The increased demand for salable entertainment, for pleasing an expanded and unknown audience in its moments of leisure, fostered a new consciousness of authorship as a commercial and professional mode of work in the first half of the nineteenth century in America. This book argues that a range of canonical and more recently enfranchised antebellum authors--from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Fern--rhetorically reconstructed their newly professionalized work by mediating it through other forms of labor. The project of understanding authorship and...