Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writing This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field--the history of letters and letter writing--is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties. Methodologically expansive, with intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academics, this book offers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others. Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of African American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Judie Newman, OBE, is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Matthew Pethers is an Associate Professor in American Intellectual and Cultural History at the University of Nottingham.

Professor Celeste-Marie Bernier is Chair of United States and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. She is the author of over 50 books and essays and curator of over 10 US and UK exhibitions. Her forthcoming books include Douglass Family Lives: The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Biography and Collected Works: Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, and The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Selected Writings: A Reader, and Douglass Family Lives: The Biography. She is the recipient of a UK Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship Award for her current project, Sacrifice is Survival: Black Families Fighting for Freedom in the USA and Canada (1732-1936).

Judie Newman, OBE, is a former Chair of the British Association for American Studies, a Founding Fellow of the English Association, the recipient of the Arthur Miller Prize in American Studies, and Professor of American Studies, University of Nottingham.

Matthew Pethers is an Associate Professor in American Intellectual and Cultural History at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on the literary history, print culture, performative arts and scientific thought of eighteenth and nineteenth-century America.