Prominent US authors, born 1800 to 1950.

This paper examines the lives of US creative writers over time, in terms of geographic location/migration, literary output and age, For this, we have constructed a novel and large data set on the geographic location, and number of major publications, for every year of the lives of 473 US writers listed in Encyclopedia Britannica born between 1800 to 1949. The main findings of interest are: While the number of female authors at the start of the period equaled that of men, the number of male authors outstripped the former, and increasingly so, from 1875 on. The dominant genre was the novel, but its share of the total works listed decreased slowly after 1860 with a corresponding increase for plays. A high degree of migration of the authors is evident, reaching a marked peak in the ages 18 to 30. This applies in all four subperiods looked at, despite the huge differences across these subperiods in terms of geography and socioeconomic circumstances. After 1870 large numbers migrated abroad but over the whole period the main destination was New York City, making it the continuing dominant location for authors, despite the spread of the US to the West coast in the 19th century. This was driven, based on the case studies examined, by income-earning possibilities, mainly through magazines, the social milieu and a concentration of theatres there. A marked increase in creative output took place between the ages of 20 and 35, with no significant fall-off for many decades in the more recent periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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