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

Part psychoanalytic reading of authorial identity and part historiographical account of the literary response to a unique cultural phenomenon, Authors Inc. is an ambitious study of the interpenetration between literary modernism and mass culture. For Loren Glass, the paradoxical nature of modern celebrity inheres in the dialectical engagement between modernity and mass cultural recognition (24); further, these two conflicting impulses are precariously linked by the hypermasculine public personas adopted by modernist authors in response to the "psychosexual trauma" of the "feminized, and feminizing, literary marketplace" (18). Glass begins his study in the late nineteenth century United States, when the rise of a "corporate culture industry" (20) and the rise of popular magazines distinct from the "genteel publishing industry" (21) were fundamental in the separation of highbrow and lowbrow culture that would help create the conditions necessary for literary modernism. Unlike other studies about celebrity and mass culture, Glass focuses his insightful analysis on autobiography, a genre whose conventions were violated by modernist authors in ways that reveal the fraught relationship between authorship and celebrity that was beginning to emerge with the proliferation of print culture and the subsequent "crisis of masculinity" (23).

Glass first puts in dialectical tension The Education of Henry Adams (1918) and The Americanization of Edward Bok (1921) as the literary manifestations of the emergence of "modern consciousness" and "public subjectivity" (24). The juxtaposition of these two third-person autobiographies demonstrates the cultural factors that enabled their production with the larger purpose of illustrating that literary celebrity during the modernist era was dependent on the "conflation of modernist genius and mass cultural personality" (31). Adams and Bok, then, are reflections of a inimitable cultural phenomenon that began in the late nineteenth century United States, and as such, they serve as the introduction to the major themes that Glass elaborates on in the chapters that follow, including the significance of the authorial name in the mass market and the connection between gender and modernity.

In "Trademark Twain," Glass analyzes the circumstances surrounding the production of Twain's autobiography in order to reveal his peculiar location between the restricted and general fields of cultural production as both a protomodernist and as a celebrity. Twain knew he was caught between his literal death and the symbolic death of his authorial persona, a position that led to the creation of the Mark Twain Company and Twain's subsequent loss of authorial agency due to the iterability of his signature. Furthermore, Glass argues that Twain's attempt to trademark his name illustrates his acknowledgment that literary value was dependent on both mass appeal and on creative genius in the changing corporate realm of publishing.

In "Legitimating London," Glass continues the themes of the significance of the name and the loss of authorial agency by analyzing Jack London's psychosexual and literary struggles for legitimacy as an illegitimate son and as an author suspected of plagiarism. In his examination of London's fictional autobiography Martin Eden, Glass contends that London's work is an allegorical reflection of his anxieties as an author and that his creation of a "labor theory of literary value" (85) was indicative of the burgeoning idealized masculine persona that would become tied to modern consciousness. Thus, Glass shows how London's career is indicative of the interpenetration of literary and psychosexual concerns that comes to define celebrity authorship in the modern United States.

Although sexuality plays a decisive role in creating the authorial personalities with which Glass engages, "Gertrude Stein's Money" stands apart in this regard. Glass takes the atypical perspective that Stein's meditations on her literary value during the Depression hinged not on her sexuality, but on her understanding of the ways in which money changed her audience's relationship with her texts and with herself as a self-fashioned authorial genius. Autobiography becomes the means by which Stein contemplates the disparity between internal consciousness and external acknowledgment, and writing itself becomes the medium through which the...