The Preface, 1st ed. 2021
American Authorship in the Twentieth Century
New Directions in Book History Series

Building on insights from the fields of textual criticism, bibliography, narratology, authorship studies, and book history, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century examines the role that prefaces played in the development of professional authorship in America. Many of the prefaces written by American writers in the twentieth century catalogue the shifting landscape of a more self-consciously professionalized trade, one fraught with tension and compromise, and influenced by evolving reading publics. With analyses of Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison, Ross K. Tangedal argues that writers used prefaces as a means of expanding and complicating authority over their work and, ultimately, as a way to write about their careers. Tangedal?s approach offers a new way of examining American writers in the evolving literary marketplace of the twentieth century.

Ross K. Tangedal is Assistant Professor of English and director of the Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. He is the co-editor of Editing the Harlem Renaissance and Michigan Salvage: Bonnie Jo Campbell and the American Midwest.

Argues that writers shape their public personae and alter the reading of their work through prefaces

Examines primary source materials ranging from archival manuscripts to correspondence and first editions

Offers insights into twentieth-century print culture and the literary marketplace