Synopses & Reviews
Thoreau wanted to be both a prophet and a professional, and although his ideals often clashed with the demands of the reading public, he was compelled to respond to a complex and evolving literary marketplace. By focusing on the economic relationship between writer and reader in antebellum America, Steven Fink not only reveals the early professional ambitions of the "hermit of Walden Pond" as conveyed in his writings, but also illuminates the nature of nineteenth-century publishing. The author shows Thoreau to have been, from his first publications, sensitive to questions of audience and literary markets, and traces his evolving professionalism through the various trials and errors of his career, demonstrating how these professional considerations profoundly shaped his writings. This book concentrates on Thoreau's development in the pre-Walden years, when he wrote moral essays, literary criticism, reform essays, nature sketches, and travel narratives for a full range of literary media--from popular magazines to publications for the intellectual elite. Relying on historical and biographical research, Fink offers new information on the public response to Thoreau's works and on Thoreau's own sense of his life as a writer, and provides important readings of individual texts.
Review
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1992
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [287]-315) and index.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | |
| List of Abbreviations | |
| Introduction | 3 |
Pt. I | New Views | |
Ch. 1 | "That Public Ground between God and Conscience": Thoreau's Apprenticeship and the Early Dial | 11 |
Ch. 2 | "The Value of a Fact": The Dial under Emerson and the "Natural History of Massachusetts" | 38 |
Pt. II | The Wider World | |
Ch. 3 | "The Poet Active": Writing beyond the Dial | 61 |
Ch. 4 | "Now Goes Our Brave Youth": Thoreau in New York | 86 |
Pt. III | A Strategic Retreat | |
Ch. 5 | "Favored by the Gods": Writing from Walden Pond | 125 |
Ch. 6 | "Contact! Contact!": The Publication of "Ktaadn" | 150 |
Pt. IV | Practical and Popular Influence | |
Ch. 7 | "Only as It Serves as an Advertisement of Me": Lecturing on Walden, Looking for a Publisher | 191 |
Ch. 8 | "Flowing to Higher Levels": A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers | 216 |
Ch. 9 | "Some Interior Shoot": Thoreau's Career after 1850 | 254 |
| Notes | 287 |
| Index | 317 |