Communication in The Americas and their Influence

In addition to religious publications, a major type of book emerging from the colonial press was the almanac. Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (1732), blending self-help advice with humor, became a best-seller. Book production was centered at first in Boston and Cambridge, but by the early eighteenth century Philadelphia (where Franklin was based) became a major player. Censorship limited the variety of books that could be published, and there was no enforcement of copyright. By the early nineteenth century the industry had diversified its output, and the burgeoning commercial center of the new nation, New York, had become the center of publishing as well.

In the United States, modern book publishing—featuring a diverse general list and home-grown authors—began in 1817, when James and John Harper established the firm bearing their name. They were soon followed by John Wiley, who took over his father's fledgling business in 1826. The house scored a major coup when it signed a then-unknown James Fenimore Cooper—later referred to as "America's Sir Walter Scott"—who went on to become the country's first literary celebrity. In 1840 Wiley went into partnership with George Putnam, who would eventually leave to establish his own firm in 1849. In 1846 Wiley and Putnam published Herman Melville's first novel, Typee, which in turn passed to Harper's in 1849. (Melville was never a big seller during his lifetime.)

Harper's went on to become the largest publisher in America, earning considerable sums from pirating English favorites including the Bröntes, Thackeray, and Dickens. The house also produced textbooks and a magazine that bore its name, which emerged as the medium to which many people turned for Civil War coverage, especially owing to impressive visuals (woodcut illustrations). Other well-known firms that emerged during this time include Appleton (1831), Scribner's (1846), and D. Van Nostrand (1848). However, it was a small Boston publisher, John P. Jewett, working in the shadow of Little, Brown (1847) and Houghton (1848), who scored the century's biggest publishing coup. After Phillips, Sampson and Company (1850) turned down the novel rights to Harriet Beecher Stowe's serialized (in the National Era) story Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jewett published it in 1852. The book became the biggest-selling hardcover in nineteenth-century America and had an enormous impact on the (northern) public's attitude toward slavery and its rising antipathy toward the South.

The second half of the century saw the country secure, both in its publishing industry and in the literary ability of American authors. The old houses grew and new ones sprang up as reading tastes diversified. Harper's even signed the once-pirated Dickens in 1867. In 1895, during a decade that saw a boom in American fiction publishing, Harper's secured the rights to sixteen books by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). Twain and several other prominent writers successfully promoted their work through a series of highly entertaining public readings—performances, in the case of Twain—that recaptured, at least in spirit, the oral tradition of storytelling that had been so integral to the cultural life of both Native Americans and African-Americans.