The generalizations made in Chapters 2 and 3 about the rise of literary professionalism in New England were based on study of the lives and careers of several hundred authors, examined with a special eye to career patterns, according to period (early national versus antebellum), gender, class, and literary stature (“major” versus “minor” authors). This Appendix presents my findings more systematically than has been done so far in this book, by means of an adaptation of some of the more elementary quantitative methods of recent social history, whose unfamiliarity to many literary scholars will, I hope, prove stimulating rather than repellent.

To study authorial careers in the aggregate tells one little about the aesthetic individuality of literary texts. Such study can be valuable, however, in preventing naive judgments about the uniqueness or typicality of the handful of writers and works in each period on which literary scholarship naturally concentrates.