Abstract
This article outlines the conceptualization and construction of three cohorts of US prose fiction debut writers. These cohorts were established for the purpose of analyzing the literary field in the United States after 1940 within the research project ‘Literary generations and social authority’ at Uppsala University, Sweden. The project charts three cohorts of debut writers from the years 1940, 1955, and 1970. The article describes how the populations of the cohorts were identified, how data were retrieved from various bibliographical and biographical sources, and how hypotheses can be postulated and tested using the data of 1048 writers appearing with works of fiction in book-length form in the United States in the three selected years. It further discusses various methodological challenges that appeared during the course of this process. Although illustrative examples are primarily collected from the 1940 cohort, the same work has been carried out for the other two cohorts.
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