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NEW DIRECTIONS IN BOOK HISTORY
The Preface
American Authorship
in the Twentieth Century
Ross K. Tangedal
New Directions in Book History
Series Editors
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Ross K. Tangedal
The Preface
American Authorship in the Twentieth Century
Ross K. Tangedal
Department of English
University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
Stevens Point, WI, USA
ISSN 2634-6117 ISSN 2634-6125 (electronic)

New Directions in Book History
ISBN 978-3-030-85150-7 ISBN 978-3-030-85151-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85151-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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material. No emendations have been made.
To my wife and daughters:
CJ, Adeline, and Hazel Tangedal.
Acknowledgments
From 1925 to 1988, my great-grandfather William “Bill” Willard went

from “printer’s devil” to print manager and typesetter for the Plentywood
Herald, a local northeast Montana newspaper. He learned how to set type
by hand in the small basement press office on Main Street, and he went on
to operate the paper’s two Mergenthaler Linotype machines, as well as its
small printing press, for well over forty years after that. I did not know this
about my Grandpa Bill until I began working on print culture studies and
bibliography. In many ways, my research is an extension of his commit-
ment to putting together thousands of papers for the better part of his
adult life. As the last Linotype operator in the state of Montana, Bill
Willard dedicated his life to print. I am proud to do the same, and this
book is my initial investigation into the business of printed works and their
creators.
I am indebted to a number of individuals who made this book possible.
My work would not be what it is without the mentorship, guidance, and
trust of Robert W. Trogdon. He challenges me to be better, to work
smarter, and to get it right, and he taught me how to be a scholar and a
bookman. He is generous and passionate about doing the work, and
through his friendship he continues to teach me. When I call with a ques-
tion he answers, and when I have an idea he listens. For that I am forever
grateful. Wesley Raabe made me a better writer and a more patient editor,
and he asked difficult questions that needed answers. James L. W. West III
gave excellent feedback on the manuscript and offered critical suggestions
that made the book better. These three leading editorial scholars of
American literature elevated my appreciation of and commitment to
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
textual studies. They inspire me with their intellects, editorial expertise,

and work ethic.
The English Department faculties at Montana State University and
Kent State University gave me the tools to write this book. I thank all of
my professors, in particular Amy Thomas, Marvin Lansverk, Greg Keeler,
Robert Bennett, Kirk Branch, Linda Karell, Philip Gaines, and Lisa Eckert
from Montana State, and, with Robert W. Trogdon and Wesley Raabe
above, Tammy Clewell, the late Kevin Floyd, and the late Claire Culleton
from Kent State. The English Department faculty at Mercyhurst University,
especially Brian Reed, Christina Riley-Brown, and Jeffrey Roessner, gave
me my first academic job and welcomed me into their program with such
grace and enthusiasm. Without them I would not be where I am.
A number of colleagues and friends were generous with their time as
this book was completed. Andy Oler read every version of the proposal
that became this book, and I am grateful for his honesty, good humor, and
friendship. Sara Kosiba, Marc Seals, and Doug Sheldon are good friends
who get me through the highs and lows of Midwestern life. Joshua Murray
has been my friend since our doctoral days at Kent State, and his goodness
knows no bounds. I speak with the five of them weekly, and I am glad
they’re my friends. Thank you, also, to Dave Arnold, Kirk Curnutt, Scott
Emmert, Verna Kale, Adam McKee, Jennifer Nolan, Andy Oler, and Marc
Seals for reviewing chapter drafts. The Ernest Hemingway Society, the
F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, and the Society for the Study of Midwestern
Literature are my scholarly families. I share in the good work of these
societies with many of the friends and colleagues listed above, but addi-
tionally I would like to thank Jeanne Alexander, Marilyn Atlas, Robert
Beasecker, Susan Beegel, Tom Bevilacqua, Jackson Bryer, Bonnie Jo
Campbell, Michelle Campbell, Mark Cirino, the late Michael DuBose,
Lisa DuRose, Carl Eby, Kayla Forrest, Joe Fruscione, Suzanne del Gizzo,
Larry Grimes, Ryan Hediger, Gary Holcomb, Laura Julier, Hilary
K. Justice, Kevin Maier, Miriam Mandel, Martina Mastandrea, Debra
Moddelmog, Patricia Oman, Scott Ortolano, Rachael Price, David
A. Rennie, Gail Sinclair, Sandra Spanier, Kim Suhr, Jeff Swenson, Steven
Trout, Lisa Tyler, and Michael Von Cannon.
The Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens
Point (UWSP) deserves special mention for their enthusiastic support of
my work: Jeff Snowbarger, for his friendship and integrity; Michael
Williams and Rebecca Stephens, for their guidance and care; Mary
Bowman, for her mentorship; and Dave Arnold, Mark Balhorn, James
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
Berry, W. John Coletta, Pat Dyjak, Lauren Gantz, Pat Gott, Tomoko
Kuribayashi, Dejan Kuzmanovic, Lynn Ludwig, Wade Mahon, Larry
Morgan, Samantha Pech, Erica Ringelspaugh, David Roloff, Robert
Sirabian, Michael Steffes, Jill Stukenberg, Julie Tharp, and Chris Williams,
for their support. I also wish to thank former Dean Eric Yonke and Dean
Joshua Hagan of the College of Letters and Science, along with Tobias
Barske, Assistant Dean of the School of Humanities and Global Studies,
and Shanny Luft, Associate Dean of General Education and Honors, for
their support of my work during my time at UWSP.
My Kent State cohort listened to my questions and shared their exper-
tise; thank you Seth Johnson, Chris McCracken, Heather McCracken,
Dan Miller, Melissa Pompili, and Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman. My Montana
State cohort was a supportive, tight-knit group; thank you Katie Davison,
Lauren Degraffenreid, Beth Forslund, Alsu Gilmetdinova, Aspen Haugen,
Danette Long, Rachel Sarkar, and Micaela Young. My more recent edito-
rial and print culture colleagues have added new angles to my research;
thank you Noelle Baker, Kathryn Tomasek, Andrew Kopec, Caleb
Milligan, and Jonathan Senchyne for modeling strong research and lead-
ership in these fields. I’d also like to thank my good friends Chris Benson,
Ryan Brensdal, Brandon Overland, and Edward Yperman for their two
decades of friendship. I have been lucky to have had the support of these
wonderful friends and colleagues.
I wish to thank the following for granting me access to archival materi-
als: Susan Wrynn, past curator, and Hilary K. Justice, curator, of the Ernest
Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, MA;
Don C. Skemer, curator of manuscripts in the Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections at Princeton University Library; Timothy Young,
curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, and Matthew Rowe, Library
Services Assistant, at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of
Yale University; and Alison Hinderliter, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern
Manuscripts at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL. The Complete Letters
of Willa Cather, an ongoing digital project, is available to the public thanks
to the Willa Cather Archive, which is freely distributed by the Center for
Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Thank you to project editors Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout, as well as
to the entire editorial team, for their exceptional work.
I owe a great debt to the following organizations for awarding me
research funding crucial to the completion of this book: the Ernest
Hemingway Foundation & Society for twice awarding me the
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lewis-Smith-Reynolds Founders Fellowship; the John F. Kennedy Library

for awarding me the Ernest Hemingway Research Grant; the Department
of English at Kent State University for awarding me the Kenneth R. Pringle
Dissertation Fellowship; the Graduate Student Senate of Kent State
University for awarding me a Dissertation Research Grant for work at
Princeton University Library; Mercyhurst University for awarding me a
Thomas Merton Postdoctoral Fellowship; and the University of Wisconsin–
Stevens Point for awarding me the University Scholar Award. Finally, I
wish to thank Carrie Kline (circulation) and Rebecca Wisniewski
(Interlibrary Loan), as well as the front desk staff, at the UWSP Albertson
Learning Resources Center (Library) for their assistance in securing doz-
ens of volumes and research materials for me.
Palgrave Macmillan believed in this book from the outset. Allie
Troyanos, Rachel Jacobe, Emily Wood, Brian Halm, and the editorial staff
have been astute editors and champions of this project from acquisition to
publication. Two anonymous readers provided me with additional direc-
tion and encouragement, as did series editors Jonathan Rose and Shafquat
Towheed. I am also grateful to the editors and peer reviewers of Authorship,
the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, and the Hemingway Review, journals where
parts of Chaps. 3, 4, and 5 originally appeared in different versions. Thank
you to Ghent University, the Pennsylvania State University Press, and the
Ernest Hemingway Foundation & Society for permission to include
revised portions of those essays in this book.
My parents, Jerry and Kathy Tangedal, taught me how to work hard at
work worth doing. They bought me a complete Encyclopedia Britannica
when I was five years old, knowing I would read every volume. They
worked hard so my siblings and I could be successful. My mother’s cour-
age and tenacity, and my father’s integrity and passion, are gifts. I’m glad
they’re my parents. Reanne and Ryan are great siblings, and Jordan and
Logan are great cousins. I’m lucky to have them in my life. My in-laws,
Rich and Cheryl Boberg, have always supported me, as have my wife’s
siblings, Christina and Bill. My parents and in-laws gave me a couple of
precious writing weeks in April 2021, agreeing to spend time with their
granddaughters while I worked on my book manuscript. They’ll never
know how much that meant to me. On the day he passed away, my grand-
father Kurt Ueland was reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
because I told him it was good. He and my late grandmother Adeline
never shied away from a conversation with me about anything, nor from
loving and supporting me. They taught me how to dance, how to tell
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
stories, and how to love your family. They were good people, and I miss
them and their goodness every day. My grandmother Yvonne Tangedal gave
me a deep love of history. She took me to Washington, D.C., when I was
eight, indulging my obsession with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.
Her father was Bill Willard, which may explain her guiding hand over
the years.
The most profound thanks belongs to my wife, CJ Tangedal, to whom
this book is dedicated. We met in 2009, and since then she has supported
me during my time as a graduate student, as a grill cook and irrigation
repairman, as a postdoctoral fellow, and, finally, as a professor. She did this
in the beginning by working long hours and longer weekends, and by
cultivating the special moments for us to hold on to when we were young.
She does it today by patterning for our two girls a deep sense of family,
work ethic, and love. She makes sure that when I say I have writing to do
I write, and she lets me know when it is time to be done for the day. Her
sacrifices are part of this book, as there were days and nights when I’d
emerge from my office knowing that she had taken care of things. Though
we take great pride in sharing the parental and household duties, my wife
holds it all together. She is my best friend, and the steady link to the hap-
piness in my life. That happiness is reflected in this book’s other dedica-
tees, our two daughters, Adeline and Hazel. Their intelligence, kindness,
love, humor, and capacity for wonder are immeasurable gifts. I am proud
of all three of them, who give me more than I deserve every day. This
book is for them.
Praise for The Preface
“In The Preface, Ross K. Tangedal examines an often-overlooked textual element

in literature: an opening commentary (either current or in retrospect) by an author
about a particular work of fiction. The author addresses the reader directly to recall
the creation of the work, to reply to critics, and to assert authority over interpreta-
tion. Tangedal’s approach in this excellent new monograph yields a great many
fresh and valuable insights, both critical and biographical.”
—James L. W. West III, Sparks Professor of English, Emeritus,
Pennsylvania State University, USA, Author of American Authors
and the Literary Marketplace since 1900
“Ross K. Tangedal’s The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century

offers an expansive, inclusive take on a textual tradition that most readers consider
the print equivalent of a hello. Tangedal’s multi-level discussion of this device
demonstrates how integral it is to theories of authorship, and how major novelists
from Willa Cather to Toni Morrison, and now-overlooked writers like Ring
Lardner, employed it to fashion their personae for public consumption. From
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early self-deprecation (which did not serve him well) to Ernest
Hemingway’s pugilistic professionalism to Robert Penn Warren’s obsession with
historical motive, Tangedal reveals the range writers display and the risks they
undertake in this textual space.”
—Kirk Curnutt, Professor of English, Troy University, USA,
Editor of American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980
“Engaging, theoretically sophisticated, and well written, with fresh insights on

every page, The Preface is much more than a study of prefaces. In the hands of
Tangedal, this topic becomes a fascinating study of how the business of writing
and publishing and the need for writers to construct and wield authority over their
texts and authorial identities shaped the canon of twentieth-century American
literature.”
—Carl P. Eby, Professor of English, Appalachian State University, USA, Author
of Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood
“Through this tour de force of intellectual curiosity, Ross K. Tangedal reveals fasci-
nating new dimensions to texts we thought we knew. Beyond that, he presents
profound ideas about writing and reading as a solemn, holy act. This book is
inventive, assertive, generous, and impeccably researched. It is literary scholarship
at its finest.”
—Mark Cirino, Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature, University of
Evansville, USA, Author of Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action
“In this well-researched book, Ross K. Tangedal shows how American authors
responded to the emergence of new literary institutions in the twentieth century.
From literary clubs to reprint editions such as the Modern Library and paperbacks,
the publishing landscape encouraged the rise of the authorial preface as a way to
target specific audiences and markets. Tangedal sheds new light on the connec-
tions between authors and writers, mediated by a rapidly changing publishing
industry.”
—Lise Jaillant, Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities,
Loughborough University, UK, Author of Modernism, Middlebrow and the
Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917–1955
“Ross K. Tangedal’s fine study of the preface explores the changing face of
American authorship and book publishing from Modernism to Toni Morrison.
His discussion of prefaces by, among others, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Penn Warren offers more than a mere analysis of
a literary marketing device. This exciting and original book explores the complex
implications of any paratextual material that purports to speak for an author.”
—Steven Trout, Professor of English, University of Alabama, USA, Author of
Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War
“Tangedal’s study of the evolving nature of twentieth-century American author-

ship and the literary market, as expressed through the often neglected genre of the
authorial preface, is expansive in scope and rich in detail. Readers interested in the
many authors Tangedal examines, or book history and its related disciplines, will
find much to learn from in these pages.”
—John K. Young, Professor of English, Marshall University, USA, Author of
Black Writers, White Publishers
“The Preface is the first to provide an in-depth analysis of the preface in twentieth-
century American literature, interlacing literary history with an analysis of the
commercial market and literary criticism. It will be useful to those who are
approaching the subject for the first time, as well as those seeking to better under-
stand the ways in which authors control and exert authority over their artistic
works. A fascinating and important study.”
—Michelle E. Moore, Professor of English, College of DuPage, USA, Author of
Chicago and the Making of American Modernism
Contents
1 Introduction: An Influence on the Public 1

Authorial Prefaces and the Literary Marketplace in America 3
Henry James and Joseph Conrad 9
The American Reprint Market and the Authorial Preface 16
An Influence on the Public 21
Bibliography 33
2 A Proper Reading: Willa Cather’s Introductions to My

Ántonia 37
A Proper Reading: Cather as Editor in Control 39
The Impact of the 1926 Revisions 50
Something Complete and Great 56
Bibliography 63
3 Stepping In or Turning Back: Ring Lardner and Authorial

Resistance 65
Authorial Resistance 71
How to Write Short Stories (with Samples) (1924) 75
The Love Nest and Other Stories (1926) 81
Stepping In 85
Bibliography 89
xvii
xviii CONTENTS
4 Inhibiting Signposts: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Authorial

Anxiety 91
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) 93
The Great Gatsby (Modern Library, 1934) 100
Taps at Reveille (1935) 105
Bibliography 112
5 The Will to Control: Ernest Hemingway and the Action

of Writing115
Kiki of Montparnasse (Kiki, 1929) 117
Green Hills of Africa (1935) 120
All Good Americans (Jerome Bahr, 1937) 125
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938) 128
Controlling the Action 132
Bibliography 137
6 A Safe Distance: Robert Penn Warren’s Introductions

to All the King’s Men141
Origins 146
“Huey” 154
Out of History Into History 160
Bibliography 167
7 Ensuring Presence: Toni Morrison and the Language

of Legacy171
A Public Exposure of a Private Confidence 175
Language Must Get Out of the Way 180
Like a Grown-Up Writer 185
Assuming Power 192
Bibliography 200
8 Coda: Any Given Moment Has Its Value203

Bibliography 214
Index215
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: An Influence on the Public
A piazza must be had.

—Herman Melville, “The Piazza”1
To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth,
and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a
moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and
shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the
aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve.
—Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’2
Sacred altogether to memory, in short, such labours and such lights.

—Henry James, Preface to Volume XV of the New York Edition3
Authorial introductions, prefaces, and forewords have been part of litera-

ture for centuries, dating back to Rabelais’s prologue to Gargantua
(1534), which instructs readers to drink and eat heartily while reading.
However, authorial prefaces are rarely the focus of analysis, and few read-
ers recognize the space as more than secondary. The dominant field of
inquiry regarding all extratextual materials (not just prefaces) is narratol-
ogy, with Gerard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987;
trans. 1997) the standard survey of the field. Paratexts, as defined by
Genette, “‘surround’ and ‘extend’ a book, in order to present it, in the
usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to
ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
R. K. Tangedal, The Preface, New Directions in Book History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85151-4_1
2 R. K. TANGEDAL
the form (nowadays, at least) of a book.”4 Placement, date of publication,

and structure are keys to understanding these pieces, as are the various
publishing circumstances which call for their composition. Prefaces are
windows into professional authorship, as the business of literature informs
their existence. Authors and publishers recognized the space as more than
secondary to their literary endeavors, resulting in pieces designed to make
public a writer’s agency. To borrow Genette’s phrasing, writers and pub-
lishers wanted to ensure a text’s presence in the world by creating a variety
of paratexts, and none was more closely related to a writer’s authority than
the preface.
Prefaces frame the central text, alter meaning prior to reading the cen-
tral text, and assist in the increased sales of books by appearing in later
reprint editions. However, these pieces do not exist solely to promote the
sale of books. Authorial prefaces promote and represent professional
authorship, which was integral to the growth of authority in twentieth-
century American literature. These pieces help us trace the careers of sev-
eral writers not only biographically but also textually. Why were certain
books given prefaces and others not? Why did authors choose to remove,
replace, or revise prefaces in subsequent editions of specific texts? What
can be said about an author’s legacy in the context of his or her prefaces?
How much direction is given in them, and where can that direction help
or hinder certain readings of texts? Can the preface in production change
the textual make-up of the given text, and can that text be permanently
altered because of it? Do unpublished or unfinished/aborted prefaces say
as much about an author’s professional attributes as his/her published
texts? These questions spark what follows, an investigation into the busi-
ness of literature in America in the twentieth century.
However, Genette casts a wide net when defining “the prefatorial situ-
ation of communication,” including “every type of introductory (preludial
or postludial) text, authorial or allographic, consisting of a discourse pro-
duced on the subject of the text that follows or precedes it.”5 Genette
differentiates between the original preface,6 the later preface,7 the delayed
preface,8 the allographic preface,9 as well as other forms, including the
postface (which comes at the end of a book). I am concerned with pref-
aces, forewords, and introductions (introductory essays or short pieces)
written by authors for their books, though I also investigate particular
prefaces that Ernest Hemingway wrote for other writers (allographic, or
third person, pieces), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unconventional table of
contents to his collection Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), which is composed
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 3
of individual mini-prefaces for each story. Other devices, such as the sche-
mata that James Joyce gave to Carlo Linati and Stuart Gilbert as keys to
his novel Ulysses, subsequently printed in various editions and studies of
the novel since their inception,10 or William Faulkner’s famed appendix to
The Sound and the Fury, “1699–1945 The Compsons,” published first in
Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner (1946)11 and subsequently
reprinted in other editions, fall just outside of the kinds of prefaces I
choose to investigate. Though each has had a considerable impact on the
writers and books they are associated with, and both would come under
Genette’s definition of preface/postface, my goal is to investigate those
particular essay-style prefaces that occur prior to the central text. First,
essay-style prefaces at the beginnings of books are most common, and
many reprint editions tend to include them in some form. Second, while
the preface is far from an American form, the prefaces under investigation
interrogate professional authorship in America in the twentieth century, a
time of great change in the industry, and writers and publishers took
advantage of the space for commercial and commemorative reasons. And
third, in taking up primarily canonical American writers, I argue that their
prefaces complicate and enhance our understanding of their authority over
their texts, readers, and careers in a shifting literary environment. Prefaces
are not a decidedly American form, but American writers wrote dozens if
not hundreds of prefaces in the twentieth century, begging the simple but
obvious question: why?
Authorial Prefaces and the Literary Marketplace

in America
Prefaces add value to a book as a marketing and advertising mechanism in

order to, at times, sell the same work twice, but this time with added fea-
tures which may be—from an authorial and publishing standpoint—attrac-
tive to prospective readers. Value is also added to the reader. Prefaces offer
direct links between authors and readers, giving the latter assurance that
they are reading the book correctly. They also provide authors with the
opportunity to brand their work for market, aligning with William
Charvat’s terms of authorship as a professional trade. In deciding to write
prefaces which provide a new or amplified reading of a book, writers
choose to participate in a professional zone of commerce where writing “is
produced with the hope of extended sale in the open market” and where
4 R. K. TANGEDAL
“the problem of the professional writer is not identical with that of the
literary artist; but when a literary artist is also a professional writer, he can-
not solve the problems of the one function without reference to the
other.”12 Therefore the authorial preface, much like book publication,
represents a choice every writer must make when tasked with becoming a
public author. Where private concerns once dominated in the form of
writing what becomes a book, public personae take over to promote that
work to readers. However, a more complex process unfolds once books
are brought out, as books influence the creation of other books, and writ-
ers influence the work of other writers. Authors “are unique in that they
are not just the authors of their own works,” writes Michel Foucault.
“They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the
formation of other texts.”13 The rules of the game are in a constant state
of flux, though the goal—a published book—remains the primary objec-
tive. Yet the features of books follow specific fads, just like any other trend.
The twentieth century was not the first to feature authorial prefaces, but
due to the increased opportunity for writers to produce prefaces for their
work, coupled with the growth of writing as a consistent craft for the
“serious author”14 to ply, the twentieth century saw prefaces take on a new
significance to the professionals who placed them between the covers of
their books.
All the same, publication as a business spreads control over several par-
ticipants and generally leaves the author with the least amount of power.
Joshua Kopperman Ratner argues that nineteenth-century authors pro-
moted an “aggressive engagement of readers” through paratextual experi-
mentation as a means of authorial survival, a factor which translated into
the twentieth century.15 The complicated relationship between authors
and their authority/authorship in a burgeoning literary marketplace filled
with both skilled and unskilled readers drove writers to intensify their indi-
vidual paratextual expression. Genette notes that “the original assumptive
authorial preface, which we will thus shorten to original preface, has as its
chief function to ensure that the text is read properly.”16 Whether engaging
in preface writing or not, an author’s main goal is to be read; to augment
Genette slightly, authorial centrality enhances the paratextual goal of pub-
lic consumption. In any case, the spatial dynamics of the authorial preface
require a degree of control. In the twentieth century many prefaces were
excised prior to publication, which left books ripe for definition and direc-
tion.17 Generally, authors chose to preface reprints and new editions of the
same work years after initial publication, a practice crucial in asserting
authorial control over printed material that was already available to the
public. If a writer’s control was compromised in the first edition, reprints
allowed for a return to authorial centrality, and many writers achieved (or
attempted to achieve) some level of textual control by using a variety of
paratextual devices.
Writers were able to find spaces for authorial reconstitution, from titles
and epigrams to epilogues and headings. Franco Moretti argues that “as
the market expands, titles contract; as they do that, they learn to compress
meaning; and as they do that, they develop special ‘signals’ to place books
in the right market niche.”18 From the eighteenth century onward,
authors, editors, and publishers utilized paratextual space as a key compo-
nent of book marketing and reader engagement. The space also became a
place for writers to discuss the new professionalism associated with author-
ship. According to Ratner, “Literary history has been content to declare
the death of the author; we have not paid enough attention to the ways
that this death excited and upset writers in the early United States. This is
partially because we have not paid enough attention to what writers said
about the subject of authorship in paratexts.”19 Writers like Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Washington Irving, Ratner argues, used every part of the
book to their advantage, though readers fail to see just how “absolutely
enmeshed” paratexts and texts become if read properly.20 Writing about
authorship for readers provided each new edition of a work with a window
into America’s newest profession and gave writers the opportunity to
inform and direct their readers. Though a book is the product of many
hands, the writer who gave it life reaches out to connect with readers in
surprising places, if only to survive to write another one.
Authors in the twentieth century felt many of the same needs as those
in the nineteenth century, though the role was evolving. James L.W. West
III defines the twentieth-century author as “simultaneously an artist and
an impresario, an aesthete and an entertainer, a thinker and a business-
man.”21 In order to function successfully within the literary marketplace,
authors needed to encompass various roles. Pierre Bourdieu describes the
literary field as “a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to
transform or conserve this field of forces,”22 just as Foucault defines the
author as “the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain being
of reason that we call ‘author.’”23 According to Bourdieu, “the fundamen-
tal stake in literary struggles is the monopoly of literary legitimacy, i.e.,
inter alia, the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are
authorized to call themselves writers.”24 Writers were able to legitimize
6 R. K. TANGEDAL
their authorship in prefaces by recounting the trials and tribulations of

composition and publication. Ernest Hemingway and Toni Morrison cat-
alogue their struggles in prefaces that redefine and ultimately authorize
their existence as writers. They create an authority of resilience, integral to
legacy building and reader engagement, while F. Scott Fitzgerald amplifies
the integrity of his talent (and what he sees as the indifference of critics) in
his late career prefaces, partially as a response to the youthful pose on dis-
play in his earlier work. He does not persevere; he laments what could
have been and the effect that has on a writer. Robert Penn Warren grap-
ples with facts and fictions, stories and origins, and the myth of Huey
Long orbiting All the King’s Men (1946), and Willa Cather subdues the
character of Willa Cather in her revised introduction to My Ántonia, which
actually amplifies her control, the disappearance into narrative complete
and true. Of course Ring Lardner throws it all out the window—babies,
bathwater, and all—with his prefaces for Charles Scribner’s Sons. But he
knew what a “real” writer was supposed to look like, how a “real” writer
would instruct readers in a preface, and why “real” writers were too proud
to admit that the market was built to chew them up. His legitimacy was his
survival in spite of the overwhelming calls to evolve, something he never
did. The tasks each of the previously mentioned writers undertook com-
plicate authority further, much like how their literary ancestors of the pre-
vious century had used paratexts to cry out for control of their work.
Foucault recognizes that “these aspects of an individual which we des-
ignate as making him an author are only a projection … of the operations
we force texts to undergo, the connections we make, the traits we establish
as pertinent, the continuities we recognize, or the exclusions we prac-
tice.”25 In order to establish a market niche, writers became authors
because the projection, to borrow from Foucault, was enacted for a spe-
cific publication purpose; such projections continue to display the compli-
cated web of literary creation integral to publication and market
consumption. Rather than displaying literary production as a linear model,
both Bourdieu and Foucault define authority in more complex terms.
With his “communications circuit,” Robert Darnton claimed that the
cycle of publication “runs from the author to the publisher (if the book-
seller does not assume the role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller,
and the reader. The reader completes the circuit because he influences the
author before and after the act of publication.”26 Whether a struggle, a
projection, or a circuit, the terms of authorship in the literary marketplace
require explanation, for the force of book production results in

compromises.
Writers and authors, both part of Bourdieu’s “field of struggle” and
Darnton’s “communications circuit,” are inhabited by a singular artistic
mind. As a private figure the writer enacts the physical act of writing, while
the public author is presented to a readership in the form of literary pub-
lication. Where these two functions meet (the text) forms a canvas of com-
promise. Over time the dynamics of the preface continued to confound
critics and readers alike, as authors chose to either utilize the space fully or
ignore the space altogether. Genette argues that “more than a boundary
or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold, or … a ‘vestibule’
that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or
turning back. … [It is] a zone not only of transition, but also of transac-
tion: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the
public.”27 The paratext “is at the service of a better reception for the text
and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes
of its author and his allies).”28 Consequently, authors of the twentieth
century were given access to new markets in the wake of the reprint cul-
ture that had expanded the century prior. Meredith McGill chronicles the
rampant effects of literary piracy which helped build—for better or
worse—America’s literary identity. She notes: “Antebellum struggles over
the right to reprint domestic and foreign texts demonstrate that literary
property is never simply or only a matter of individual property rights, but
rather of systems of circulation in which persons, corporate bodies, and
the state have complicated and often conflicting interests.”29 Publishers
treated literary works as publicly owned rather than privately owned enti-
ties, reprinting works by Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne while granting
authors little to no control over their reprinted work. Essentially these
reprints forged a uniquely public literary community in which texts flowed
between publisher and reader. The centrality of the author was in conflict
with the complicated “rights” of readers.
The losers in the game—the authors—pressed for stringent copyright
restrictions, resulting in books as authorial property as opposed to a pub-
licly owned good by the end of the nineteenth century. McGill argues that
the reprint culture from 1837 to 1853 helped grow the national literature,
for “in establishing a public sphere based on the general accessibility of
printed texts but defined by the stutter of locally interrupted circulation,
and in its disaggregating response to the challenges posed by economic
development, the system of reprinting represents the Jacksonian form of
8 R. K. TANGEDAL
national culture.”30 Access was paramount, and texts were readily available
for readers to purchase at low prices. British texts were predominantly
reprinted since no international copyright law restricted their reprinting.
James J. Barnes notes that “as a country, nineteenth-century America was
akin to a present-day underdeveloped nation which recognizes its depen-
dence on those more commercially and technologically advanced, and
desires the fruits of civilization in the cheapest and most convenient ways.
Reprinting English literature seemed easy and inexpensive, and so America
borrowed voraciously.”31 In doing so, the reprint policy “partook of a
curious blend of protectionism and free trade: protection for American
industry but not American authors; freedom to reprint British works but
not to import them.”32 The phenomenon produced a decentralized liter-
ary market, in which “the mania for cheapness won out over the interests
of the literary community.”33 Reprinting various texts produced an anti-
authorial vacuum in which writers were separated from their texts, a sepa-
ration fraught with antagonism between author, publisher, and reader.
Authorship shifted within the unregulated transatlantic reprint market,
for “in rejecting authorship as a governing principle for the production
and distribution of literary texts,” argues McGill, “the culture of reprint-
ing does not eliminate authors so much as suspend, reconfigure, and
intensify their authority, placing a premium on texts that circulate with the
names of authors attached.”34 The name of the author was important, not
their interests, which echoes the splitting of private and public writing
functions crucial to authorship. West notes that as professions in America
became more identifiable than before, “American writers began to lose
their sense of authority and audience, to retreat from society and to see
themselves as alienated, misunderstood figures.”35 Instead of authorial
control, McGill claims that authorial manipulation in the public reading
sphere fueled “the fiercely competitive reprint publishers who pioneered
American book marketing techniques, trumpeting the names and fortify-
ing the reputations of authors as a means of distinguishing their editions
from rival reprints.”36 Generally done without the input of the author,
publishers separated an author from his or her work and effectively mar-
ginalized the creator from the creation while still using the name to sell
the book. West argues that “part of the problem has been lack of public
identity” for authors at the turn of the century,37 and McGill concludes
that “the antebellum culture of reprinting gives us access to a long history
of American skepticism about tight controls over literary property.”38
What is the property: the writer or the book? Or both? McGill forecasts
and West examines the intense attention to commercial interests that

authors gave their work in the twentieth century. As Anglo-American
copyright became law in 1891, the protection of authors and their proper-
ties hampered the reprint market, but authorship continued to profession-
alize as new markets developed. The twentieth century saw new forms of
literary growth, predominantly in four forms: the formation of literary
clubs (the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild), the prolif-
eration of affordable reprint series (such as the Modern Library), the
paperback revolution, and new trade editions with prefaces written by the
authors. Though the free-for-all reprint culture of the mid-nineteenth
century ceased, a new reprint standard took shape in the twentieth cen-
tury. Continued attention to audience fostered a new interest in authorial
prefaces as a means of creating and expanding authorship in the new cen-
tury, with writers and publishers taking advantage of this phenomenon to
sell books and grow authority. While not a wholly unique moment in the
history of books, the prefaces written by American writers in the twentieth
century catalogue the shifting landscape of a more self-consciously profes-
sionalized trade—the American writer—fraught with tension and com-
promise, and informed by evolving reading publics.
Henry James and Joseph Conrad

Though the reprint and literary club boom served as a catalyst for the
twentieth-century preface, at the turn of the century two literary icons
turned to the authorial preface: Henry James and Joseph Conrad. The
opportunity for prefacing came as part of the “collected edition” phenom-
enon, of which both writers took full advantage. Conrad’s preface to The
Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897, 1914)—retitled The Children of the Sea in
the first American edition39—evoked clear authorial commitment, while
James’s prefaces to his twenty-four-volume New York Edition of the Novels
and Tales of Henry James (1907–1909) forwarded a new Henry James, a
public figure dedicated to art and creation, and to setting the record
straight.40 Their prefaces were professional and artistic. Michael Anesko
argues that “in writing his prefaces James had one of the rarest opportuni-
ties ever afforded to an artist: the chance to supply the [kind] of intelligent
criticism his work deserved, but which it had failed to elicit from contem-
porary readers or men of letters.”41 As James was nearing the end of his
life, the author chose to redesign his legacy into what John H. Pearson
labeled a “mosaic sarcophagus,” blending criticism with intention, and art
10 R. K. TANGEDAL
with reception.42 Each preface to the New York edition, then, would
“result in a reading of the prefaced text that is more richly suggestive and
far more rewarding for inquiring minds than a reading of that novel or tale
without such preparation.”43 However, when gathered and published as
part of a collected edition, the prefaces take on lives of their own and
essentially form complex essays on art and literature rather than prefaces
for specific novels. Though originally published as individual prefaces for
each new volume in the collection, James’s prefaces were collected later as
a standalone volume in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (1934) and
later as part of the collected editions of James’s work for the Library of
America, where they are divorced from their original texts. Genette
accounts for this change in location, as prefaces frequently become “essays”
in a collection rather than paratextual pieces.44 The transition from preface
to essay is an important one. We ought not separate the preface from its
original home, for in doing so we deny the textual influence of the preface
as designed. Prefaces are not essays, though essays can be utilized as pref-
aces. The pieces are designed to accompany a text, and reading prefaces
outside of their textual context denies functionality, the most integral
component of prefatory statements. With this in mind, attention to inten-
tion is crucial in determining the value of authorial prefaces.
James’s intentions were clear from the outset, with Vivienne Rundle
noting that “James uses the New York Edition prefaces as a crucially
important recuperative opportunity.”45 Concerning James’s disastrous
foray into the theater, Rundle argues further “that the prefaces afford their
author a way to reassert mastery over his oeuvre; they constitute a textual
site for the reclamation of authority and identity.”46 Anesko contends that
the prefaces became added capital, for “to assist the public in its search and
to satisfy its craving for novelty, James was eager to embellish his Edition
with prefaces and frontispieces and to rework his earlier fictions. To capti-
vate a publisher and the public, James was prepared to frame his artistic
goals in distinctly marketable form.”47 For example, James’s preface to The
American discusses “the only general attribute of projected romance” in
the following way:
The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under
that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more
or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know
where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and
unrelated: we only swing apart from the globe—though remaining as exhil-

arated, naturally, as we like, especially when all goes well.48
James’s prefaces feature long, detailed descriptions, psychological detours,

and rereadings of each novel. Though James gives the impression in his
prefaces of having reread his novels (and therefore discovered new ideas),
Rundle and Anesko both question the veracity of the prefaces, as writers
tend to create narratives of labor and inception rather than report actual
events.49 For instance, James likened The Tragic Muse to “some aromatic
bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never been loosed; or, better
still, to some jar of potpourri, shaped and overfigured and polished, but of
which the lid, never lifted, has provided for the intense accumulation of
fragrance within.”50 The Portrait of a Lady was constructed with “artful
patience” by piling “brick upon brick.”51
Pearson argues that “James desired his readers to be conscious not only
of the value of his art, but of the value of his aesthetic performance. We
must always read novel and novelist, in other words.” James pushed his
texts and himself into the public sphere, advanced his authority, framed his
oeuvre, and recast control over his work.52 Many authors would follow his
example as the twentieth century progressed, as the product and the per-
formance of an author became increasingly intertwined. In many ways
James’s prefaces provide a base for authorial self-conception in the twenti-
eth century. His preface to Volume XV denounces editorial prescriptive-
ness (specifically as it pertains to his short story “The Death of the Lion”),
and he charts how stories like “The Death of the Lion” “deal all with the
literary life, gathering their motive, in each case, from some extreme pre-
dicament, of the artist enamoured of perfection, ridden by his idea or
paying for his sincerity.” Nearly three decades later, F. Scott Fitzgerald
wanted readers (and critics) to recognize his sincerity in a preface to the
Modern Library Edition of The Great Gatsby, where he became his own
best critic (like James). “I think [Gatsby] is an honest book,” he insisted,
“that is to say, that one used none of one’s virtuosity to get an effect, and,
to boast again, one soft-pedalled the emotional side to avoid the tears
leaking from the socket of the left eye, or the large false face peering
around the corner of a character’s head.”53 He pays for his sincerity, to
borrow from James, with Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and Taps at Reveille
falling far short of critical and commercial expectations. Further, for James,
his stories “testify indeed, as they thus stand together, to no general inten-
tion—they minister only, I think, to an emphasized effect.”54 Similarly, in
12 R. K. TANGEDAL
Fitzgerald’s aborted foreword to Taps at Reveille, the beleaguered writer

notes that he too “tried for an arduous precision in trying to catch one
character or one emotion or one adventure—which is all that one can do
in the length of a short story.”55 The restrictions placed upon writers by
genre, editorial frameworks, and critical reception lead to compromise,
and while some find freedom in breaking the rules (James), others eventu-
ally buckle under the weight of the rules (Fitzgerald). James offered an
inside view of a writer as an artist, and future writers now had frameworks
by which they too could express what once felt inexpressible.
Similarly, Joseph Conrad’s author’s notes for his collected works serve
the same function as James’s prefaces. Conrad revered James, as his col-
lected prefaces looked to emulate James’s New York Edition. After receiv-
ing copies of the edition from James, he wrote back on 12 December
1908, “I sat for a long while with the closed volume in my hand going
over the preface [to The American] in my mind and thinking—that’s how
it began, that’s how it was done!”56 He wrote J. B. Pinker in July 1917
concerning his own prefaces: “I wouldn’t even expand them. Of course I
can’t rivalise with poor dear H[enry] J[ames] and I don’t know that it
would be wise even to try.”57 Just like James, Conrad sought to expand
both his marketability and his critical reputation. A series of author’s notes
for the Heinemann edition of the Collected Works of Joseph Conrad were
written largely between 1919 and 1922. While some were written prior to
the collection, Conrad furnished each of his books with a preface, a com-
monplace practice for a collected edition.58 However, one preface in par-
ticular stands apart from the others, partly for its attention to artistic
precision and partly for its reputation among writers. Conrad’s The Nigger
of the ‘Narcissus’ is generally regarded as the author’s first major work, a
short novel concerning the life of a Black sailor (James Wait) and the con-
ditions aboard the eponymous ship “Narcissus.” The novel followed two
other sea tales, Almayer’s Folly and Outcasts of the Island, with ‘Narcissus’
an evolution in the author’s style and technique. Conrad sent a potential
preface to friend Edward Garnett on 24 August 1897; the piece then went
on a rather complicated, though not unique, publication journey. Initially
Conrad hoped to include it in the first edition, published by Heinemann,
but editor Sydney Pawling refused to publish the preface. However,
W. E. Henley of the New Review opted to include the preface as an after-
word in the final serial installment of the novel (December 1897).59 The
preface was then reprinted in 1905 as “The Art of Fiction” in Harper’s
Weekly, which resembled the text Conrad had originally written. It
appeared for a third time—but for the first time as a preface—in the sec-
ond American printing published by Doubleday, Page, & Co. (23 May
1914) but was preceded by another preface entitled “To My Readers in
America.” Heinemann then included the preface—as it appeared in the
second American printing—as the preface to the novel for the Collected
Works (1921).
The publishing history of Conrad’s preface to ‘Narcissus’ is no outlier,
and it would be nearly duplicated several decades later by Toni Morrison’s
The Bluest Eye (1970, 1993, 1999, 2007); the first edition had no preface,
the Nobel Prize reprint featured a new afterword by the author, the next
reprint featured the afterword and a foreword, and the collected edition
ran the revised afterword as a foreword. Genette argues that prefaces must
be analyzed in spatial, functional, and aesthetic terms, especially when
reprints, new editions, and collected editions alter the effect of a preface.
The crucial elements of Conrad’s oft-cited preface are the representation
of his literary authority, his attention to the senses, and how to make read-
ers “see.” In his note to American readers Conrad insisted that “almost
without laying down the pen I wrote a preface, trying to express the spirit
in which I was entering on the task of my new life,” which the novel
fueled.60 On 5 December 1897, as the serial run came to an end, Conrad
wrote Garnett: “Henley printed the preface at the end as an Author’s
note. It does not shine very much, but I am glad to see it in type.”61 When
asked to include a preface for the second American printing, Conrad
jumped at the chance to resubmit his original preface. On 27 March 1914
he wrote Alfred A. Knopf (then working for Doubleday): “In the matter
of the preface: it was suppressed simply because the publisher here (Mr
Heinemann) thought it would do no good to the book—I don’t know on
what grounds—and I simply took his opinion meekly. I was a very young
author them [sic]—remember!”62 Conrad explains the effect his preface is
meant to have on readers and on his career, as he notes his age and inex-
perience when first confronted with its suppression. Conrad’s preface illu-
minates many of the central tenets of prefatory structure and imagination
that authors would continue to follow for decades.
Conrad chose the preface as the primary forum to illuminate his new
artistic sensibility. Conrad’s first two novels were considered middling
efforts, and when placed alongside ‘Narcissus’ we understand the author’s
motivation to chart his new artistic course with a preface, which begins: “a
work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its
justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded
14 R. K. TANGEDAL
attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by

bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every
aspect.”63 While James created a “heroic narrative” with his collected pref-
aces, Conrad created an introspective narrative, whose purpose was to
showcase how one harnesses truth and the imagination to heighten read-
ers’ senses. Rundle argues that Conrad’s prefaces “memorialize the bor-
derline moments attendant upon the birth and death of the creative
impulse. And yet Conrad’s elegiac prefaces allow the reader to live and
perform in a way that James’s absolutely preclude.”64 The self-reflective
James leaves readers overwhelmed with authorial direction (and misdirec-
tion), but for Conrad a writer’s “appeal is less loud, more profound, less
distinct, more stirring—and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures for-
ever.”65 Conrad argues that “all art, therefore, appeals primarily to the
senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must
also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the
secret spring of responsive emotion.”66 Ultimately, Conrad’s task is “by
the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is,
before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.”67
Many writers were influenced by Conrad’s preface. Fitzgerald called the
preface “the greatest ‘credo’ in my life, ever since I decided that I would
rather be an artist than a careerist,”68 and Ernest Hemingway borrowed
from the preface when writing his father: “you see I am trying in all my
stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—
or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read
something by me you actually experience the thing.”69 He mirrors Conrad,
who writes: “If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts:
encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps,
also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”70 Willa
Cather wrote a “Mr. Miller” that “there is one kind of story that ought to
tell itself—the story of action. There is another story that ought to be
told—I mean the emotional story, which tries to be much more like music
than it tries to be like drama—the story that tries to evoke and leave merely
a picture—a mood. That was what [Joseph] Conrad tried to do, and he
did it well.”71 Cather’s evocation of music echoes Conrad’s insistence that
art “must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of
painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music—which is the art of
arts,”72 and the act of submerging herself deep into My Ántonia gets at the
effect that Conrad believes “endures forever.” Toni Morrison also
channeled Conrad’s preface in her foreword to Beloved when she likened

the effect of her novel to a feeling and a sense rather than just words:
In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things
being under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout;
that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by
the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be
threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a
personal experience, language must get out of the way.73
Conrad’s attention to literary effect and a reader’s senses aims at a dynamic

artistic purpose, which many twentieth-century writers took up as a defin-
ing feature of the modern preface: by illuminating the process the authors
illuminate the work, and by illuminating the work they illuminate their
authority.
The call for truth in representation, rendering the visible and tangible
effects of prose, and establishing literary authority, echoes fully in the
twentieth century. Fitzgerald considered Conrad a major influence
throughout his career.74 He wrote his editor Maxwell Perkins regarding
The Great Gatsby: “the happiest thought I have is my new novel—it is
something really new in form, idea, structure—the model for the age that
Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.”75 Showing the
breadth of Conrad’s influence, Fitzgerald wrote Kenneth Littauer four-
teen years later regarding his novel in progress: “by making Cecilia at the
moment of her telling the story, an intelligent and observant woman, I
shall grant myself the privilege, as Conrad did, of letting her imagine the
actions of the characters. Thus, I hope to get the verisimilitude of a first
person narrative, combined with a Godlike knowledge of all events that
happen to my characters.”76 He cited Conrad specifically in his 1934
introduction for the Modern Library reprint of The Great Gatsby:
reading it over one can see how it could have been improved—yet without
feeling guilty of any discrepancy from the truth, as far as I saw it; truth or
rather the equivalent of the truth, the attempt at honesty of imagination. I
had just re-read Conrad’s preface [to ‘Narcissus’], and I had recently been
kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to pre-
clude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world.77
Conrad’s preface made its impression on Fitzgerald early, and other

authors similarly fell under the influence of the piece. Hemingway
16 R. K. TANGEDAL
concluded his foreword to Green Hills of Africa with a call to the senses
through honest depiction, declaring that “the writer has attempted to
write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and
the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a
work of the imagination.”78 “To snatch in a moment of courage, from the
remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of
the task,” explains Conrad; “the task approached in tenderness and faith is
to hold up unquestionably, without choice and without fear, the rescued
fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood.”79 As justification
for claims of effectiveness and influence, and following the lead of Henry
James, Joseph Conrad—and his preface to ‘Narcissus’—provided the
essential introduction to the purpose and potential of prefaces in the liter-
ary marketplace of the twentieth century.
The American Reprint Market

and the Authorial Preface
The problem with publishing books has always been distribution, and as a
publishing mechanism the authorial preface took on a new role during
what Charles Madison dubs “the commercialization of literature” between
1900 and 1945.80 Borrowing from the title of publisher Henry Holt’s
1905 essay for Atlantic Monthly, Madison explains that “the peculiarity of
publishing is that while it is and must of necessity remain a business, it
tends to attract a fair percentage of men who seek from it a satisfaction
that money alone cannot provide,” and publishers of the period sought to
combine the literary quality of the modernist period with popular novels
and bestsellers.81 “It is important to understand that publishers were both
marketers of and a market for modernism,” writes Catherine Turner in
Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars. “They had to be con-
vinced that modernist manuscripts were worth buying for their firms. Just
as consumers had to be convinced modernism might be good for them,
publishers had to be convinced that modernism might be good for busi-
ness.”82 Publishers combined several authors’ apparent disinterestedness
with savvy marketing and created new forms of advertising in order to sell
difficult and less accessible modernist works. Turner’s survey of literary
advertising in the early twentieth century shows publishers striving to
both highlight an author’s literary merit and distance an author from
claims to popularity. The industry, at this point, looked like Bourdieu’s
“field of struggles,” as writers campaigned for legitimacy by pretending to

care little for promotion or economic remuneration.83 Consequently, as
the market shifted to accommodate these new books and authors, a newly
energized reprint market created another bridge between popularity and
sales. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, founders of Random House, pur-
chased the Modern Library from Horace Liveright (of Boni & Liveright)
in July 1925; in doing so, the two built one of the most successful reprint
series of the twentieth century, composed of cheap editions of both popu-
lar and highbrow literature. Madison notes that by 1941, the series had
sold over 10,000,000 copies, with the series expanding to include longer
books.84 As the popularity of the series grew, Cerf and Klopfer sought out
introductions for their reprints in order to differentiate them from rival
editions. Writing a Modern Library introduction became a cottage indus-
try unto itself.
Jay Satterfield refers to the Modern Library introductions as “attrac-
tions” and cites Cerf’s inclination to protect his introductions rather than
allow them to be reprinted in other books. When asked by Max Eastman
for permission to do so, Cerf responded: “that introduction is the exclu-
sive feature of the Modern Library edition of the book, and we wouldn’t
want to see it appear in any other format.”85 The series featured introduc-
tions written by critics, professors, and celebrities, but Cerf and Klopfer
pressed authors for their own introductions when possible. Though Willa
Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Penn Warren
all had titles appear on the Modern Library list, only Fitzgerald and Warren
offered introductions for publication (The Great Gatsby, 1934; All the
King’s Men, 1953). Prior to Gatsby’s appearance in the Modern Library,
Fitzgerald wrote Perkins:
The people who buy the Modern Library are not at all the people who buy
the new books. Gatsby—in its present form, not actually available in sight to
book buyers, will only get a scattering sale as a result of the success of this
book. I feel that every time your business department has taken a short-
sighted view of our community of interest in this matter, which is my repu-
tation, there has been no profit on your part and something less than that
on mine.86
Fitzgerald differentiates the reading markets for his books and discusses
the difference between Modern Library readers, paperback readers, and
trade edition readers. The Modern Library’s attention to price and
18 R. K. TANGEDAL
accessibility weighed heavily on authors and publishers alike, as did the

cheap creation and distribution of mass market paperback editions.
Concerning Scribner’s dealings with reprint giant Grosset & Dunlap,
Perkins wrote Hemingway: “In a letter you pointed out the disappointing
fact that books do not hold up as you had thought from year to year. We
know that well enough. It is increasingly true. And the chief reason for it
is the short-sightedness and avariciousness of publishers.”87 For authors
like Fitzgerald, reprint series such as the Modern Library provided “con-
tinued distribution and an additional seal of critical appreciation for an
already successful title” and offered authors a chance to reestablish their
books, and their authorities, in a new form.88 But not all writers were fond
of the series. Willa Cather spent years fending off Cerf and Klopfer, who
wanted to include her most popular works in the series. She finally relented
in 1931, allowing the Modern Library to reprint Death Comes for the
Archbishop, but she refused to renew the contract five years later, and the
novel was removed from the series. Lise Jaillant explains that “Cather
made little attempt to reach the academics that continued to admire her
work,” and though her contemporaries had cheap editions in series like
the Modern Library, “she underestimated the importance of these series
in canon making.”89 Cather maintained careful control over her work, and
in doing so she passed on the opportunities that cheap reprint series pro-
vided writers looking to expand their reach. Other writers took the chance
and ran with it, with many regarding the series favorably over time.90
Consequently, the advent and proliferation of cheap paperback editions
forced publishers to reissue works with new prefaces, as they hoped to cash
in on renewed exposure and the new shift to classroom editions. With
already a large-scale distribution of paperbacks in a variety of new ven-
ues—including drug stores, grocery stores, and train stations—publishers
sought out another venue for their authors’ works. Scribner’s began
releasing the Scribner’s Library trade editions in the 1950s, after they rec-
ognized the growth of one of the most important publishing venues of the
mid-century: the classroom. West argues that “the demand for cheapness,
utility, and wide circulation, together with the lure of a vast domestic mar-
ket, had their effect on the publishing industry,” which partly led to the
paperback revolution.91 Kenneth Davis notes that “the option of ignoring
the paperback grew less viable as the reprint was increasingly viewed as a
source of income. Reprint royalties were once thought of as icing on the
cake of regular trade and book-club sales. But this income was beginning
to mount as paperback sales grew, more titles were reprinted, and prices …
crept up to thirty-five cents.”92 And in tracing Willa Cather’s relationship

with the Modern Library, Jaillant concludes that “Cather’s opposition to
cheap reprints partly explains her declining critical reputation in the
1930s.”93 Reprints meant potential profits, both short-term and long-
term visibility, and an increased likelihood that particular books would be
in the hands of students. Though someone of Cather’s stature felt com-
pelled to resist the phenomenon, most writers knew what these reprints
and editions meant for their legacies.
Fitzgerald asked Perkins several years before the Scribner’s Library edi-
tions hit bookstores to consider creating an omnibus collection: “I think
the novels should come first and, unless there are factors there you haven’t
told me about, I think it is a shame to put it off. It would not sell wildly at
first but unless you make some gesture of confidence I see my reputation
dieing on its feet from lack of nourishment.”94 Fitzgerald forecasted the
firm’s intentions, though in the 1930s Scribner’s saw no need to create a
vast reprint library. He reiterated his feelings to Perkins near the end of
his life:
Would the 25 cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye—or is the book unpop-
ular. Has it had a chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a
preface not by me but by one of its admirers—I can pick one—make it a
favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody. But to
die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there
is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bare my stamp—
in a small way I was an original.95
The previously mentioned Scribner’s Library series would go on to fea-

ture the firm’s eventual bestselling title: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby. His longing to be remembered and repositioned is similar to Toni
Morrison’s forceful forewords to her canon for Vintage. Such a move has
become commonplace, and authors are still eager to situate their work,
regardless of their popularity.
While the Modern Library and paperback editions featured promi-
nently in most professional authors’ portfolios, the Book-of-the-Month
Club (BOMC) also became a market force once established in 1923. Mail-
order book clubs date back to the nineteenth century, whereby club mem-
bers were sent books regularly selected by a committee or club group, but
the critical and popular weight of the BOMC label assisted in sales and
promotion more so than clubs of the past. Charles Madison notes that by
20 R. K. TANGEDAL
the early 1960s, “the club had sent to its members a total of 183,000,000
books,” as the club targeted middle-brow readers with a wide variety of
books.96 Janice Radway highlights club founder Henry Scherman’s refusal
“to perpetuate the distinction between two forms of value, one deter-
mined by the operations of particular interests in the market, the other
understood to be fixed, universal, and transcendent.”97 In terms of reader-
ship, Radway argues that
to look at the construction of middle-brow culture by the Book-of-the-

Month Club and at the howls of rage its transgressive posture generated
among its many critics is to begin to understand the crucial ideological work
performed then, and even now, by a transcendent and idealized culture
embodied in the literary classic, bound in vellum and treated with reverence
and awe.98
The BOMC stamp of approval meant many things; in order to assuage

publishers’ fear of price-cutting, the club offered essential services—expo-
sure, advertising, marketing—and promised to keep prices stable rather
than below the net average. Along with these tenets came an attention to
culture, and “the Book-of-the-Month Club, then, as it was initially envi-
sioned in 1926,” notes Radway, “promised not simply to treat cultural
objects as commodities, but even more significantly, it promised to foster
a widespread ability among the population to treat culture itself as a rec-
ognizable, highly liquid currency.”99 Blending cultural capital with savvy
marketing, the BOMC flexed significant social muscle throughout the
twentieth century.
The middle-brow culture strove to occupy the same cultural space as
Hemingway, James Joyce, and others, while editors such as Max Perkins
were reticent about the BOMC’s power. After Hemingway’s For Whom
the Bell Tolls was made a featured selection by the BOMC in 1940, Perkins
wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald: “I suppose you have heard of the good fortune
that has befallen Ernest. ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ has been taken by the
Book of the Month Club.—The stamp of bourgeois approval. He would
hate to think of it that way, and yet it is a good thing, practically speak-
ing.”100 Eight years prior Hemingway responded dismissively to Perkins
when asked about the possibility of placing Death in the Afternoon in
the BOMC:
if anyone so acts as to put themselves out as a book of the month they can-
not insist in ramming the good word shit or the sound old word xxxx down
the throats of a lot of clubwomen but when a book is offered for sale no one
has to buy it that does not want to—and I will not have any pressure brought
to bear to make me emasculate a book to make anyone seven thousand dol-
lars, myself or anyone else.101
By 1940, Hemingway had changed his tune with regard to For Whom the
Bell Tolls. Robert W. Trogdon argues that “Hemingway wrote the novel
without using any of the obscene words he had fought to include in his
previous works. In writing the novel, he gave in to commercial pressures,
writing the novel in the way that he did to increase the chances of serial-
izing it or of selling it to a book club.”102 This self-censorship flies in the
face of his earlier criticism of the club’s membership, as even Hemingway
caved in the face of increased commercial prospects. Conversely, Fitzgerald
pressed actively to place Tender Is the Night with the BOMC. He told
Perkins that “it is to both our advantages to capitalize if possible such facts
as that the editors of those book leagues might take a fancy to such a curi-
ous idea that the author, Fitzgerald, actually wrote a book after all these
years.”103 Books are commodities, goods to be sold at market, and whether
the BOMC was seen as deleterious or positive, Scherman’s “subtle under-
standing of the ideological dilemma of the modern moment” and “his
remarkable ability to address them through a particular, innovative orga-
nization of the business of cultural goods production” positioned the club
in the middle of the literary conversation in the twentieth century.104
An Influence on the Public

American writers in the twentieth century frequently chose to introduce
their own materials with prefaces to first editions, the Modern Library
series, Book-of-the-Month Club editions, and authorized trade reprints.
As outlined earlier, the culture of reprinting in the nineteenth century
influenced the growing attention to professional authorship in American
publishing in the twentieth century. Each chapter in this book examines
specific prefaces written by representative professional authors as attempts
to market, explain, and wield authority over published texts. Fredson
Bowers argues passionately for the attention to an author’s composition
identity, for “a critic who becomes impatient at the bibliographer’s con-
cern to establish the exact form of a text in all its possible pre-publication
22 R. K. TANGEDAL
states of variance is throwing away, almost wilfully, one of the best possible
ways of understanding an author by following him step by step at work.”105
Bowers also highlights the importance of “the shaping development of
idea” and the modification of textual expression through literary creation,
as contexts and concepts matter.106 G. Thomas Tanselle notes that “the
insubstantial nature of language means that finished works must be
searched for through the activity of mind,” as textual evidence possesses
“a tranquility that comes from their being outgrowths of life, distillations
of experience.”107 Recognizing the value of authorial prefaces requires a
measure of faith in textual study, as Bowers determines that “when one is
working with a difference in degree, not in kind, the point at which one
feels a need to defend the bridge is shifting and uncertain.”108 Readers can
see in a preface both the private and public sides of authorship, a deeply
human device writers used to situate, define, and defend themselves and
their work. The authors under investigation offer narratives in this vein,
with each attempting to “see” (as Conrad would have it) their texts, their
readers, and themselves, in new and fascinating ways. Each chapter focuses
on a different aspect of Genette’s definition of prefaces: make certain a
“text is read properly”;109 offer readers the possibility of “stepping inside
or turning back”110; obstruct readers as “inhibiting signposts”111; promote
the author’s “will to control”112; show a writer remembering a text at “a
safe distance”113; and “ensure the text’s presence in the world.”114 Willa
Cather, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert
Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison used prefaces in different ways, and each
case study complicates key components of American publishing in the
twentieth century.
Chapter 2 examines the introduction to Willa Cather’s My Ántonia
(1918) and surveys the critical response to the revisions the author made
to that introduction in 1926. The first edition featured an original preface
(titled an introduction by Cather), and eight years later, Cather reworked
her introduction for a revised printing (1926).115 In the interim, a World
War had raged, modernism had taken hold of the literary consciousness,
and Cather had signed with a new publisher. The introductions are mark-
edly different, with Cather’s treatment of narrator Jim Burden the primary
revision. But unlike many prefaces, Cather’s introduction to My Ántonia
has been the subject of scholarly focus. I investigate Cather as editor in
control of her novel and the impact of the 1926 revisions to the introduc-
tion, as well as the ways in which critics and scholars have accounted for
the revisions she made to the introduction. Though prefaces, as I stated
earlier, are rarely the focus of scholarly interest, the two versions of
the introduction to My Ántonia and the attention they have received
prove, partially, the value of engaging with prefaces as zones of control.
Chapter 3 highlights Ring Lardner, a widely popular writer in his day
who cared little for literary pretension, evidenced by his satirical prefaces
for How to Write Short Stories (with Samples) (1924) and The Love Nest
and Other Stories (1926) for Charles Scribner’s Sons. Both pieces compli-
cate the intended function of the preface—the most important of which,
per Genette, “is to provide the author’s interpretation of the text or, if you
prefer, his statement of intent”116—by commenting indirectly on the busi-
ness of literature through comedic misdirection. Lardner’s editor, Maxwell
Perkins, may well have intended for the prefaces to reposition Lardner in
hopes of attracting new readers. However, it is clear that Lardner wanted
to reinforce an already established authorial persona for an already estab-
lished set of consumers. He refused to fix what wasn’t broken. Though
difficult to position because of his relative indifference to the literati,
Lardner and his work for Perkins at Scribner’s provides a sterling example
of authorial resistance in the face of expected evolution. Ring Lardner
altered the preface from a place of serious textual positioning to a space of
textual resistance, resulting in biting commentaries on the “literary game”
from the only perspective he knew: his own.
Chapter 4 maps the authorial anxiety that F. Scott Fitzgerald dealt with
for most of his career. The table of contents to his story collection, Tales
of the Jazz Age (1922), written as a series of mini-prefaces to each story in
the collection, peddled the image of Scott the celebrity hobbyist rather
than Fitzgerald the serious writer, while the introduction to the Modern
Library edition of The Great Gatsby (1934) and an unpublished three-
sentence foreword to Taps at Reveille (1935) suggest the degree to which
his reputation had waned by the mid-1930s. Designed partially as apolo-
gies and correctives, the 1930s prefaces highlight Fitzgerald’s desire to be
recognized as a craftsman and his doubts that he ever would. The intro-
duction to The Great Gatsby provides a cogent, insightful, and ultimately
sad window into an author only fourteen years into his professional career.
His unpublished foreword to Taps at Reveille reminds readers of the
author’s goal: to create fiction out of his own material and unique perspec-
tive, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. Scholars rarely discuss
these pieces, or analyze them in sequence for how they illuminate
Fitzgerald’s glittering beginnings and career disappointments. The table
of contents, the introduction, and the foreword amplify the anxiety of a
24 R. K. TANGEDAL
writer at odds with himself, his artistic choices, and eventually, his
own talent.
Chapter 5 investigates Ernest Hemingway’s defense of writers and writ-
ing in the prefaces he wrote for himself and others. As a writers’ writer, he
often commented on the constraints put upon writers in the literary mar-
ketplace. With his prefaces to specific works, including Green Hills of
Africa (1935) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories
(1938), and the works of others, including books by Kiki (Alice Prin), Elio
Vittorini, and Jerome Bahr, Hemingway produced a deliberately con-
trolled persona that enhanced his authority, granted him greater public
exposure, and allowed him to defend his positions on good writers and
writing while denouncing the critical community. The preface, one of
many “instruments of authorial control,”117 gave him the space to high-
light the action of writing, similar to his letters for Esquire in the 1930s.
However, his will to control went beyond persona. He cared deeply for
writers, whom he favored over the critic. Writing meant action, while cri-
tiquing meant passivity; his prefaces reinforce this dictum.
Chapter 6 explores the introductions that Robert Penn Warren wrote
for various American editions of his most famous novel, All the King’s Men
(1946), over a twenty-eight-year period (1953–1981). In prefaces for the
Modern Library (1953), Time, Inc. (1963), the Franklin Library (1977),
and the Book-of-the-Month Club (1981), Warren inhabits a number of
personas: teacher, writer, critic, reader. Known as a renaissance man for his
success in poetry, prose, and criticism, Warren displays the tools necessary
to maintain a literary career and sustain a public for his book. In each
introduction, Warren describes how and why he wrote the novel, and who
and what inspired specific characters and scenes. However, the most
important element of his introductions is the influence of Huey P. Long,
populist Governor (1928–1932) and US Senator (1932–1935) from
Louisiana, on Willie Stark, the fictional populist governor in the novel.
Warren’s view of Long and Stark (and earlier, Talos) forms the kind of
interpretive exercise that Genette argues can only happen “at a safe dis-
tance”118 from the original text, and Warren takes the many opportunities
afforded him and his book to reflect on the intentions and integrity of his
most celebrated novel. To get at Warren’s introductions, I focus on his
treatment of origins (both of the novel and of origins themselves), fol-
lowed by a survey of Warren’s “Huey,” whose treatment drives, to a great
extent, the success and staying power of the novel.
Chapter 7 examines the forewords that Toni Morrison wrote in her

post-Nobel laureate years. Her forewords for a Vintage reprint series of
her novels (2004–2014) stem from her desire to maintain a narrative proj-
ect rooted in language, though the forewords complicate that project in
various ways. Morrison searches for the language of legacy as much as a
language “worthy of the culture,”119 and her choices can be read as either
significant supplements to her texts or textual deterrents. For a writer who
referenced readers and reading regularly in her public lectures, interviews,
and essays, Morrison uses her forewords as vehicles of explanation and
interpretation, not unlike Henry James’s prefaces for the New York edi-
tion. But the forewords elicit more questions than answers: Was the act of
reading still her primary focus, or had the target shifted slightly in the
wake of her increased profile due to her Nobel Prize win in the early 1990s
and her exposure as part of Oprah’s Book Club in the early 2000s? Are
Morrison’s forewords an extension of her lifelong “narrative project”120 or
a unique authorial act, connected perhaps, but not necessarily a continua-
tion of that project? With particular focus on storytelling, language inter-
rogation, and Black representation, this chapter evaluates Morrison’s
forewords in the context of her own mission. Are they worthy of the cul-
ture, and therefore, worthy of Toni Morrison?
Chapter 8 concludes the book with a sampling of mini-studies of pref-
aces written by Robert Frost, Arna Bontemps, Mary Karr, William Styron,
William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, and Katherine Anne Porter.
With so many writers and so many books, the final chapter shows where
we can take detailed research into prefaces if we are open to the concept.
The goal of The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century
was always to help readers see prefaces, actually see them, as part of the
books written by writers. It is impossible for any study on what could
include hundreds of possible case studies to approach anything resembling
a definitive or complete treatment. Writers canonical and underground,
academic and popular, have taken part in the phenomenon of the preface.
As this book makes its way into the world, like the books under investiga-
tion herein, my sincere hope would be to see more studies of writers and
their prefaces; studies on afterwords and epilogues, epigraphs and pro-
logues, dedications and acknowledgments, author biographies and read-
ers’ guides. In my effort to blend bibliographic examination with the
forgotten (or discounted) ephemera of major writers, I attempted to
choose case studies that could serve as starting points for a field in need of
26 R. K. TANGEDAL
one. With any luck, The Preface will be only the beginning, so to speak, of
a more rigorous and complete investigation into the prefaces of books.
In discussing delayed prefaces (which many of the prefaces under inves-
tigation are), Genette notes that “an author’s tastes or ideas evolve—
indeed, undergo a sudden conversion. More generally, a middle-aged or
elderly writer, when the time has come to compile his Complete Works,
sees a delayed preface as an opportunity to express his thoughts, at a safe
distance, about some past work.”121 Though I use “a safe distance” as the
title for Chap. 6, the phrase defines the purpose of this book. Authors
negotiate textual, artistic, and personal distance as their careers move for-
ward, with each preceding text building upon the next. Authors’ prefaces
offer readers an opportunity to gauge an author’s relationship to his or her
text and offer textual evidence to support the lively interchange of ideas
present in any given text. For a writer, a work is never truly finished; writ-
ing for publication presents the public with a compromised authority, and
when writers choose to preface their experience with new material after
time has passed, the result forever alters the text that follows. The preface
was one of the most frequently used paratextual devices by American writ-
ers in the twentieth century, and by examining these prefaces in more
detail, we grow our understanding of the complex and deeply personal
business of professional authorship in America.
Notes
1. Herman Melville, “The Piazza.” The Piazza Tales: and Other Prose Pieces,
1839–1860, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas
Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 2.
2. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927), 16.
3. Henry James, “Volume XV,” 1908. Literary Criticism: French Writers,
Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon
Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1236.
4. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 1987, trans. Jane
Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.
5. Genette, Paratexts, 161.
10. The Linati and Gilbert Schemata have a complicated publication history.
Neither were printed with the original 1922 text, though both had been
circulated prior to and after publication of the first edition. The Gilbert
Schema was printed first, appearing in Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s
Ulysses: A Study (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), while the Linati
Schema was not printed until Richard Ellman included it Ulysses on the
Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). The schemata were
published as appendices to Ulysses: The 1922 Text (2008). See James
Joyce, “Appendix A: The Gilbert and Linati Schemata,” Ulysses: The 1922
Text, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008),
734–739. Bennett Cerf, publisher at Random House, wanted to include
one of Joyce’s schema as part of the first American edition (Random
House, 1934). Joyce refused, but the Saturday Review of Literature pub-
lished a two-page ad entitled “How to Enjoy James Joyce’s Great Novel
Ulysses,” which coincided with the release of the first American edition.
See Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars
(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); and A. Nicholas
Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie, Critical Companion to James
Joyce: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts On
File, Inc., 2006), 280, 311, 349–350.
11. William Faulkner, “1699–1945 The Compsons,” The Portable Faulkner,
ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1946), 325–343. Harold
Bloom called the appendix Faulkner’s “will-to-power over his own text,”
while Philip Cohen refers to the piece as “a kind of authorially sanctioned
fifth section of The Sound and the Fury.” See Harold Bloom,
“Introduction,” in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, ed.
Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008), 2; and Philip
Cohen, “Faulkner by the Light of a Pale Fire: Postmodern Textual
Scholarship and Faulkner Studies at the End of the Twentieth Century,”
in Faulkner and Postmodernism, eds. John N. Duvall and Ann J. Abadie
(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 177. Textual editor
Noel Polk removed the appendix (which had circulated for some time as
an introduction) in major reprints of The Sound and the Fury, though he
included it in a 1992 Modern Library reprint edition as an appendix. See
Cohen, “Faulkner by the Light,” 177.
12. William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870,
1968, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992), 3.
13. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” Aesthetics, Method, and
Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press,
1998), 217.
28 R. K. TANGEDAL
14. For a further discussion of writing in the twentieth century as a trade, see
James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace
since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 7–22.
15. Joshua Kopperman Ratner, American Paratexts: Experimentation and
Anxiety in the Early United States. Dissertations available from ProQuest.
2011. AAI3500774. https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/
AAI3500774, vi.
17. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald cut prefaces to Tender Is the Night
(1934) and Taps at Reveille (1935), and he may have cut his preface to
This Side of Paradise (1920); he also wished to revise a published intro-
duction to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby (1934), but
poor sales prevented the revision. For more on Fitzgerald and the Modern
Library, see Andrew Myers, “‘I Am Used to Being Dunned’: F. Scott
Fitzgerald and the Modern Library,” Columbia Library Columns 25
(February 1976): 28–39.
18. Franco Moretti, “Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles
(British Novels, 1740–1850),” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 1 (2009): 141.
19. Ratner, American Paratexts, 10.
20. Ratner, American Paratexts, 11.
21. West, American Authors, 5.
22. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic
World Reversed,” 1993, in The Broadview Reader in Book History, eds.
Michelle Levy and Tom Mole (Toronto, ON: Broadview Press,
2015), 337.
23. Foucault, “What is an Author?” 213.
24. Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” 343.
25. Foucault, “What is an Author?” 213–214.
26. Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” 1990, in The Broadview
Reader in Book History, eds. Michelle Levy and Tom Mole (Toronto,
ON: Broadview Press, 2015), 233.
29. Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting,
1834–1853 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002), 276.
30. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 108.
31. James J. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Politicians: The Quest for an
Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 1815–1854 (Columbus, OH:
Ohio State University Press, 1974), 50.
32. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Politicians, 235.
33. Barnes, Authors, Publishers, and Politicians, 152.

35. West, American Authors, 19–20.
37. West, American Authors, 20.
39. Joseph Conrad, The Children of the Sea (New York: Dodd, Mead, and
Company, 1897).
40. Michael Anesko refers to James’s “Olympian” prefaces as an “heroic nar-
rative” that self-fashions legacy and history. See Michael Anesko, ‘Friction
with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 4.
41. Anesko, ‘Friction with the Market’, 4.
42. John H. Pearson, The Prefaces of Henry James: Framing the Modern
Reader (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997),
8. Pearson’s study suggests that James created the modern reader by
instructing them in his method with prefaces while creating a monument
to his own life and work. Pearson points out the various anxieties inherent
in James, noting that the author “would recall readers to an earlier time
when his values were more in tune with the world about him, yet he
would propel both his readers and his work into an uncertain future
where he hoped to be canonized.” James’s prefaces still stand as a hall-
mark of craft, self-fashioning, and authorial control. See Pearson, The
Prefaces of Henry James, 8.
43. Pearson, The Prefaces of Henry James, 16.
45. Vivienne Rundle, “Defining Frames: The Prefaces of Henry James and
Joseph Conrad,” The Henry James Review 16, no. 1 (1995): 68.
46. Rundle, “Defining Frames,” 68.
47. Anesko, ‘Friction with the Market’, 144.
48. Henry James, “The American,” 1907. Literary Criticism: French Writers,
Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, 1064.
49. In many cases James rewrote large portions of his novels for the edition.
James accounted for new directions in his prefaces.
50. Henry James, “The Tragic Muse,” 1908. Literary Criticism: French
Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York
Edition, 1104.
51. Henry James, “The Portrait of a Lady,” 1908. Literary Criticism: French
Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York
Edition, 1083.
52. The New York Edition was ultimately a significant financial failure for
James and Charles Scribner’s Sons, though his prefaces were a boon to his
critical reputation.
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Girls are good as they can be,
But boys are best you must agree.
I guess I’ve tol’ you all I know

From where names come to where they go;
But ’member now ’ist what I sed,
My name is Bub instead o’ Ned.
THE VEGETABLE MAN

By Leonard G. Nattkemper
A Chinaman comes to our house each day

Wif horses that’s colored both red an’ gray,
An’ wagon ’ist full of things to eat—
An’ up I climbs on his big high seat.
This Chinaman’s name I cannot tell—

But “veg’table man” will do as well;
For corn an’ beans and cabbage, too,
He grows in the fields for me an’ you.
An’ w’en it’s time to drive to town

He brings his wagon ’ist loaded down
With veg’t’ble things an’ peaches too—
He’ll peel you one if I ask him to.
Gee, but I love this Chinaman;

He stops an’ plays, an’ one day ran
Aroun’ his wagon clear out of sight—
But I found him there an’ held on tight.
Then up he lifts me way up high,

An’ laughs again wif his funny eye—
I forgot to tell that he can see
’Ist half so well as you an’ me.
’Cause one day w’en he’s ’ist a boy

An’ playin’ wif a home-made toy,
It flew aroun’ an’ hit his face,
An’ left that funny open place.
But I don’t care if he is queer,

He sees enough to know I’m here,
An’ finds the time to stop an’ play
W’en I am lonesome through the day.
But ma an’ dad are not so kind

As veg’t’ble man whose eye is blind.
I guess I love them all I can,
But most I love my Chinaman.
IMMIGRATION
By Wallace Irwin
Ezekiel, the Puritan,

Thus lifts his protestation:
“By ginger, I’m American,
And don’t like immigration.
Naow I jest guess I got here fust
And know what I’m abaout,
When I declar’ we’ll all go bust
Or keep them aliens out.”
Max Heidelburg, the German, says:

“Jah also. Right, mein frendt.
If ve dot foreign trash admit
Our woes will nefer endt.
I am Americans as you
Und villing to ge-shout
‘Hurray mit red und vite und plue,
Und kiip dose aliens oudt!’”
Ike Diamondstein, the Jew, exclaims:

“Ah, Izzy, ain’t dat grandt!
Ve Yangees haf such nople aims
Und vill togeder standt,
Ve’ve got der goods, ve’re nach’ralized—
Vat hinters us from shouten
‘Americavich is civilzized,
So keep dose aliens outen!’”
Pietro Garibaldi says:

“Here ever-r-ry man is king.
I catch-a da fun, I mak-a da mon,
I like-a da ever-r-yt’ing.
American he gent-a-man—
Watch-a da Dago shout,
‘Sell-a da fruit, shin-a da boot,
Keep-a da alien out!’”
The Irishman vociferates:

“Sure, Mike, it’s sahft as jelly.
I’ll take the shtick and crack the pates
Of ivery foreign Kelly.
If it’s the call o’ polyticks,
Then I’m the la’ad to shout,
‘Down wid th’ Da-agos an’ th’ Micks,
An’ keep th’ aliens out!’”
But covered with ancestral tan,

Beside his wigwam door,
The only real American
Counts idle talk a bore.
“Ugh! Pale-face man he mighty thief.
Much medicine talk about—
It heap too late for Injun chief
To keep-um alien out.”
PATHETIC SELECTIONS IN POETRY
PASSIN’ BY[11]
By Bombardier B. Bumpas
Well, I went an’ joined the army, an’ I done my little bit—
’Ere’s the bloke wot put my pot on; yes, I keeps ’im in my kit—
No, ’e ain’t no proper soft-nose; just the end off on the sly;
’E’s the only one wot got me—but I’ve ’eard ’em passin’ by,
God A’mighty! Yes, I’ve ’eard ’em passin’ by.
Passin’ by; passin’ by; with a little whistlin’ sigh,

“Nearly got you that time, Sonny, just a little bit too high,”
Or a crack like, “Jack, look out there: Keep yer ’ead down, mind yer
eye!”
But they’re gone an’ far behind yer ’fore you’ll ’ear ’em passin’ by.
Yes, I lay from Toosday mornin’ till the Wensday afternoon;

’En the Black Watch took their trenches ’en it woke me from a
swoon.
I was flamin’, nearly mad wi’ thirst an’ pain, an’ fit to cry,
But I cheered ’em as they trampled on me carcus, passin’ by.
God A’mighty! Yes, I cheered ’em as I ’eard ’em passin’ by.
Passin’ by; passin’ by; trippin’, failin’, gettin’ nigh.

Gettin’ nearer to the trenches, ’en you ’eard a Tommy cry:
“Don’t forget the Belgian wimmen, nor the little bairns forbye.”
God! I wouldn’t be a German when them men was passin’ by.
Then they gathered us together an’ they sorted out the worst—
Wot they called the “stretcher cases”—and they ’tended to us first,
They was overworked an’ crowded, an’ the Doc ’ud give a sigh—
“Hopeless, that case”—“that one, also”—speakin’ softly, passin’ by.
God! They watched ’im, silent, suff’rin’, watchin’, hopin’—passin’ by.
Passin’ by; passin’ by; curt command an’ stifled sigh,
For it ain’t no place for drama, an’ a man ’as got ter die;
’En I thought I ’eard a whimper an’ a little soft reply—
“Greater love than this hath no man”—some one speakin’ passin’ by.
So they ships me off to “Blighty,” ’en they sticks me in a ward,

I was short a leg an’ peeper, but they treats me like a lord.
I’d allus bin a lonely bloke, an’ so I used ter lie
An’ watch the fren’s of other men continual passin’ by,
Sisters, children, wives, an’ mothers, everlastin’ passin’ by.
Passin’ by; passin’ by; with a smile or with a sigh;

With their cigarettes an’ matches, flowers or shirt or pipe or tie;
An’ one ’ud sometimes talk an’ speak—I used ter wonder why—
Cos I ain’t no blame Adonis, not ter notice, passin’ by.
I’m thinkin’ if the angels ’ave a Union Jack around,

An’ sticks it somewhere prominent when Gabriel starts to sound,
The people round that flag will be ’most half the hosts on high—
The men who’ve passed, or waits to pass, or now are passin’ by,
Big ’earted men an’ wimmen, white an’ black, a-passin’ by.
Passin’ by; passin’ by; just to keep that flag on high,

An’ all that flag ’as stood for in the days that’s now gone by;
An’ when they pass before, I’m sure ’E’ll listen to their cry,
An’ ’E’ll treat ’em very gentle, an’ forgive ’em, passin’ by.
JEANIE MORRISON
By William Motherwell
I’ve wandered east, I’ve wandered west,

Through mony a weary way;
But never, never can forget
The luve o’ life’s young day!
The fire that’s blawn on Beltanes e’en
May weel be black ’gin Yule;
But blacker fa’ awaits the heart
Where first fond luve grows cule.
O dear, dear Jeanie Morrison,

The thochts o’ bygane years
Still fling their shadows ower my path,
And blind my een wi’ tears:
They blind my een wi’ saut, saut tears,
And sair and sick I pine,
As memory idly summons up
The blithe blinks o’ langsyne.
’Twas then we luvit ilk ither weel,

’Twas then we twa did part;
Sweet time,—sad time! twa bairns at scule,
Twa bairns, and but ae heart!
’Twas then we sat on ae laigh bink,
To leir ilk ither lear;
And tones and looks and smiles were shed,
Remembered evermair.
I wonder, Jeanie, aften yet,

When sitting on that bink,
Cheek touchin’ cheek, loof locked in loof,
What our wee heads could think.
When baith bent doun ower ae braid page,
Wi’ ae buik on our knee,
Thy lips were on thy lesson, but
My lesson was in thee.
O, mind ye how we hung our heads,

How cheeks brent red wi’ shame,
Whene’er the scule-weans, laughin’, said
We cleeked thegither hame?
And mind ye o’ the Saturdays,
(The scule then skail’t at noon,)
When we ran off the speel the braes,—
The broomy braes o’ June?
My head rins round and round about,—
My heart flows like a sea,
As ane by ane the thochts rush back
O’ scule-time and o’ thee.
O mornin’ life! O mornin’ luve!
O lichtsome days and lang,
When hinnied hopes around our hearts
Like summer blossoms sprang!
O, mind ye, luve, how aft we left

The deavin’ dinsome toun,
To wander by the green burnside,
And hear its waters croon?
The simmer leaves hung ower our heads,
The flowers burst round our feet,
And in the gloamin’ o’ the wood
The throssil whusslit sweet;
The throssil whusslit in the wood,

The burn sang to the trees,—
And we, with Nature’s heart in tune,
Concerted harmonies;
And on the knowe abune the burn
For hours thegither sat
In the silentness o’ joy, till baith
Wi’ very gladness grat.
Ay, ay, dear Jeanie Morrison,

Tears trinkled doun your cheek
Like dew-beads on a rose, yet nane
Had ony power to speak!
That was a time, a blessed time,
When hearts were fresh and young,
When freely gushed all feelings forth,
Unsyllabled,—unsung!
I marvel, Jeanie Morrison,

Gin I hae bin to thee
As closely twined wi’ earliest thocts
As ye hae been to me?
O, tell me gin their music fills
Thine ear as it does mine!
O, say gin e’er your heart grows grit
Wi’ dreamings o’ langsyne?
I’ve wandered east, I’ve wandered west,

I’ve borne a weary lot;
But in my wanderings, far or near,
Ye never were forgot.
The fount that first burst frae this heart
Still travels on its way;
And channels deeper, as it rins,
The luv o’ life’s young day.
O dear, dear Jeanie Morrison,

Since we were sindered young
I’ve never seen your face, nor heard
The music o’ your tongue;
But I could hug all wretchedness,
And happy could I dee,
Did I but ken your heart still dreamed
O’ bygone days and me!
CUDDLE DOON
By Alexander Anderson
The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht

Wi’ muckle faught an’ din;
“Oh, try and sleep, ye waukrief rogues,
Your faither’s comin’ in.”
They never heed a word I speak;
I try to gie a froon,
But aye I hap them up an’ cry,
“Oh, bairnies, cuddle doon.”
Wee Jamie wi’ the curly heid—
He aye sleeps next the wa’—
Bangs up an’ cries, “I want a piece;”
The rascal starts them a’.
I rin an’ fetch them pieces, drinks,
They stop awee the soun’,
Then draw the blankets up an’ cry,
“Noo, weanies, cuddle doon.”
But ere five minutes gang, wee Rab

Cries out, frae neath the claes,
“Mither, mak’ Tam gie ower at once,
He’s kittlin’ wi’ his taes.”
The mischief’s in that Tam for tricks,
He’d bother half the toon,
But aye I hap them up and cry,
At length they hear their faither’s fit,

An’ as he steeks the door,
They turn their faces to the wa’,
While Tam pretends to snore.
“Hae a’ the weans been gude?” he asks,
As he pits off his shoon;
“The bairnies, John, are in their beds,
An’ lang since cuddled doon.”
And just afore we bed oorsels,

We look at our wee lambs;
Tam has his airm roun’ wee Rab’s neck,
And Rab his airm round Tam’s.
I lift wee Jamie up the bed,
An’ as I straik each croon,
I whisper, till my heart fills up,
The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht

Wi’ mirth that’s dear to me;
But soon the big warl’s cark an’ care
Will quaten doon their glee.
Yet, come what will to ilka ane,
May He who rules aboon
Aye whisper, though their pows be beld
THE PATRIOT
By Robert Browning
(An Old Story)
It was roses, roses, all the way,

With myrtle mixed in my path like mad:
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
A year ago on this very day.
The air broke into a mist with bells,

The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries.
Had I said, “Good folk, mere noise repels—
But give me your sun from yonder skies!”
They had answered “And afterward, what else?”
Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun

To give it my loving friends to keep!
Naught man could do, have I left undone:
And you see my harvest, what I reap
This very day, now a year is run.
There’s nobody on the house-tops now

Just a palsied few at the windows set;
For the best of the sight is, all allow,
At the Shambles’ Gate—or, better yet,
By the very scaffold’s foot, I trow.
I go in the rain, and, more than needs,

A rope cuts both my wrists behind;
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
For they fling, whoever has a mind,
Stones at me for my year’s misdeeds.
Thus I entered, and thus I go!

In triumphs, people have dropped down dead.
“Paid by the world, what dost thou owe
Me?” God might question; now instead,
’Tis God shall repay: I am safer so.
ANNABEL LEE
By Edgar Allan Poe
It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,

In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee,
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me;
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we;
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
THE LOVER OF ANNABEL LEE

By Edwin D. Casterline
Often I think of the beautiful soul,

The soul of Annabel Lee,
And the man who loved, in the years gone by,
The soul of Annabel Lee—
His beautiful bride, who sleeps by his side,
By the shores of the sounding sea.
They say he was mad, but the world was mad,

More mad and more wrong than he,
For the soul was true that loved the soul
Of the wondrous Annabel Lee,
And the touch of that love was the love that made
The soul of her lover free.
In the days gone by, in the wreck of things,

From the wave of Life’s wide sea,
They were carried beyond by their kinsmen high,
He and his Annabel Lee;
Her heart was pure, too pure for the world
That chills the heart of the free—
And his was a life that chilled with the life
That passed from Annabel Lee.
But the angels are good; in heaven above

They gather the wrecks of the sea,
They gather the gold from the wrecks of love,
And the soul in its purity free—
So this is what they’ve done with the love
Of Poe and his Annabel Lee.
I’ve stood in the room where they lived and loved,

And my soul touched the Life to be,
And I felt the spell of the hidden light
That lived in Annabel Lee;
And I felt the hand of the man she loved,
(That she loved far better than we,)
And down in my soul the double soul
Awoke the God in me.
So down in my dreams I follow the beams

Of Poe and his Annabel Lee,
And deep in the night I see the pure light
That flashes and quivers to me.
Away in the years where the Future stands,
In the world that is to be,
I know that my hands will clasp the hands
Of Poe and his Annabel Lee.
THE BURIED HEART
By Dennar Stewart
“I sleep, but my heart waketh.”
Tread lightly, love, when over my head,

Beneath the daisies lying,
And tenderly press the grassy bed
Where the fallen rose lies dying.
Dreamless I sleep in the quiet ground,

Save when, your foot-fall hearing,
My heart awakes to the old-loved sound
And beats to the step that’s nearing.
Bright shone the moon, last eve, when you came—

Still, dust for dust hath feeling—
The willow-roots whispered low the name
Of him who weeps while kneeling.
The lily-cup holds the falling tears,

The tears you shed above me;
And I know through all these silent years
There’s some one still to love me.
Oh, softly sigh; for I hear the sound

And grieve me o’er your sorrow;
But leave a kiss in the myrtle mound—
I’ll give it back to-morrow.
Whisper me, love, as in moments fled,

While I dream your hand mine taketh;
For the stone speaks false that says, “She’s dead;”
I sleep, but my heart awaketh.
BREAK! BREAK! BREAK!

By Alfred Tennyson
Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman’s boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor-lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;
But, O, for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
BESIDE THE DEAD

By Ina Coolbrith
(One of the finest sonnets in the English language)
It must be sweet, O thou, my dead, to lie

With hands that folded are from every task;
Sealed with the seal of the great mystery,
The lips that nothing answer, nothing ask.
The life-long struggle ended; ended quite
The weariness of patience, and of pain,
And the eyes closed to open not again
On desolate dawn or dreariness of night.
It must be sweet to slumber and forget;
To have the poor tired heart so still at last:
Done with all yearning, done with all regret,
Doubt, fear, hope, sorrow, all forever past:
Past all the hours, or slow of wing or fleet—
It must be sweet, it must be very sweet!
—From “Songs of the Golden Gate,” copyright by Houghton,

Mifflin & Co., and used by kind permission of author and publisher.
ROCKING THE BABY

By Madge Morris Wagner
I hear her rocking the baby—

Her room is just next to mine—
And I fancy I feel the dimpled arms
That round her neck entwine,
As she rocks, and rocks the baby,
In the room just next to mine.
I hear her rocking the baby
Each day when the twilight comes,
And I know there’s a world of blessing and love
In the “baby bye” she hums.
I see the restless fingers
Playing with “mamma’s rings,”
And the sweet little smiling, pouting mouth,
That to hers in kissing clings,
As she rocks and sings to the baby,
And dreams as she rocks and sings.
I hear her rocking the baby,

Slower and slower now,
And I know she is leaving her good-night kiss
On its eyes, and cheek, and brow.
From her rocking, rocking, rocking,
I wonder would she start,
Could she know, through the wall between us,
She is rocking on a heart,
While my empty arms are aching
For a form they may not press,
And my emptier heart is breaking
In its desolate loneliness?
I list to the rocking, rocking,
In the room just next to mine,
And breathe a prayer in silence,
At a mother’s broken shrine,
For the woman who rocks the baby
In the room just next to mine.
—Copyright by Harr Wagner Co., San Francisco, and used by kind

permission of author and publisher.
PUT FLOWERS ON MY GRAVE

By Madge Morris Wagner
When dead, no imposing funeral rite,

Nor line of praise I crave;
But drop your tears upon my face—
Put flowers on my grave.
Close not in narrow wall the place

In which my heart finds rest,
Nor mark with tow’ring monument
The sod above my breast.
Nor carve on gleaming, marble slab

A burning thought or deed.
Or word of love, or praise, or blame,
For stranger eyes to read.
But deep, deep in your heart of hearts,

A tender mem’ry save;
Upon my dead face drop your tears—
Put flowers on my grave.
—Copyright by Harr Wagner Co., San Francisco, and used by kind
permission of author and publisher.
THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES

By Charles Lamb
I have had playmates, I have had companions,

In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing,

Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies;
I loved a love once, fairest among women;

Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her—
I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;

Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,

Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,

Why wert thou not born in my father’s dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces—
How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
I FEEL I’M GROWING AULD, GUDE-WIFE

By James Linen
I feel I’m growing auld, gude-wife—
I feel I’m growing auld;
My steps are frail, my een are bleared,
My pow is unco bauld.
I’ve seen the snaws o’ fourscore years
O’er hill and meadow fa’,
And hinnie! were it no’ for you,
I’d gladly slip awa’.

Frae youth to age I’ve keepit warm
The love that ne’er turned cauld.
I canna bear the dreary thocht
That we maun sindered be;
There’s naething binds my poor auld heart
To earth, gude-wife, but thee.

Life seems to me a wintry waste,
The very sun feels cauld.
Of worldly frien’s ye’ve been to me,
Amang them a’ the best;
Now, I’ll lay down my weary head,
Gude-wife, and be at rest.
DA THIEF[12]
By T. A. Daly
Eef poor man goes

An’ steals a rose
Een Juna-time—
Wan leetla rose—
You gon’ su’pose
Dat dat’s a crime?
Eh! w’at? Den taka look at me,
For here bayfore your eyes you see
Wan thief, dat ees so glad an’ proud
He gona brag of eet out loud!
So moocha good I do, an’ feel,
From dat wan leetle rose I steal,
Dat eef I gon’ to jail to-day
Dey no could tak’ my joy away.
So, leesen! here ees how eet come:
Las’ night w’en I am walkin’ home
From work een hotta ceety street
Ees sudden com’ a smal so sweet

Eet maka heaven een my nose—
I look an’ dere I see da rose!
Not wan, but manny, fine an’ tall,
Dat peep at me above da wall.
So, then, I close my eyes an’ find
Anudder peecture een my mind;
I see a house dat’s small an’ hot
Where many pretta theengs ees not,
Where leetla woman, good an’ true,
Ees work so hard da whole day through,
She’s too wore out, w’en com’s da night,
For smile an’ mak’ da housa bright.
But presto! now I’m home, an’ she

Ees seetin’ on da step weeth me.
Bambino, sleepin’ on her breast,
Ees nevva know more sweeta rest,
An’ nevva was sooch glad su’prise
Like now ees shina from her eyes;
An’ all baycause to-night she wear
Wan leetla rose stuck een her hair.
She ees so please’! Eet mak’ me feel
I shoulda sooner learned to steal!

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The Preface: American Authorship in

the Twentieth Century Ross K.

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The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American

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More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-6117 ISSN 2634-6125 (electronic)

From 1925 to 1988, my great-grandfather William “Bill” Willard went

textual studies. They inspire me with their intellects, editorial expertise,

Lewis-Smith-Reynolds Founders Fellowship; the John F. Kennedy Library

“In The Preface, Ross K. Tangedal examines an often-overlooked textual element

“Ross K. Tangedal’s The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century

“Engaging, theoretically sophisticated, and well written, with fresh insights on

“Tangedal’s study of the evolving nature of twentieth-century American author-

1 Introduction: An Influence on the Public 1

2 A Proper Reading: Willa Cather’s Introductions to My

3 Stepping In or Turning Back: Ring Lardner and Authorial

4 Inhibiting Signposts: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Authorial

5 The Will to Control: Ernest Hemingway and the Action

6 A Safe Distance: Robert Penn Warren’s Introductions

7 Ensuring Presence: Toni Morrison and the Language

8 Coda: Any Given Moment Has Its Value203

Introduction: An Influence on the Public

A piazza must be had.

Sacred altogether to memory, in short, such labours and such lights.

Authorial introductions, prefaces, and forewords have been part of litera-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

the form (nowadays, at least) of a book.”4 Placement, date of publication,

Authorial Prefaces and the Literary Marketplace

Prefaces add value to a book as a marketing and advertising mechanism in

their authorship in prefaces by recounting the trials and tribulations of

require explanation, for the force of book production results in

and West examines the intense attention to commercial interests that

Henry James and Joseph Conrad

unrelated: we only swing apart from the globe—though remaining as exhil-

James’s prefaces feature long, detailed descriptions, psychological detours,

Fitzgerald’s aborted foreword to Taps at Reveille, the beleaguered writer

attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by

channeled Conrad’s preface in her foreword to Beloved when she likened

Conrad’s attention to literary effect and a reader’s senses aims at a dynamic

Conrad’s preface made its impression on Fitzgerald early, and other

The American Reprint Market

“field of struggles,” as writers campaigned for legitimacy by pretending to

accessibility weighed heavily on authors and publishers alike, as did the

crept up to thirty-five cents.”92 And in tracing Willa Cather’s relationship

The previously mentioned Scribner’s Library series would go on to fea-

to look at the construction of middle-brow culture by the Book-of-the-­

The BOMC stamp of approval meant many things; in order to assuage

An Influence on the Public

Chapter 7 examines the forewords that Toni Morrison wrote in her

34. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 17.

I guess I’ve tol’ you all I know

THE VEGETABLE MAN

A Chinaman comes to our house each day

This Chinaman’s name I cannot tell—

An’ w’en it’s time to drive to town

Gee, but I love this Chinaman;

Then up he lifts me way up high,

1 Introduction: An Influence on the Public 1

2 A Proper Reading: Willa Cather’s Introductions to My

3 Stepping In or Turning Back: Ring Lardner and Authorial

4 Inhibiting Signposts: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Authorial

5 The Will to Control: Ernest Hemingway and the Action

6 A Safe Distance: Robert Penn Warren’s Introductions

7 Ensuring Presence: Toni Morrison and the Language

8 Coda: Any Given Moment Has Its Value203

to look at the construction of middle-brow culture by the Book-of-the-