This study focuses on the complex relations between author, publisher and contemporary reading public in 19th-century America; in particular, the emergence of Irving and Cooper as America's first successful literary entrepreneurs, how Poe's and Melville's successes and failures affected their writing, the popularization of poetry in the 1830s and 1840s, the role of the literary magazine in the 1840s and 1850s, and the beginnings of book promotion. It pays particular attention to the way social and economic forces helped to shape literary works.

Carr (English, U. of London) examines literary and anthropological writings that describe, inscribe, translate, and transform Native American myths and poetry to conform with mainstream American society's conception of the primitive. She draws on post-colonial and feminist theory and the recent textual turn of ethnography. The story she finds is taut with the contradiction of trying to preserve a culture while ruthlessly destroying it. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Based on an exhibition at the Houghton Library and was originally published as a special issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, Volume 17, Numbers 3-4.

This definitive biography restores to the public an eloquent writer and reformer who embodied the best of the American democratic heritage.