THE REPUBLIC OF WORDS
The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925
University Press of New England
October 2011
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Atlantic Monthly became the conscience of the American public and the biggest platform of the nation’s flourishing literature
A record of Atlantic Monthly authors reads like a Who’s Who of American literature. The magazine’s stable of contributors included Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Henry Adams, Frank Norris, Jack London, Henry James, Owen Wister, Robert Frost, and many others.
In Republic of Words, Susan Goodman brilliantly captures this emerging culture of arts, ideas, science, and literature of an America in its adolescence, as filtered through the intersecting lives and words of the best and brightest writers of the day. Through this lens, Goodman examines the life of the magazine from its emergence in 1857 through the 1920s.
Susan Goodman is a professor of English and the H. Fletcher Brown Chair of Humanities at the University of Delaware. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of grants from the NEH and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is the author of six previous books, including biographies of Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells.
