outline_us_lit

Charles Brockden Brown wasmore typical. The author of severalinteresting Gothic romances,Brown was the first Americanauthor to attempt to live from hiswriting. But his short life ended inpoverty.The lack of an audience wasanother problem. The small cultivatedaudience in America wantedwell-known European authors,partly out of the exaggeratedrespect with which former coloniesregarded their previous rulers.This preference for English workswas not entirely unreasonable, consideringthe inferiority of Americanoutput, but it worsened the situationby depriving American authorsof an audience. Only journalismoffered financial remuneration, butthe mass audience wanted light,undemanding verse and short topicalessays — not long or experimentalwork.The absence of adequate copyrightlaws was perhaps the clearestcause of literary stagnation. Americanprinters pirating Englishbest-sellers understandably wereunwilling to pay an American authorfor unknown material. The unauthorizedreprinting of foreignbooks was originally seen as a serviceto the colonies as well as asource of profit for printers likeFranklin, who reprinted works ofthe classics and great Europeanbooks to educate the Americanpublic.Printers everywhere in Americafollowed his lead. There are notoriousexamples of pirating. MatthewNOAH WEBSTEREngraving © The BettmannArchiveCarey, an important American publisher,paid a London agent — asort of literary spy — to sendcopies of unbound pages, or evenproofs, to him in fast ships thatcould sail to America in a month.Carey’s men would sail out to meetthe incoming ships in the harborand speed the pirated books intoprint using typesetters who dividedthe book into sections and workedin shifts around the clock. Such apirated English book could be reprintedin a day and placed on theshelves for sale in American bookstoresalmost as fast as in England.Because imported authorizededitions were more expensive andcould not compete with piratedones, the copyright situation damagedforeign authors such as SirWalter Scott and Charles Dickens,along with American authors. Butat least the foreign authors hadalready been paid by their originalpublishers and were already wellknown. Americans such as JamesFenimore Cooper not only failed toreceive adequate payment, but theyhad to suffer seeing their workspirated under their noses. Cooper’sfirst successful book, The Spy(1821), was pirated by four differentprinters within a month of itsappearance.Ironically, the copyright law of1790, which allowed pirating, wasnationalistic in intent. Drafted byNoah Webster, the great lexicographerwho later compiled an Americandictionary, the law protectedonly the work of American authors;it was felt that English writers15