Preface

Building on insights from the fields of textual criticism, bibliography, narratology, authorship studies, and book history,ThePreface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Centuryexamines the role thatprefaces played in the development of professional authorship in America. Many of theprefaces written by American writers in the twentieth century catalogue the shifting landscape of a more self-consciously professionalized trade, one fraught with tension and compromise, and influenced by evolving reading publics. With analyses of Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison, Ross K. Tangedal argues that writers usedprefaces as a means of expanding and complicating authority over their work and, ultimately, as a way to write about their careers. Tangedal's approach offers a new way of examining American writers in the evolving literary marketplace of the twentieth century.