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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
Shafquat Towheed
Faculty of Arts
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
Jonathan Rose
Department of History
Drew University
Madison, NJ, USA
As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of
maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the
goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish mono-
graphs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new fron-
tiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its
scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and to
all historical periods from antiquity to the twenty-first century, including
studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book
History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will
experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives,
debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected
subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic
fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiog-
raphy of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book
scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be published in three
formats: single-author monographs; edited collections of essays in single
or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave’s
e-book (EPUB2) ‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals should emphasize the
innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent to either of the two
series editors.
Editorial Board:
Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil
Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA
Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia.
* * *
The Preface
American Authorship in the Twentieth Century
Ross K. Tangedal
Department of English
University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point
Stevens Point, WI, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
All quotations from the letters and personal writings of this study’s case
authors, editors, and others have been transcribed as accurately as possible.
The correspondents’ errors in spelling and punctuation have been retained;
diplomatic transcription has been used in cases of unpublished archival
material. No emendations have been made.
To my wife and daughters:
CJ, Adeline, and Hazel Tangedal.
Acknowledgments
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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
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
“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
“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
xvii
xviii CONTENTS
Index215
CHAPTER 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
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?
“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
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 5
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
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
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 9
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
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 11
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
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
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
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 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
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 17
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
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 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
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
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
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 23
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.
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 25
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.
6. Genette, Paratexts, 196.
7. Genette, Paratexts, 239.
8. Genette, Paratexts, 247.
9. Genette, Paratexts, 263.
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 27
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.
16. Genette, Paratexts, 197.
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.
27. Genette, Paratexts, 2.
28. Genette, Paratexts, 2.
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.
1 INTRODUCTION: AN INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC 29
IMMIGRATION
By Wallace Irwin
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.
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.
JEANIE MORRISON
By William Motherwell
CUDDLE DOON
By Alexander Anderson
THE PATRIOT
By Robert Browning
(An Old Story)
ANNABEL LEE
By Edgar Allan Poe
How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
DA THIEF[12]
By T. A. Daly