This collection of essays contributes to the socio-institutional study of literary culture by looking at how writers, artists, and scholars in the United States assert their intellectual authority at various moments within the shifting cultural marketplace between 1790 and 1900. What do we mean when we speak of intellectual authority? How does the intellectual capability to make a difference relate to the nineteenth-century formation and differentiation of literary fields? How do literary intellectuals and their media partake in the economies of symbolic prestige that circulate between the local and transatlantic markets and institutions of Europe and the United States? The authors in this volume wish to inquire into the rituals of consecration and contestation that shaped the production of intellectual authority in the long nineteenth-century.