“What good is an author without readers? But in a market economy, how does the lonely romantic artist find those readers? In this brisk and refreshing book, David Dowling puts into play the range of strategies American authors have used to solve this dilemma, from Thoreau, Whitman, Harriet Wilson, and Fanny Fern to Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, and even Stephen King. Dowling’s authors rolled up their sleeves and with ink-smudged hands dove into the paradoxes of the modern literary marketplace. In the process careers were made, redefined, and ruined—and the market, too, was changed. By asking important new questions about how high romantic ideals wrestled with the materialities of the book trade, Dowling, too, bids fair to change and reenergize the marketplace of American literary studies today.”—Laura Dassow Walls, author, Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth
“David Dowling has produced a first-rate book. Capital Letters is a thoroughly researched and well-argued analysis of the complicated relationship between ‘capital’—in the economic sense—and ‘letters’—in the literary sense. Dowling goes about his work with an admirable determination to treat each of his writers as an individual case, but always painstakingly hewing to his theme that writing for the market was the inescapable problem that every writer had to resolve, one way or another. This is an excellent book.”—R. Jackson Wilson, author, Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson
“Capital Letters not only adds to our historical knowledge of antebellum publishing but also deepens our appreciation of the cultural dialogues maintained by some of the nineteenth century’s most significant writers.”—David Haven Blake, author, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity