Poems & Short Stories: 4,271 Forum Members: 70,634 Forum Posts:
1,033,546 And over 2 million unique readers monthly! Literature
as a profession has hardly existed in the United States until
very recently. Even now the number of those who support
themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth
of the reading public and the establishment of great magazines,
such as Harper's, the Century, and the Atlantic, have made a
market for intellectual wares which forty years ago would have
seemed a godsend to poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure
men of genius like Hawthorne. About 1840, two Philadelphia
magazines—Godey's Lady's Book and Graham's Monthly—began to pay
their contributors twelve dollars a page, a price then thought
wildly munificent. But the first magazine of the modern type was
Harper's Monthly, founded in 1850. American books have always
suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want of an
international copyright, which has flooded the country with
cheap reprints and translation