| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book. By Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray. (London: Routledge, 2005. xxx, 325 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-415-98984-X. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 0-415-97248-5.)

Histories of antebellum American authorship, according to Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, have tended to be top-heavy and market driven in their approach, focusing largely on a "triumphalist narrative" that traces authors' professionalization within an increasingly remunerative literary market (p. 200). In Literary Dollars and Social Sense, the Zborays put forward an important counternarrative, one that looks at amateur as well as professional authorship and emphasizes the social dimensions of literary production—what they term "social sense." They base this narrative on a wide array of letters and manuscripts left by writer "informants." The sources are rich and varied, encompassing the records left by everyone from seminarians and middle-class women to ex-slaves and frustrated book distributors. The result is an impressive "people's history" that significantly expands the antebellum literary field.

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