Reviewed by: Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980 Suzanne del Gizzo Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980. By Loren Daniel Glass. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Paperback, 242 pp. $20.00 Authors Inc. by Loren Glass is an ambitious book that provocatively and deftly tackles the question of literary celebrity in modern America. Glass's project emerges from the convergence of several recent but distinct trends in literary scholarship: the rapidly expanding area of cultural studies known as celebrity studies, the on-going critical effort to recover the complexity of the relationship between modernism and mass culture, and the extension of gender studies into an active engagement with questions of masculinity. In Authors Inc., Glass yokes these different lines of study together in order to argue that "celebrity authorship in the United States was a resolutely historical phenomenon that began with the rise of mass culture and the first crisis in masculinity and ended with the emergence of postmodernity and the second crisis of masculinity in the late twentieth century" (23). In recent years, there has been a spate of academic work on celebrity, including Richard Dyer's Stars, David Marshall's Celebrity and Power, and Joshua Gamson's Claims to Fame, but not one of these studies has focused on literary celebrity. The reason for this oversight, according to Glass, is that [End Page 117] writers, unlike movie or TV stars, "have sustained an ethos of individual creative production over and against the rise of [the] cultural industries in which they nevertheless have had to participate" (4). In other words, agency—specifically the complicity with or resistance to celebrity—is a thornier issue when it comes to writers. Glass attempts to address this problem of agency in his decision to work primarily with autobiographical texts. Using a capacious definition of autobiography based on Philippe Lejeune's notion of the "autobiographical pact," Glass claims that such texts mark the point of contact between the public and the private life of an author and thus reveal his or her attempt "to reappropriate the public discourse that determines the authorial career" (7). This emphasis on autobiographical texts allows Glass to explore authors' anxieties about the way their identities and work circulate in public spaces against the social and cultural institutions and formations associated with modern celebrity. The most compelling part of Glass's thesis, however, is his assertion that literary celebrity is fundamentally linked to masculinity. He anchors this claim primarily on the work of Andreas Huyssen, whose article "Mass Culture as Woman"1 made it a truism among scholars in the field that high modernism with its emphasis on stable ego/textual boundaries and its reliance on a restricted field of cultural production was gendered male, while mass culture with its tropes of crowds and floods and its association with the seemingly inscrutable logic of mass consumption was gendered female. Launching his argument from this foundational understanding of the gendered dynamic between modernism and mass culture, Glass argues that masculinity and masculine posturing became a kind of armor in which celebrity authors steeled themselves from the corrosive effects of a feminized mass audience with its mob-like fluctuations in preference and its irrational assessments of value. For Glass, literary celebrity in the United States "super-sized" the preoccupation with masculinity that was already stitched into the rhetoric of the modernism/mass culture debate. Although the chapters are ordered chronologically and work together to develop Glass's claim about the necessarily masculine nature of modern literary celebrity, each of the six chapters also presents a self-contained argument generally focused on one literary figure. Glass begins by documenting the rise of a mass market for literature, and the challenges this new market posed for traditional notions of literary production and authorial identity. Artfully juxtaposing the contemporaneous autobiographies of Henry Adams, who [End Page 118] was an ancestor of a founding father and a literary elitist, and Edward Bok, an immigrant who rose to fame by editing the Ladies Home Journal, Glass reveals the way gender is woven into discussions of literary production and consumption. He then proceeds to explore writers...