A Twice-Told Tale? Nathaniel Hawthorne, Genre, Sponsorship

Abstract This essay analyzes the gradual commercialization of the book market in the antebellum period. It shows that the reality of book publishing in the 1830s and 1840s has little to do with traditional accounts of the antebellum period developed in the wake of or in opposition to F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance. The essay focuses in particular on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ascent into the literary establishment of the 1840s—based mainly on the promotion of his Twice-Told Tales—and on the attempts to advertise Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin across socially and politically diverse readerships in the South and the North.