This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.

Table of Contents

• Prologue: Networks of Nineteenth-Century Letter-Writing - Elizabeth Hewitt
• Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing - Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, and Matthew Pethers
• Part I: Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts
• 1. From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens, and the Materiality of Letter-Writing - Graham Thompson
• 2. The Business of Letter-Writing - Michael Zakim
• 3. Name and Address: Letters and Mass Mailing in Nineteenth-Century America - David M. Henkin
• 4. Paper Evidence: Handwriting, Print, Letters, and the Law - Christopher A. Hunter
• 5. Nineteenth-Century American Science and the Decline of Letters - Robin Vandome
• 6. The Means and the End: Letters and the Work of History - Alea Henle
• 7. Letters, Telegrams, News - Richard R. John
• 8. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth-Century America - Matthew Pethers
• 9. The Spider and the Dumpling: Threatening Letters in Nineteenth-Century America - Leon Jackson
• Part II: Travel, Migration, and Dislocation
• 10. Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now - William Merrill Decker
• 11. Working Away, Writing Home - David M. Stewart
• 12. Letters from America: Themes and Methods in the Study of Irish Emigrant Correspondence - Emma Moreton
• 13. The Usual Problems: Sickness, Distance, and Failure to Acculturate in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Letters - Janet Floyd
• 14. Indigenous Epistolarity in the Nineteenth Century - Phillip H. Round
• 15. Dueling Epistles: Enslaved Letter-Writers and the Discourse of (Dis)Honor - Ben Schiller
• 16. Home and Belonging in the Letters of Sarah Hicks Williams - Rebecca J. Fraser
• 17. ‘An Oblique Place’: Letters in the Civil War - Rebecca Weir
• 18. Social Action in Cross-Regional Letter-Writing: Ednah Cheney's Correspondence with Postbellum Teachers in the U.S. South - Sarah R. Robbins
• Part III: Politics, Reform, and Intellectual Life
• 19. Founding Friendship: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the American Experiment in Republican Government, 1812-26 - Peter S. Onuf
• 20. Corresponding Natures: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Letters - David Greenham
• 21. ‘This Epistolary Medium’: Friendship and Civil Society in Margaret Fuller's Private Letters - Magdalena Nerio
• 22. ‘Will You live?’: Thoreau's Philosophical Letters - Michael Jonik
• 23. ‘Frederick Douglass, the Freeman’ and ‘Frederick Bailey, the Slave’: Private versus Public Acts and Arts of Letter-Writing in Frederick Douglass's Pre-Civil-War Correspondence - Celeste-Marie Bernier
• 24. Old Master Letters and Letters from the Old World: Julia Griffiths and the Uses of Correspondence in Frederick Douglass's Newspapers - Sarah Meer
• 25. Letters from ‘Linda Brent’: Harriet Jacobs and the Work of Emancipation - Fionnghuala Sweeney
• 26. Abraham Lincoln: The Man through His Letters - Robert Bray
• 27. Between Science and Aesthetics: The Letters of William James - Martin Halliwell
• 28. ‘My Dear Dr.’: American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientific Correspondence - Tina Gianquitto
• 29. ‘A Chain of Correspondence’: Social Activism and Civic Values in the Letters of Lydia Sigourney - Elizabeth A. Petrino
• 30. A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Epistles - Judith A. Allen
• 31. ‘The Stamp of Truth’: Historiographical Dissent and Its Limits in the Letters of Jared Sparks - Eileen Ka-May Cheng
• 32. Defenses and Masks and Poses in Henry Adams’ Letters - John C. Orr
• Part IV: Literary Culture
• 33. The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown: Epistolary Performance and New Paths for Scholarship - Philip Barnard
• 34. Publishing and Public Affairs in the Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper - Lance Schachterle
• 35. The Transatlantic Village: The Rise and Fall of the Epistolary Friendship of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Mary Russell Mitford - Melissa J. Homestead
• 36. The Literary Professional and the Country Gentleman: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke - Kevin J. Hayes
• 37. Melville's Flummery - Wyn Kelley
• 38. The Epistolary Romance and Rivalry of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne - Patricia Dunlavy Valenti
• 39. Co-Responding with Walt Whitman - Ed Folsom
• 40. ‘Rare Sparkles of Light’: Intimacy and Distance in Emily Dickinson's Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson - Linda Freedman
• 41. ‘Soul Friends’: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron in Correspondence - Beth L. Lueck
• 42. Louisa May Alcott's Family Post Box - Judie Newman
• 43. Profanities, Indecencies, and Theologies: Mark Twain's Letters to Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, and Henry Rogers - Peter Messent
• 44. Charles W. Chesnutt's Letters: ‘The Vaguely Defined Line Where Races Meet’ - Maria Orban
• 45. Sarah Orne Jewett's Foreign Correspondence - Mark Storey
• 46. ‘Too Intimate to Publish, Too Rare to Suppress’: Henry James in His Letters - Michael Anesko
• 47. ‘Ill Correspondent’: Stephen Crane's Trouble with Letters - John Fagg
• Notes on Contributors