Collaborators in Literary America, 1870-1920 argues that the collaborative novels of the 19th and 20th centuries were singularly instrumental to the evolving nature of authorship and its relationship to the modern literary marketplace. More than just a gimmick, these novels (there were several hundred published at the turn of the century), were a serious attempt to work through the anxieties authors faced in an ever more competitive and businesslike market. Deeply contextualized within book history and labor practices, the issues surrounding collaborative production of such idiosyncratic writers as Henry James, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells, demonstrate that in union there was strength.