Challenging critical orthodoxy in literary studies, Susan M. Ryan puts authors and authorship front and center in her compelling study of nineteenth-century US print culture – not their biographies or inspirations, per se, but rather their reputations. Amidst the radical transformations of print and circulation technologies in the nineteenth century, Ryan argues,

Situating her intervention amidst a diverse list of critical concerns – economic history, literary nationalism, print and reprinting culture, celebrity, just to name a few – Ryan shines a light on crucial elements driving the evolutions of an initially fractured but slowly consolidating US literary marketplace. Her initial propositions – that moral authority circulated as a type of literary property, and that scandalous moments serve as valuable flashpoints at which these concerns become most inconspicuous –shrewdly promise to balance the sober and the risqué. In doing so, Ryan's book yields an archivally rich examination of the wide sweep of nineteenth-century literary culture.

In an apt demonstration of the complexities of the US literary marketplace, Ryan's study oscillates between extended focus on familiar names – James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe – and a plethora of writers whose names and reputations have proven less durable across history. Her readings on the rise, fall, and recuperation of Cooper's reputation serve as an ideal launching point, demonstrating the dynamics of literary property, propriety, and authority in all their permutations in the 1830s and 1840s. In an even glitzier example that concludes the book's case studies, Ryan takes up Harriet Beecher Stowe's assertions against the long-dead Lord Byron and his alleged adulterous/incestuous relationship. Stowe's defense of the also-dead Lady Byron sparked a litany of printed responses throughout the late 1860s, creating a blockbuster scandal that raises a host of questions for current scholars: gender-oriented double standards for proper behavior, the artistic reputations of poetry and prose, aesthetic questions revolving around the quality of written production, and – central to Ryan's study – the fraying link between aesthetic evaluation and moral reputation. While some might assume this link dissolved by the time of the modernist artists and New Critics, Ryan instead traces the resilience of such concerns well into the twenty-first century.

While Cooper and Stowe stand as single authors whose personal foibles contributed just as much to their scandalous falls from popular grace, Ryan also shows how the reputation game was likewise inflected by more contentious politics of that era, best exemplified by the example of African American life-writing and the volatility of moral economies in the advertising and marketing sectors. In this vein, Ryan examines the work of prefaces during the mid-century in a variety of texts, concluding that a large majority of “the era's prefaces registered a fundamental regard for the reader's judgment (or a recognition that such a regard ought to be performed if not felt), not to mention a faith that such judgment could be shaped by the claims of the author or his or her sponsor” (63). An especially illuminating demonstration that such moves did not always work, though, appears in African American life-writing and the vexed problem of white writers’ legitimation of black-authored texts. Countering conventional wisdom, Ryan demonstrates that pretty much all authors, white and black, struggled for secure claims on moral authority. Moreover, through scandal-inflected examples like The History of Mary Prince (1831), Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes (1868), Ryan highlights the legion of debates about books and authors that altogether show how moral authority was ever susceptible to both loss and recuperation, “especially when the authors in question had articles of interest – be they secrets, stirring plots, or clever turns of phrase – to sell” (84). While literary culture might have foregrounded moral authority as the prime concern of criticism and sensibilities, sales and profits ultimately held the bottom line.

With great savvy, Ryan ably walks the line between traditional literary critique and the larger world of nineteenth-century print culture. At the intersections of literary artistry and the market pressures of the publishing world, authorial reputation stands as a fascinating index for understanding the dynamics of both. Deftly reading the many locations of this debate, Ryan expands the scope of literary history with canniness and verve.