Hired Pens: Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print - Hardcover

Weber, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821412043 ISBN 13: 9780821412046

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Just as mass-market magazines and cheap books have played important roles in the creation of an American identity, those skilled craftsmen (and women) whose careers are the subjects of Ronald Weber's narrative profoundly influenced the outlook and strategies of the high-culture writers who are generally the focus of literary studies.

Hired Pens, a history of the writing profession in the United States, recognizes the place of independent writers who wrote for their livelihood from the 1830s and 1840s, with the first appearance of a broad-based print culture, to the 1960s.

Many realist authors began on this American Grub Street. Jack London turned out hackwork for any paying market he could find, while Scott Fitzgerald's stories in slick magazines in the 1920s and early '30s established his name as a writer.

From Edgar Allen Poe's earliest forays into writing for pay to Sylvia Plath's attempts to produce fiction for mass-circulation journals, Hired Pens documents without agenda the evolution of professional writing in all its permutations—travel accounts, sport, popular biography and history, genre and series fiction—and the culture it fed.

About this title

Review:

Ever wonder how Franklin W. Dixon or Carolyn Keene managed to churn out the hundreds of titles in their respective Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series? The answer is, they didn't. Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene were the noms de plume of a small army of anonymous writers-for-hire who produced a neverending stream of adventure tales aimed at young readers. In Hired Pens, author Ronald Weber explores the so-called golden age of print, a time when the market for fiction was huge and a wide range of writers from the nameless authors of the Hardy Boys books to the likes of Upton Sinclair could make a steady--and in some cases, handsome--living from their pens. Weber's book starts in the 1830s and ends in 1969; during the intervening decades, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens share the page with Zane Grey and Max Brand as Weber tells the sometimes glorious, often grubby story of mass-market publishing. For every author who made it big (Stowe, for example), there were plenty who didn't, and the book abounds with tales of poverty and suicide. Still, Weber's view of his subject is generally admiring, and Hired Pens offers some interesting insights into a time when writing could be wild, woolly, and sometimes even profitable.

About the Author:

Ronald Weber is Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the author of many books, both fiction and nonfiction. He is the editor of The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0821412043
• ISBN 13: 9780821412046
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300