Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980 (review)

126Reviews characterized by a focus on social history. Csicsila notes that "by the late 1970s, editors were eschewing 'literary merit' as their criterion." The substance of Cscisila's book consists of a detailed analysis of how writers have fared over time in the literature anthologies. For example, Washington Irving, after an initial phase of popularity, fades from view and disappears in some instances. E. A. Poe, another waning moon, is bright in the 1920s, somewhat gray and insubstantial by the modern period. Herman Melville, nowhere in sight in 1917, suddenly in 1948 gets an entire chapter of his own in the LiteraryHistory ofAmerica. Scholars often play a role in this process; Alan Tate's 1928 essay on Emily Dickinson is credited with her accession to canonical status in the 1920s. Csicsila wishes to refute critics such as Jane Tompkins whom he feels mistakenly accuse early anthologists of ignoring women writers. He notes that women writers such as Alice Cary, Lucy Larcom, and Celia Thaxter, who were both popular in their lifetimes and popular with anthologists up to the 1920s, fade from view only once the criterion of merit is instituted by the New Critics. The book has only one shortcoming. Csicsila too readily dismisses claims by critics ofanthologies that they serve a cultural filtering function that often reflects the interests of dominant social groups such as white heterosexual men. He also does not note how canons preserve biased acts of exclusion that become less visible with time. For example, Whittier's Songs ofLabor(1850), as significant a work historically as other "classics" of the American Renaissance, continues to be ignored in favor of works with more "American" themes. Northeastern UniversityMichael Ryan Glass, Loren. Authorsinc.:LiteraryCelebrityin theModern United States, 1880-1980. New York: New York Univ. Press, 2004. 242 pp. Cloth: $60.00. Paper: $20.00. Glass offers an ambitious project and an interesting argument to the burgeoning field of literary celebrity studies. He proposes a réévaluation of literary authorship in the twentieth century, one that argues that "in the collision between private interiority and public exteriority . . . we can see an emerging dialectical relationship between modernist authorship and mass cultural celebrity that deeply informed the field of cultural production in the twentieth-century United States" (8). He builds his argument in successive chapters on Henry Adams and Edward Bok, Mark Twain, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and finally Norman Mailer. Through analyses ofeach ofthese authors, Glass hopes to show how the conflict between high and low culture, or what he follows Studies in American Fiction127 Bourdieu in calling the "restricted" and "general" fields of cultural production , shaped American celebrity authorship. He argues that this tension between high and low gives each writer's life and career a particular cast, and by extension, shapes the whole phenomenon of literary celebrity from the 1880s to the 1980s. Glass begins by offering Adams and Bok as prototypes of literary celebrity . In Henry Adams, bearer of one of the most lustrous names in American history, we find the exemplar of high culture, but one who is uncomfortable with his own lofty status. Facing the disparity between "high-reputation yet low-circulation literary endeavors," Adams finds himself "precariously straddling the divide between being an elite subject of political discourse and popular object of personal gossip" (38, 39). Adams' response to these contradictions, as inscribed in The Education ofHenry Adams, shows a "protomodernist resistance to the emerging logic ofthe literary marketplace" (30). Opposite Adams is the decidedly middlebrow Edward Bok, who, though equally well known in his day as the editor of The Ladies Home Journal, has since faded into obscurity. Glass reveals the conflict between the public "Edward Bok," well-known editor of a popular magazine , and the private Edward, who remains intellectually aloof from the magazine's mass readership. According to Glass, Adams and Bok represent not only bookends ofthe beginnings of modern celebrity authorship, but also conflicts that will plague it for a century, including the tension between public and private selves, the loss of self in the glare ofpublicity, and the psychosexual anxiety that fame causes male authors. In subsequent chapters, Glass shows how Twain, London, Stein, Hemingway, and Mailer each...