The Grand Chorus of Complaint

Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

Michael J. Everton

Offers a unique combination of cultural history and literary criticism to examine the beginnings of print culture in the U.S.
Examines authors as diverse as Thomas Paine, Herman Mevlille, and Fanny Fern

The Grand Chorus of Complaint

Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

Michael J. Everton

Description

When Lord Byron toasted Napoleon for executing a bookseller, and when American satirist Fitz-Greene Halleck picketed his New York publisher for trying to starve him, both writers were taking part in a time-honored tradition-styling publishers as unregenerate capitalists. However apocryphal, both stories speak to the longstanding feud between writers and publishers over how the book business ought to be conducted. Such grumblings were so constant throughout the nineteenth century that Horace Greeley wearily referred to them collectively as "the grand chorus of complaint."

Ranging from the Revolution to the Civil War, The Grand Chorus of Complaint explores moral propriety in American literary culture, arguing that debates over the business of authorship and publishing in the United States were simultaneously debates over the ethics and character of capitalism. Michael Everton shows that the moral discourse authors and publishers used in these debates was not intended as a distraction from debates over economics, intellectual property, or gender in American literary culture. Instead, morality was itself at issue. With case studies of the fraught publication experiences of authors including Thomas Paine, Hannah Adams, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, and Gail Hamilton, Everton argues that in their business correspondence and fiction, in their diaries and essays, authors and publishers talked so much about ethics not to obfuscate their convictions but to clarify them in a commercial world preoccupied by the meanings and efficacy of moral beliefs. The Grand Chorus of Complaint illustrates that ethics should matter as much to book historians as much as it has come to matter-again-to literary critics and theorists.

Through wide-ranging primary-source research backed by a nuanced layering of historical detail, The Grand Chorus of Complaint dissects the role of morality in the print culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, providing a valuable new perspective on formative forces in the publishing trade.

The Grand Chorus of Complaint

Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

Michael J. Everton

Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Character of the Trade
Chapter 2 - Liberty in Business: The Printing of Common Sense
Chapter 3 - Hannah Adams and the Courtesies of Authorship
Chapter 4 - The Moral Vernacular of American Copyright Reform
Chapter 5 - Melville in the Antebellum Publishing Maelstrom
Chapter 6 - The Tact of Ruthless Hall
Epilogue - What Lies Back of the Contract
Index

The Grand Chorus of Complaint

Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

Michael J. Everton

Author Information

Michael J. Everton is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

The Grand Chorus of Complaint

Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

Michael J. Everton

Reviews and Awards

"Michael J. Everton has provided a fascinating account, supported by deep historical and archival research, of the contentious dealings between authors and publishers that occur along the ragged line between art and commerce." --James L. W. West III, author of American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900

"Members of the book trade receive bad press these days, creating the impression that the modern book trade is, ethically speaking, a little shaky. Those in the book business argue otherwise, defending their actions even while occasionally backpedaling. In his bold and far-reaching study, Michael Everton makes clear that such ethical debates about the book trade go all the way back to the eighteenth century. The Grand Chorus of Complaint is a book of great importance, insight, and originality." --Leon Jackson, author of The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America

"In this illuminating, impressively researched, and engagingly written book, Michael Everton examines the persistent rhetoric of complaint that antebellum American authors aimed at their publishers. Moving beyond the analysis of commercial practices, Everton imaginatively demonstrates that the business relationships between authors and publishers were fundamentally shaped by moral expectations." --Jeffrey D. Groves, coeditor of Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary

"[An] excellent book...A thoroughly researched, well-written, and smartly argued work of mature scholarship...Literary, cultural, and intellectual historians as well as students of business practices and ethics could all profit from reading this book." --^{he New England Quarterly}