Most of the letters, which are of prime importance in America's cultural history, have never before been published. The remainder that have appeared in print frequently did so in emasculated form and in a wide variety of books and journals. Here, scrupulous annotations supply relevant identifications of individuals, explain allusions, and present information regarding the addresses of letters, endorsements, postmarks, and the location of manuscripts.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist: “A stunning work of biography” about three little-known New England women who made intellectual history (The New York Times). Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways the American Brontës. The story of these remarkable sisters—and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day—has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall’s monumental biography brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life. Elizabeth Peabody, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire influence on the great writers of the era—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them—who also published some of their earliest works; it was she who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson’s individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Middle sister Mary Peabody was a passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. And the frail Sophia, an admired painter among the preeminent society artists of the day, married Nathaniel Hawthorne—but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray. Casting new light on a legendary American era, and on three sisters who made an indelible mark on history, Marshall’s unprecedented research uncovers thousands of never-before-seen letters as well as other previously unmined original sources. “A massive enterprise,” The Peabody Sisters is an event in American biography (The New York Times Book Review). “Marshall’s book is a grand story . . . where male and female minds and sensibilities were in free, fruitful communion, even if men could exploit this cultural richness far more easily than women.” —The Washington Post “Marshall has greatly increased our understanding of these women and their times in one of the best literary biographies to come along in years.” —New England Quarterly

Inventing the American Guitar is the first book to describe the early history of American guitar design in detail. It tells the story of how a European instrument was transformed into one with all of the design and construction features that define the iconic American flat-top guitar. This transformation happened within a mere 20 years, a remarkably brief period. The person who dominates this history is C. F. Martin Sr., America's first major guitar maker and the founder of the Martin Guitar Company, which continues to produce outstanding flat-top guitars today. After emigrating from his native Saxony to New York in 1833, Martin quickly established a guitar making business, producing instruments modeled after those of his mentor, Johann Stauffer of Vienna. By the time he moved his family and business to rural Pennsylvania in 1839, Martin had absorbed and integrated the influence of Spanish guitars he had seen and heard in New York. In Pennsylvania, he evolved further, inventing a uniquely American guitar that was fully developed before the outbreak of the Civil War. Inventing the American Guitar traces Martin's evolution as a craftsman and entrepreneur and explores the influences and experiments that led to his creation of the American guitar that is recognized and played around the world today. To learn more about the history of the Martin guitar, click here to view the video and article from BBC, How Martin Guitars Became an 'American Stratavarius'.

Industry and the Creative Mind takes a radically new look at the figure of the eccentric, alienated writer in American literature and entertainment from 1790 to 1860. Traditional scholarship takes for granted that the eccentric writer, modeled by such Romantic beings as Lord Byron and brought to life for American audiences by the gloomy person of Edgar Allan Poe, was a figure of rebellion against the excesses of modern commercial culture and industrial life. By contrast, Industry and the Creative Mind argues that in the United States myths of writerly moodiness, alienation, and irresponsibility predated the development of a commercial arts and entertainment industry and instead of forming a site of rebellion from this industry formed a bedrock for its development. Looking at the careers of a number of early American writers---Joseph Dennie, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Edgar Allan Poe, Fanny Fern, as well as a host of now forgotten souls who peopled the twilight worlds of hack fiction and industrial literature---this book traces the way in which early nineteenth-century American arts and entertainment systems incorporated writerly eccentricity in their "logical" economic workings, placing the mad, rebellious writer at the center of the industry's productivity and success.