Chapter 20 - Authors on the Campaign Trail: “We Are Politicians Now”

Summary

Nineteenth-century American authors often sought diplomatic political appointments because these were understood to be comfortable positions that provided financial security, cultural enrichment, and leisure time for writing. One popular strategy for obtaining such an appointment was to write a campaign biography for a successful politician. Though overlooked today, the genre of the campaign biography, which dates from the 1820s, was important for American novelists such as William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lew Wallace, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In fact, Hawthorne’s 1852 Life of Franklin Pierce irritated his contemporaries (including Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville) and later became an important touchstone for literary scholars interested in the intersection of literary arts and national politics. Paying special attention to Hawthorne’s work, this chapter argues that, rather than characterize the campaign biography as an inartistic piece of propaganda written merely to secure a political appointment, we should instead understand it as a node in a wider network of literary and political narrative nonfiction genres – also including histories, travelogues, newspaper journalism, and slave narratives.