The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing
Michael J. Everton
Abstract
When Lord Byron toasted Napoleon for summarily executing a bookseller and when American satirist Fitz-Greene Halleck picketed his New York publisher for trying to starve him, both writers were taking part in a time-honored tradition: calling out publishers as unregenerate capitalists. However apocryphal, both stories speak to what writer Gail Hamilton called “the conflict of the ages,” the long feud between and writers and publishers over the way the business of print ought to be conducted. Michael Everton explores this feud in the early United States, where the much-discussed relationship bet ... More
When Lord Byron toasted Napoleon for summarily executing a bookseller and when American satirist Fitz-Greene Halleck picketed his New York publisher for trying to starve him, both writers were taking part in a time-honored tradition: calling out publishers as unregenerate capitalists. However apocryphal, both stories speak to what writer Gail Hamilton called “the conflict of the ages,” the long feud between and writers and publishers over the way the business of print ought to be conducted. Michael Everton explores this feud in the early United States, where the much-discussed relationship between morality and money meant that debates over business of authorship and literary publishing were simultaneously debates over the ethics of capitalism. This book shows that the moral discourse authors and publishers used in these debates was not intended as a distraction from the “real” issues affecting American print culture. Instead, morality was itself at issue. Drawing on a diverse archive of manuscript and print sources, the book argues that in their business correspondence and fiction, in their diaries and essays, authors and publishers talked so much about ethics not to obfuscate their convictions but to clarify them in a commercial world preoccupied by the meanings and efficacy of moral beliefs. This study illustrates that ethics should matter to literary and book historians as much as it has come to matter—again—to literary critics and theorists.
Keywords:
authorship,
publishing,
ethics,
Herman Melville,
Thomas Paine,
Hannah Adams,
Fanny Fern,
Gail Hamilton,
business,
copyright
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199751785 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751785.001.0001 |
