Collaborative momentum: the author and the middle man in U.S. literature and culture Matthew 【翻译】

Collaborative momentum: the author and the
middle man in U.S. literature and culture
Matthew Josef Lavin
University of Iowa
Copyright 2012 Matthew J. Lavin
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1352
Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the English Language and Literature Commons
Recommended Citation
Lavin, Matthew Josef. "Collaborative momentum: the author and the middle man in U.S. literature and culture." PhD (Doctor of
Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2012.
https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1352. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.b7allvhp
COLLABORATIVE MOMENTUM:
THE AUTHOR AND THE MIDDLE MAN IN
U.S. LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1890-1940
by
Matthew Josef Lavin
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in English in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2012
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Loren D. Glass
1
ABSTRACT
In the frame introduction to Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), an unnamed
author encounters her childhood friend Jim Burden on a cross-country train. Jim asks the
author why she has never written anything about their mutual friend Ántonia. To answer
Jim’s criticism, she proposes they both write stories about Ántonia, but only Jim honors
the agreement. The rest of the novel is put forth as Jim’s manuscript “substantially” as he
brought it to the author (xii). This scenario is but one of several ways My Ántonia evokes
Cather’s experience ghostwriting S.S. McClure’s My Autobiography (1914) for, just as
the authorial voice in My Ántonia dissolves into Jim’s, Cather had to adopt McClure’s
perspective to write her former employer’s life story. Going further, Cather worked
closely with her book editor Ferris Greenslet and the production editor R.L. Scaife to be
sure Houghton Mifflin would paginate the introduction with roman numerals and thereby
produce the effect of a true authorial preface. The introduction recalls the preface of
McClure’s autobiography, which acknowledged Cather for “cooperation” that
contributed to “the very existence” of his book.
Interpreting My Ántonia and My Autobiography as projects connected by authorial
process, textual allusion, and even typesetting suggests the complicated and elusive
nature of collaborative labor in the literary marketplace, as well as the extent to which
modern literary texts responded to those complexities. Working on a task or project with
a partner or in a group can frustrate, energize or empower those involved, but whatever
feelings it inspires, interactive labor often has a life of its own. This is the idea of
collaborative momentum. My dissertation examines relationships among authors, agents,
editors, publishers, and unofficial “middle men” to argue that supportive and adversarial
cycles of interactive labor in the modern American literary marketplace created the basic
parameters of modern authorship. I show that as professional specialization becomes
more rigid and institutionalized, the literary field paradoxically created new spaces for
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nebulous but crucial cooperative labor. In particular, the effect I call collaborative
momentum facilitated the exchange of economic and symbolic capital. I show that
narratives of the modern period are inextricably invested in corporate and institutional
labor systems that surround them and can be interpreted as rhetorical attempts to reform
and improve those systems.
By analyzing the author’s cultural identity in relation to rising institutional
collaborators of the modern era, I contribute to the steadily growing field of authorship
studies while adding to ongoing scholarly conversations about individual authors and
texts. My chapters analyze the systemic production of literary identity, reciprocal
relationships between editors and authors, the modern apparatus of literary debut, and the
role bibliophilia and book collecting played in the production of The New Negro. I
therefore highlight four paradigmatic examples of interactive labor while simultaneously
emphasizing that collaborative momentum was crucial not only to those with privilege
but also to individuals and groups struggling against inequality. My work helps scholars
see a power structure that granted disproportionate credibility to white men as literary
creators and publishing industry insiders, yet it also shows a modern American literary
culture shaped as much by the experience of marginalized individuals and groups
negotiating a discriminatory publishing industry as it was by aesthetic contests between
popular fiction and high modernism.
Abstract Approved: __________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
__________________________________
Title and Department
__________________________________
Date
COLLABORATIVE MOMENTUM:
THE AUTHOR AND THE MIDDLE MAN IN
U.S. LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1890-1940
by
Matthew Josef Lavin
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in English in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
July 2012
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Loren D. Glass
Copyright by
MATTHEW JOSEF LAVIN
2012
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
___________________________
PH.D. THESIS
____________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Matthew Josef Lavin
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the
Doctor of Philosophy degree in English at the July 2012 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ____________________________________________________
Loren D. Glass, Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________________________
Kathleen Diffley
____________________________________________________
Harilaos Stecopoulos
____________________________________________________
Laura Rigal
____________________________________________________
Kembrew McLeod
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A project on collaborative labor, like any other, owes much to its collaborators. I
would like to extend my gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee—
Kathleen Diffley, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Laura Rigal, Kembrew McLeod—for their
support and assistance with this project. To my dissertation director Loren D. Glass I
want to convey a particular message of thanks, for he was at all times an attentive and
sympathetic mentor who always pushed me to do my best. I want to thank Professor
Garrett Stewart for his encouragement and advice at various stages of the process.
Assistant Professor Miriam Thaggert kindly took time to provide feedback on my work,
and I thank her. To David Depew and Leslie Margolin, co-leaders of the POROI seminar
“Writing for Learned Journals,” I am grateful for all you did to help me advance this
project. I am also grateful to my classmates in all the dissertation workshops in which I
took part. To my friends and cohort in Iowa City, thanks you for everything you did to
help me finish this dissertation.
This project would not have been possible without the participation of Columbia
University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the New York Public Library, the
Newberry Library, the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library, Indian University’s
Lilly Library, and Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, as well as
financial assistance from the Lilly Library’s Everett C. Helm, the University of Iowa’s
Frederick P. W. McDowell Scholarship, and grants from the University of Iowa Graduate
College. I want to thank my home department for other financial assistance that helped
me finish this project: the Frederick F. Seely Fellowship, a post-comprehensive exam
course release, and funding associated with Garrett Stewart’s “Story in Theory”
dissertation seminar.
Stepping outside the boundaries of my home university, I want to thank my
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friends and colleagues who supported this project in more ways than I can name. Several
of my fellow Cather scholars—Florence Amamoto, Tim Bintrim, Evelyn Funda, Richard
Harris, Mark Madigan, Melissa Homestead, Andy Jewell, Anne L. Kaufman, David
Porter, Guy Reynolds, Steve Shively, and Bob Thacker—participated in energizing and
informative conversations, as well as direct feedback and support.
To my friends and loved ones around the country, thank you for providing
couches and futons to sleep on near archives I had hoped to visit. John Ward and Danielle
Palombini, Ed and Emily Forbes, and Sarah Stoeckl and Mark Gully: Your couches, in
particular, I recall with fondness.
Lastly, to Jen Zoble, I want to name you for the benefit of anyone reading these
acknowledgements, but I won’t try to cover in this brief space what you have meant to
me or to my dissertation. We both know, and that’s what matters to me.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................
LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................
CHAPTER I: CHARACTER, PERSONALITY, AND THE EDITOR FIGURE:
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND THE INSTITUTION OF IMAGEBUILDING
..........................................................................................................
Introduction ..........................................................................................................
Reading the Editor as a Member of the Professional-Managerial Class,
as a Personality, and as a Celebrity .....................................................................
The Merciless Blue Pencil and the Trembling Contributor: Figuring the
Editor in the U.S. Marketplace ...........................................................................
Howells as an Unreal Editor ................................................................................
Howells, Harper’s Weekly, and the Question of Editorial Intervention ..............
Personality, Character, and the Editor Figure in A Hazard of New Fortunes ......
Conclusion ............................................................................................................
CHAPTER II: RECIPROCITY AND THE “REAL” AUTHOR: WILLA CATHER
AS S.S. MCCLURE’S GHOSTWRITER ...........................................................
Introduction .........................................................................................................
Reciprocity and Authorship Studies ....................................................................
McClure’s Debt Spiral and My Autobiography ...................................................
Indebtedness and Cather’s Cooperation ...............................................................
Ghostwriting and Collaborative Authorship ......................................................
McClure’s Autobiography by Installments ........................................................
Indebtedness and Reciprocity in My Ántonia and The Professor’s House ........
Conclusion: Owing “Something” to Miss Cather ..............................................
CHAPTER III: DISCOVERY OF THE MONTH: D’ARCY MCNICKLE AND THE
APPARATUS OF LITERARY DEBUT ...........................................................
Introduction ........................................................................................................
McNickle and (Native) American Authorship ...................................................
Breaking into Literature: Anonymity, Credibility, and Market Practices .........
From Commanding Prices to Discovering Talent: The Literary Agent as an
Emerging American Profession .........................................................................
“Don’t Let’s Have Publicity Men”: McNickle, Rae, and the Gendered
Literary Agent ....................................................................................................
Discovering McNickle and Fashioning McNickle as a Discovery ....................

“Musician by Birth and a Printer by Accident”: Cultural Exchange in
The Surrounded ..................................................................................................
Conclusion: Seeking Permission ........................................................................
CHAPTER IV: IRREPRESSIBLE ANTHOLOGIES, COLLECTIBLE
COLLECTIONS: BIBLIOPHILIA AND BOOK COLLECTING
IN THE NEW NEGRO .......................................................................................
Introduction ........................................................................................................
The Harlem Renaissance and the History of the Book ......................................
The New Negro as a Bibliophilic Edition ..........................................................
Making Matter and Material ..............................................................................
Digging up the Past: Book Collecting, Black Bibliophiles, and The New
Negro ..................................................................................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
APPENDIX: WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, EDITOR FIGURE
ACTIVITIES, 1890-1900 ..................................................................................
REFERENCES: .............................................................................................................

LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Free Indirect Discourse in The Surrounded ..................................................... 192
Table 2: Examples of Revisions from Scene Action to Interiority ................................ 197
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1: Thomas Nast, “Too Heavy a Load for the Trade Unions,” Harper’s
Weekly, May 15, 1886, 305. Front Page Illustration ..................................
Figure 1.2: “The Evolution of the Americanized Foreigner,” Harper’s Weekly.
May 15, 1886, 307. Caricature ...................................................................
Figure 2.1: “My Autobiography” Installment 1, McClure’s Magazine, 41.6
(October 1913): 33 ....................................................................................
Figure 2.2: An example of a page pairing an illustration (top left) of McClure
reading as a young boy with a photograph (bottom right) of Knox
College in Galesburg, Illinois. “My Autobiography” Installment 3,
McClure’s Magazine, 41.8 (December 1913): 98-99 ...............................
Figure 2.3: A young McClure reads a book by the light of a small window.
Installment 2, McClure’s Magazine, 41.7 (November 1913): 78 .............
Figure 2.4: McClure and his brother John walk by the light of the moon
between two towns in rural Indiana. My Autobiography Installment
4, McClure’s Magazine 41.9 (January 1914): 107-108 ............................
Figure 4.1: The title page of the 1925 first edition of The New Negro (left) is
markedly different from the title page of the Touchstone edition
(1997), which remains the most widely circulated presentation of
the anthology (right) .................................................................................
Figure 4.2: Reiss’s signature on the frontispiece of The New Negro, to the left
of the title page .…....................................................................................
Figure 4.3: Reiss’s design work for the cover of Opportunity (February 1925) ........
Figure 4.4: Opportunity. Editorial page (August 1925) ..............................................
Figure 4.5: Opportunity. Table of contents page (May 1925) ....................................
Figure 4.6: The 1925 version of Opportunity’s book review department, titled
“Book Shelf” and later “Our Book Shelf.” ...............................................
Figure 4.7: “Book Shelf,” Opportunity (November 1925): 342 .................................
Figure 4.8: “Our Book Shelf” Opportunity (September 1923): 276 ...........................

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Figure 4.9: The cover of the March 1925 special issue of Survey Graphic.
Reiss’s signature S is visible in the photo credit (center right) and
appears in the magazine title. A typographical motif features single
and double triangles in several letterforms ..............................................
Figure 4.10: Reiss’s design of the dust jacket and the book cover for the first
edition of The New Negro .......................................................................
Figure 4.11: Albert and Charles Boni cover design, 1926-1932 .................................
Figure 4.12: Dust jacket for The New Negro, new and revised edition, 1927 ............
Figure 4.13: “Ornamental frames” from Reiss’s You Can Design (1930) .................
Figure 4.14: A book decoration used as a header in The New Negro .........................
Figure 4.15: A book decoration used as a header in The New Negro .........................
Figure 4.16: A book decoration used as a footer in The New Negro ..........................
Figure 4.17: Locke’s “To Certain of Our Phillistines” closes with one of Reiss’s
decorative designs wrapped around an image of a book shelf, the
header associated with Opportunity’s “Book Shelf” feature ..................
Figure 4.18: The New Negro, dedication page ............................................................
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