Republic of words : the Atlantic monthly and its writers, 1857-1925 / Susan Goodman

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface -- Beginnings. Forging traditions: James Russell Lowell -- John Brown's war -- The Battle of the Hundred Pines -- Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- Dueling visions: Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray -- Reconstructions: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Jr. -- James and Annie Fields: the business of hospitality -- Harriet Beecher Stowe tests the magazine -- Battle of the books -- Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and a changing magazine -- William Dean Howells: democracy at work -- John Greenleaf Whittier's seventieth birthday -- Bret Harte to the lions -- Straddling The Atlantic: Henry James -- Clarence King, scholar-adventurer -- The gilded eighties -- Thomas Bailey Aldrich, guardian at the gate -- In the wake of Louis Agassiz -- A magazine in decline and ascension -- From the far East to Mars: Lafcadio Hearn and Percival Lowell -- Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois -- Progressive politics under Walter Hines page -- From sea to shining sea -- A state of uncertainty -- Ellery Sedgwick: politics and poets -- A window on the war: Atlantic writers and World War I -- America's War -- The turbulent Twenties, I -- -- The turbulent Twenties, II -- Across the decades.

A record of Atlantic Monthly authors reads like a Who's Who of American literature. The magazine's stable of contributors included Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Henry Adams, Frank Norris, Jack London, Henry James, Owen Wister, Robert Frost, and many others. In Republic of Words, Susan Goodman brilliantly captures this emerging culture of arts, ideas, science, and literature of an America in its adolescence, as filtered through the intersecting lives and words of the best and brightest writers of the day. Through this lens, Goodman examines the life of the magazine from its emergence in 1857 through the 1920s.