Publisher:
Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin, Trinity Research in Social Sciences (TRiSS), Dublin
Abstract:
It has been argued that economic circumstances can partly shape and influence literature. This is so because creative writers must operate within, and are influenced by, the society to which they belong, and by the markets to which they sell their work.This paper examines the evolution of US literary output in terms of four factors that might impinge in this way on the work of creative writers, namely geography, migration, age and urban milieu. For this, we have constructed a novel and large data set on the geographic location, and number of major publications, for every year of the lives of 481 US writers listed in Encyclopedia Britannicaborn between 1800 to 1949.