The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Historians and critics of antebellum literary economics will hail the arrival of The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing by Michael Everton. In a readable and spirited prose style saturated with historical specificity, Everton provides a broad and deep appreciation of the diverse voices of "the grand chorus of complaint" at this crucial phase in the development of American publishing, a period remarkable for its lack of codified law governing business practice in a culture obsessed with morality. The table is now set for future research into precisely which tactical shifts occurred in the trade that were accepted among publishers and which were rejected, and which grew to define the industry, particularly in the context of such long-term author-publisher relationships as Bonner-Fern, Duyckinck-Meville, and Murray-Irving. [...]literary biographers, and indeed biographers of editors and publishers, have much to learn from this landmark study.