Hand-Book of American Literature, Historical, Biographical, and Critical (Classic Reprint)

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FB&C Limited, 2018 M02 5 - 334 pages
Excerpt from Hand-Book of American Literature, Historical, Biographical, and Critical

America, however, has few professional authors, excepting editors of newspapers. The best writers have wisely avoided dependence on booksellers, and have been engaged in commercial pursuits. Their poems, essays, and reviews, have been written as recreations, after the cares of banking and bookkeeping. 'authorship, ' says a reviewer,1 'is the least lucrative profession in the United States. Every prudent man avoids it as he does a pestilence. A writer who attempts to live on the manufactures of his imagination, is continually coquetting with starvation.' That this should be the case to a greater extent in America than in England, is mainly owing to the want of international copy right law between the two countries. It is an unavoidable difficulty that American authors must write under the shade of the greatest names in English literature; but in the present system, they must also be discouraged bya competition altogether unfair. The stripling, if we may so speak, has to carry weight in his contest with a giant. In plainer words, the American author, or his publisher, must demand dollars as the price of a new book, while the best English works on the same topic may be offered at the cost of a few cents, because they have been seized and reprinted, without any payment made either'to the writer or the original publisher. The injury thus inflicted on British authors, and other proprietors of copyrights, is indeed serious, yet can hardly be compared with its moral consequences on the other side of the Atlantic. It is a melancholy fact, that so many thousands of persons are found, after repeated remon strance, willing to derive profit, instruction, and entertainment from the labour, enterprise, and commercial risk of neighbours to whom they will yield no remuneration. It is sad that a law as old as the world itself should be evaded or laughed at, Simply because an expanse of water lies between the debtor and his creditor, and the latter, unhappily, has no power to enforce his claims. These remarks fairly represent the views of at least a majority of the best writers in the United States. With reference to the fatal labours of Sir Walter Scott - whose works have afforded delight to many thousands of American readers a reviewer has well expressed the sentiments of many of his more generous countrymen. The passage may be quoted, as a proof that the strongest and most earnest arguments have been urged in the States, as on this side of the water, in opposition to the system commonly styled piracy.

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