Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/127

The Increasing Demand 539 of dangerous discussion. There was great diflficulty in ob- taining paper during and just before the war, and as pamphlets were too expensive, not to say books, broadsides became the prevaiUng form of pubHcation . Rags were regularly advertised for by the publishers. Yet although American publishing bears eloquent witness to the all-obsessing nature of the stem struggle, coming as it did at a time when our publishing facili- ties were not materially far enough advanced to absorb the blow, nevertheless the love of hterature was not dead. The opening years of the Revolution saw, in addition to Bracken- ridge,' Trumbull,^ Freneau,^ and Hopkinson," who of course would be issued regardless of conditions, works issued of Alsop, ' Defoe, Falconer, Garrick, Milton, Pope, Sterne, Thomson, Voltaire, and Young. Back of all publication, and in the final analysis dominating it, stands of course the psychology of the reading public. And especially as we approach the present century does it become more and more evident that the great publisher must be a psychological expert in public literary tastes and interests. Somewhere, then, about the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century American publishers began to sense the fact that the people of the country, having won some slight measure of victory over the imperious necessities of mere material exist- ence, and having to some degree slowly broadened down to a mellowness where life was no longer solely a struggle with the fiesh and the devil, were beginning to demand real literature. After the Revolution, which had temporarily dammed back this current of our culture, the recovery, considering the prostration of our material resources, was little short of marvellous. Now for the first time in our bibliographies it becomes necessary to divide our literary output into genres. Evans, for instance, for the period from 1786 to 1789 gives drama, 38; fables, 8; fiction, 43; juvenile, 104; poetry, 130; and miscellany, 12. Probably the best domestic seller of 1786 was James Buck- land's ^n Account of the Discovery of a Hermit, Who Lived about 200 Years in a Cave at the Foot of a Hill, 7J Days Journey ' See Book II, Chap. vi. " See Book I, Chap. ix. s lUd. 4 See Book I, Chap, ix, and Book II, Chap. 11. s See Book I, Chap. IX.