Since its publication in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" has always been recognized as a powerful statement about the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood, leaving her to face insanity alone, as a prisoner in her own bedroom. Never before, however, has the story itself been portrayed as victimized.

In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames...

Publisher to the Decadents chronicles the experiences of Leonard Smithers (1861-1907), a key figure in the literary culture of late Victorian England. In his day he was known primarily for publishing books of upscale pornography. He became the publisher of choice for the Decadents, including most notably Oscar Wilde and Audrey Beardsley.

While a young solicitor in his native Sheffield, Smithers established a correspondence with the famed explorer and translator of exotic texts, Captain Sir Richard Burton. Burton translated The Thousand Nights and a Night (popularly...

George Palmer Putnam (1814-1872) was arguably the most important American publisher of the nineteenth century, a man fully and multiply involved in developments transforming all aspects of literary culture. In this comprehensive cultural biography, Ezra Greenspan offers a wide-ranging account of a rich, productive life lived in print, interrelating Putnam's life with the life of his family (one of the most remarkable of its time), with the changing patterns of life in New York City and the nation, and with the institutionalization of modern print culture in nineteenth-century America....

The Rise of Sinclair Lewis examines the making of Lewis's best-selling novels Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry--their sources, composition, publication, and subsequent critical reception. Drawing on thousands of pages of material from Lewis's notes, outlines, and drafts--most of it never before published--James M. Hutchisson shows how Lewis selected usable materials and shaped them, through his unique vision, into novels that reached and remained part of the American literary imagination. Hutchisson also describes for the first...

The Scottish publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons, founded in 1804, was a major force in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literary history, publishing a diverse group of important authors--including George Eliot, John Galt, Thomas de Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, among many others--in book form and in its monthly Blackwood's Magazine. In The House of Blackwood, David Finkelstein exposes for the first time the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse.

Finkelstein begins with a...

"When I found these cigarettes you had left I thought at first to keep them as a remembrance. But I am far from needing a remembrance." --From Max Perkins's first letter to Elizabeth Lemmon, dated 14 April 1922

Maxwell E. Perkins, famed editor of such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe, was a man whose personal and professional lives often intersected. Nowhere is this more evident than in his correspondence with Elizabeth Lemmon, the Virginia socialite who became his long-distance confidante....

Biography of a Book traces the life of an iconic Australian literary work in the lead-up to, and for a century after, its initial publication: Henry Lawson's 1896 collection While the Billy Boils. Paul Eggert follows Lawson's gradual development of a pared-back bush realism in the early 1890s, as he struggled to forge a career, writing short stories and sketches for the newspapers. Lawson's famous collection came out at a decisive moment for the development of a fully professional Australian literary publishing industry, then in its infancy in Sydney. The...

Little known today, Lydia Bailey was a leading printer in Philadelphia for decades. Her career began in 1808--when her husband, Robert, died, leaving her with the family business to manage--and ended in 1861, when she retired at the age of eighty-two. During her career, she operated a shop that at its height had more than forty employees, acted as city printer for over thirty years, and produced almost a thousand imprints bearing her name. Not surprisingly, sources reveal that she was closely associated with many of her now better-known contemporaries both in the book trade and beyond,...

The Scottish publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons, founded in 1804, was a major force in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literary history, publishing a diverse group of important authors--including George Eliot, John Galt, Thomas de Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, among many others--in book form and in its monthly Blackwood's Magazine. In The House of Blackwood, David Finkelstein exposes for the first time the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse.

Finkelstein begins with a...

"When I found these cigarettes you had left I thought at first to keep them as a remembrance. But I am far from needing a remembrance." --From Max Perkins's first letter to Elizabeth Lemmon, dated 14 April 1922

Maxwell E. Perkins, famed editor of such literary luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe, was a man whose personal and professional lives often intersected. Nowhere is this more evident than in his correspondence with Elizabeth Lemmon, the Virginia socialite who became his long-distance confidante....