The Royall Coach: Sketching the Nation.

TRAVELERS' writings; AMERICAN authors; STAGECOACHES; ROYALL, Anne Newport, 1769-1854; HISTORY of travel writing; 19TH century American literature; AMERICAN women's writings

This article elucidates the extent to which the stagecoach created new opportunities for aspiring authors and underwrote the emergence of Jacksonian-era literary culture. Travel writers like Anne Newport Royall built their publication and distribution practices around the mobility of the stagecoach industry, which operated under a government subsidy to deliver the mail. Between 1826 and 1831, Royall travelled by stagecoach throughout the United States both to find stories to fill her travel books and to sell her books to far-flung audiences. The stagecoach network itself could be said to have created a demand for new kinds of writing. By incorporating far-flung localities into a single national system, the stagecoach network contributed to a growing curiosity about distant people and places in the new nation, a curiosity that contributed to the proliferation of travel sketches in books and magazines. In effect, the stagecoach network at once sparked a hunger for representations of the United States and a means to satisfy it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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