The Fabrication of American Literatureinvestigates a paradox at the heart of American literary history: at the very moment when a national literature began to take shape, many observers worried that it amounted to nothing more than what Edgar Allan Poe described as “one vast perambulating humbug.”¹ Scholarly accounts of nineteenth-century American literature tend to emphasize its authority, particularly its role in converting sociopolitical conflict into cultural coherence. But the period’s readers and writers tell a different story—one of subterfuge, impostures, and plagiarism, in which they likened literature to inflated currency, land bubbles, and quack medicine. This book accordingly...

In March 1837, the booksellers of New York City held a lavish dinner to celebrate the accomplishments of American literature. Seemingly every major literary figure attended the event, including authors William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Washington Irving, and James Kirke Paulding; magazine editors Lewis Gaylord Clark, Evert Duyckinck, and N. P. Willis; and publishers Fletcher Harper and George Palmer Putnam, as well as a host of political, legal, academic, religious, and cultural luminaries. The dinner made headlines in all the major city papers. After some opening remarks and musical numbers, each guest offered a toast—to the magazines, to the...

In the April 1836 issue of theSouthern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe launched into a furious indictment of “the present state of American criticism,” which should by now sound quite familiar. Incensed by the “indiscriminate puffing of good, bad, and indifferent” that had become the critical norm, he charged: “So far from being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original blindly conceived idea, and thus often...

If Frederick Douglass’sNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass(1845), the source for the first epigraph, enjoys the distinction of being the most canonized American slave narrative, perhaps James Williams’sNarrative of James Williams(1838), the source for the second, earns the distinction of being the most disgraced. Whereas Douglass’s narrative launched its author to international fame as an anti-slavery activist, newspaper editor, and statesman, Williams’s narrative, which was discredited as a fraud and hastily withdrawn from publication several months after it appeared, remained a sore spot for the anti-slavery movement for years afterward. But for a brief moment...

In 1849, the prolific anthologizer and industrious puffer Rufus Wilmot Griswold followed the success of his collectionsThe Poets and Poetry of America(1842) andThe Prose Writers of America(1847) withThe Female Poets of America, an expanded version of hisGems from American Female Poets(1844). Griswold’s was one of three popular anthologies of women’s poetry that appeared in quick succession in the late 1840s, signaling an unmistakable shift in the gender composition of the American literary marketplace. In his introduction, Griswold commends women for showing “indications of the infusion of our domestic spirit and temper into literature”...

If there is any antebellum text that seems to exemplify the version of fraudulence I have been trying to challenge in this book, it is surelyThe Confidence-Man: His Masquerade(1857), Herman Melville’s obliquely satirical chronicle of the ruses practiced aboard a Mississippi steamboat over the course of a single April Fool’s Day. Critics have long understood fraudulence in Melville’s final novel to be a topic for literary representation rather than a function of it, exceptional rather than endemic, a rift in the social fabric rather than its warp and weft. Whereas this book has emphasized the ubiquity of antebellum...