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Introduction
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction This book is an examination of authorship and the literary marketplace in Arnerica since 1900.I have concentrated on the careers of novelists, poets, and short-story writers and have given relatively little attention to journalists , dramatists, and screenwriters, although I have exanlined the careers of several poets and fiction \vriters who worked as jour~lalists, ser~~ed stints in H o l l ~ ~ ~ ~ o o d , or wrote occasio~lallyfor the stage. Several well-known authors are treated-Theodore Dreiser, Robi~lso~l Jeffers, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgeralcl, E. E. Cummings, Flannery O'Connor , William Styron, and James Dickey for example-but the commercial pressures felt by these authors were felt also by other writers whose names are less familiar today. I have therefore given attention to such authors as George Bars McCutcheon, John P. Marquand, Ida Tarbell, Stephen Vincent BenCt, Ogden Nash, Edna Ferber, William Saropan, Booth Tarkitlgton, and Zona Gale. I have drawn on published sources and on the surviving papers of authors, publishers, editors, and literary agents. The resulting book is an attempt to describe the changing professional situation that faced the serious author in America after 1900 and, on occasion, to show how that situation affected the author's writings and career. The informing principle of the book is my belief that if scholars or critics are hlly to understand works of literary art, they must understand the commercial factors that influenced the co~npositionand publication of these works. Ideally scholars and critics should h ~ o w more about the literarv marketplace of the author's time than the author would have known. he marketplace was only one of several factors that influenced the literary work, of course, and sometimes it was only a minor factor, but it mas never absent from the author's thoughts if that author proposed to earn a living by writing. Con~mercialfactors often influe~lcedthe published form of the work, and its success, more than the author realized. Goethe said that true genius reveals itself best when it operates within limitations. He was speakingof the formal limitations of poetry-rhythm, rhyme, and stanzaic fonn-but he could as easily have been spealung of the cornrnercial and legal limitatio~ls under which any artist works. The 2 1American Authors and the Literary Marketplace application of Goethe's principle to literary work should be self-evident, but perhaps some examples from other fields, such as architecturalhistory, will help make the point. Most students of hventieth-century American culture see the great Art Deco skyscrapers erected in New York City between 1925 and 1931as magnificent expressions of the wealth, success, arrogance , frivolit): and gaucherie of the American hkrenties. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building are the two best-known examples : viewed in purely aesthetic terms they are often seen as embodiments of the American will to achieve, to rise, to better oneself, to outdo one's competitors. The architects and designers who produced these structures and others of the period are said to have captured (perhaps even epitomized) the spirit of their times. In retrospect their buildings have become syn~bols of one of the most glamorous eras in American history. One cannot fully understand the appropriateness of New York's Art Deco skyscrapers and the genius of their design, however, without hio\x~ing in some detail the municipal regulations and economic restrictions that existed when they were built. Because land values were soaring in Manhattan during the late 1920s,newT office buildings had to be designed to provide maximum rental space. Inmxxiiate return on capital investment was cnicial to the owners of these buildings. If it had been possible, these designers would probably have erected huge boxlike structures in order to take advantage of every possible square foot of aerial space. Later, of course, this is precisely what happened with the International Style, but in the late 1920s air-conditioning had not been perfected, and architects had to keep buildings narrow enough to provide adequate cross-ventilation. New York municipal zoning ordinances \\.ere important. For example, these ordinances required that buildings be designed with setbacks, beginning at heights determined by the widths of the streets that the buildings were to face, so that daylight would not be blocked from the streets. Part of any building could be of unlimited height, but here, too, economics were a factor. If a building were extended to an extreme height, too much space 011 thc lower floors w~ould be...