Martin Buinicki examines how debates over copyright law in the United States, particularly over the lack of an international copyright law, during the nineteenth century intersected with the business practices and political and artistic beliefs of American authors. He argues that the act of taking out a copyright was more than a mere legal mechanism marking a transition from amateur to professional or artist to businessperson. Taking out a copyright had a profound impact on how audiences viewed authors, how authors perceived their profession, and how they represented individual rights and property ownership within their texts. Unique in the scope of his research, tracking developments from the 1820s through the 1890s, Buinicki brings together research from the American Antiquarian Society, the Harriet Beacher Stowe Center, and the Government and Special Collections at the University of Iowa. Drawing on an array of documents including newspaper editorials, legislative hearings, court decisions, and the public and private writing of James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beacher Stowe, Samuel Clemens, and Emily Dickinson, he demonstrates how authors found themselves in an uneasy opposition to their reading public.