Nineteenth-Centuery American Writers on Writing features essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven leading authors of the century. Each had to figure out what it meant to be a writer within the context of the relatively new nation they spoke to, for, and about. Each meditated on craft and style and form, as writers do. And each confronted the question of how to define themselves as writers--and their literature as "American"--during a century rocked by the industrial revolution, the Civil War, and the emergence of a global politic.