Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860-1900

Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860-1900. By Charles Johanningsmeier. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xii, 284 pp. $54.95, ISBN 0-521-49710-8.)

Although newspaper syndicates distributed fiction to thousands of American newspapers in the late nineteenth century, scholars have virtually ignored this realm of the literary market-perhaps because it seems too much like a market. Syndicates supposedly constrained eminent authors with moralistic standards, disseminated stories by deservedly forgotten writers, and circumscribed local control over the contents of newspapers. Thanks to remarkable research in the syndicates' business records and in newspapers that ran syndicate fiction, Charles Johanningsmeier challenges these stereotypes. Syndicates succeeded only by catering to multiple publics: they widened authors' access to print before mass-market magazines did, enabled local editors to publish original fiction by noted writers, and offered readers across...