English Language and Literature Commons^™

"Every Body Sees The Theft": Fanny Fern And Literary Proprietorship In Antebellum America, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau complained of what he believed to be the provincial reading habits of his Concord neighbors: "If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspapers in the world at once?- to not be sucking the pap of 'neutral family' papers, or browsing the 'Olive Branches' here in New England.” While Thoreau's own Week on the Concord and Merrinlack Rivers failed to find a national audience, he misreads (or willfully misrepresents) the potential geographic reach of authors who published in the Olive Branch, the weekly paper that …