Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/136

 548 Book Publishers and Publishing houses have been established on both sides of the Atlantic, and existing houses have been enabled to broaden greatly their ap- peal to the reading public. Chief among such firms in Amer- ica are The Macmillan Company, Longmans, Green and Co., G. P. Putnam's Sons, The Oxford University Press, Charles Scribner's Sons, and E. P. Button and Company. But, above all, there has resulted an immense stimulus to the possibilities of American literature through the securing of adequate returns to our authors. The three professional authors already referred to were fortunate in that in two cases they published works of such nature that American superiority of domestic information or a growing feeling of nationalism could be enlisted in their be- half. Brown came before closeness of communication and the latest great success could unite to rob him of even his slender gains, for though Morse and Webster and, later, Barnes, Andrews, Anthon, and Stephens made fortunes through the authorship of school books, belles-lettres were but a sorry crutch indeed until well within the nineteenth century. European, especially British, supplies were too cheap and plentiful. Goodrich, speaking of the time about 1820, says that " it was positively injurious to the commercial credit of a book- seller to undertake American works unless they might be Morse's Geographies, classical books, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, or something of that class." Hawthorne's The Devil in Manuscript has a passage of like tenor ; and as late as 1886 DanaEstes of Boston testified before the Senate Com- mittee on Patents: For two years past though I belong to a publishing house that emits nearly f 1,000,000 worth of books per year, I have absolutely refused to entertain the idea of publishing an American manuscript. I have returned scores, if not hundreds, of manuscripts of American authors, unopened even, simply from the fact that it is impossible to make the books of most American authors pay, unless they are first published and acquire recognition through the columns of the magazines. Against such an adverse current, American authorship was slowly winning its way. In 1829, it is asserted, no author