Republic of letters

the long version

"While much has been written about intellectual elites in American history from New England Puritans in the seventeenth century to New York Jews in the twentieth, little scholarly attention has been paid to the ongoing history of what Henry Adams called "the literary class of the United States," considered as a distinct community within the national democratic society."--BOOK JACKET. "This class of reading men and women has always constituted no more than a small fraction of the American public, judging by the sales of scholarly and literary books and magazines from the eighteenth century through the twentieth. Yet their influence on the nation's intellectual development - both public and private - continues to be profound. Republic of Letters is a sweeping account of this literary class in the United States, the serious readers and especially writers from Independence to the Civil War."--BOOK JACKET.