This chapter proposes that if scholars accepted the idea that authorship was but one form of creative contribution among many to the production of literary texts, our recognition of the breadth, impact, and influence of African Americans in all kinds of presumptive white literary production would allow us to expand the category “African American literature” considerably. Book history offers empirical and conceptual measures for conceiving “African American literature” as (1) texts read or consumed by African Americans, (2) texts that are about African Americans or that represent the experiences of African Americans, (3) texts to which African Americans deployed trades or skills (such as engraving, typesetting, bookkeeping, shipping) that may not bear the dignity of creative genius, or (4) texts that are edited by African Americans – in addition to and overlapping with (5) the more familiar conception of “African American literature” as texts authored by African Americans. Drawing examples from Phillis Wheatley’s Poems, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, and The Prodigal Daughter with illustrations by the enslaved Peter Fleet, this essay does not dispute the historical significance of African American literary and textual production so much as to think historically and theoretically about why authorship has been such a prominent part of that significance.

Textual studies scholar Robert Trogdon, currently editing the Library of America edition of Hemingway’s 1922–1926 stories and novels, argues that textual criticism of Hemingway has largely been stunted for two decades. The main culprit has been the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which in 1998 added twenty years to the traditional limits of copyright to ninety-five years. As a result, major novels such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are only now approaching public domain. Trogdon argues that in the meantime a surprising amount of textual corruptions have been allowed to pass from edition to edition through Hemingway’s publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and through the Hemingway estate. Detailing several rather striking typos, printer-induced errors, and even dropped lines of dialogue, Trogdon makes the case for a scholarly edition that would not only correct this errata but also restore Hemingway’s original intentions at moments he was restricted by obscenity and libel concerns to alter his manuscripts and typescripts. One such famous moment was Scribner’s refusal to print the word “cocksucker” in A Farewell to Arms; another was Maxwell Perkins’s insistence that he change an attack on F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” to a fictional name.