Capital letters; authorship in the antebellum literary market.

9781587297847

Capital letters; authorship in the antebellum literary market.

Dowling, David.

Univ. of Iowa Press

2009

217 pages

$39.95

Hardcover

PS201

In this unusual study of the business of being an author in antebellum America, Dowling (English, University of Iowa) pairs the cases of three men and three women in their approach to marketing their work. The couples at first seem totally incompatible: Harriet Wilson with Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman with Fanny Fern, and Rebecca Harding Davis with Herman Melville. Dowling treats these writers less in terms of the content of their work than in the ways in which they interacted with publishers and the public. He notes the expansion of publishing in America at this time due to high literacy rates, technical innovations in printing and improved distribution through mail service. Authors today bemoan the necessity of self-promotion as a new trend. Dowling makes it clear that writers like Whitman were not only singing, but selling themselves. Lecture tours and interaction with fanatic readers are nothing new either. Beyond these revelations on the reality of the authors' job, Dowling also explores the ways in which changes in publishing also changed society's way of regarding authors in terms of class and gender. He closes by bringing the topic into contemporary times by comparing the attempts of Melville and Stephen King, among others, to escape the brand of popular hack writer with brilliant but low-selling books. Moby Dick may be Melville's masterpiece, but it was a total financial flop. In his study, Dowling points out many of the paradoxes of being a professional writer, as true today (including gender bias) as they were in the early nineteenth century.

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