Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson

Examines a phase in the history of the relationship between writers and the literary marketplace. Looks at 5 Americans -- Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson -- for whom writing was the primary vocation. They wrote for people whose overriding interest was commerce and economic development, but this same audience insisted that what counted as Culture had to be ³spiritual.² Shows how the writers had to come to terms with the tension between their own ambitions and their efforts to produce a portrait of the artist as someone for whom money and fame didn¹t count. Illustrated.R. Jackson Wilson is the author of 'Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson', published 1989 under ISBN 9780788169557 and ISBN 0788169556.