Authors: A disconnected profession

Abstract

H ow often do authors meet with each other and under what circumstances? How extensive are their contacts with their professional counterparts? And does the extent of "professional connection" systematically differ among various types of authors? These are the questions that we will address here in seeking to describe the social organization among contemporary authors. The task of freelance writing is almost inevitably a solitary pursuit, perhaps prompting Ernest Hemingway to remark, "Writing is the loneliest trade "1 While the practice of the trade may be carried out in relative social isolation, writers are not necessarily social isolates. Many stories, some undoubtedly apocryphal, celebrate the comings and goings of certain prominent writers--drinking together at favorite hangouts, summering at particular resorts, meeting at promotional bashes or award ceremonies, coming together in workshops. These accounts anecdotally suggest that not only are authors sociable, but they are sociable with others within the writers' ranks--or at least that s o m e authors are. However, such astute observers of the writing scene as Bellow (1977), Cowley (1954), and Coser et al. (1982) tell us, almost as "common wisdom," that American authors are a highly disconnected lot with little contact with each other. These commentators necessarily rely on their impressionistic sense of matters, not systematic evidence; but typically the point of comparison is some intense "literary society'--exemplified by the coffee houses and salons of London or Paris in past eras--presumed to characterize cultural life in certain European societies. Commenting on the American "literary world" and his own experience, Bellow (1977, p. 182) writes, "no tea at Gertrude Stein's, no Closerie de Lilas, no Bloomsbury evenings, no charming and wicked encounters between George Moore and W. B. Yea ts . . . I can't say I miss them, because I never knew anything like them" Quite clearly, such prominent and densely linked networks of authors have existed in England and on the Continent among a literary el i te--and perhaps did so in early twentieth-century America. These circles seem to have been conduits for the diffusion of ideas; they also provided social support for the innovative endeavor while creating and defining broad patterns of cultural "taste" Yet we really do not know how extensive literary circles were or are now, nor to what extent nonelite authors were or are involved in them or tied to each other. The social organization of authors as a whole may have been and still be quite different from that of the elite. Indeed, it would be surprising if this were not so,