Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
Seriously???? Do you think that books started with the BPH's?
Thomas Paine --- Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason (all well- written, short, very historically significant, The Age of Reason less so to its own time)
Frederick Douglass -- any of his autobiographies
Henry David Thoreau -- Walden (again, one of the all-time classics; once you finish reading it, read Herman Melville's short story "The Apple-Tree Table") -OR- A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (overlooked, but another classic)
Richard Henry Dana -- Two Years Before the Mast (good, but even better as preparation for reading Melville)
Margaret Fuller -- Woman in the Nineteenth Century (a feminist book by the foremost U.S. woman intellectual; she was also a Transcendentalist)
Sojourner Truth -- Narrative of Sojourner Truth (slave narrative)
Mark Twain -- Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, Old Times on the Mississippi (Although some of these are longer than the others, they may be the most enjoyable for you.)
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur -- Letters from an American Farmer (unjustly overlooked)
Henry James -- Hawthorne (criticism/biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Harriet Jacobs -- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (slave narrative)
Mary Rowlandson -- A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (This is pretty short, but I guess it's about as short as some of Thomas Paine's stuff. This is interesting to read and very historically significant.)
Olaudah Equiano -- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (slave narrative)
Cotton Mather -- Wonders of the Invisible World (Mather argues that Satan walks among us as ghosts, witches, and demons, often in human garb; this work helped fuel the witch hunts)
Benjamin Franklin -- Autobiography (Even though it's all lies, it's very significant.) -OR- Poor Richard's Almanack
Oh... And most of them are available right here on MobileRead.
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Okay - you got me on that
. Don't post in the midst of tax time.
The point is not , can history and qualitynonfiction be published in the absence off the BPHs- the question is , how likely is it that quality nonfiction and biography will be published in the absence of, oR the crippling of the BPHS. Inote that you didnt respond to my second query.
The fact is that good history and biogrphy are rather thin on the ground at Smashwords.
Sure you can make an impressive list of quality nonfiction and history writing over the course of centuries. But these days it's coming from the BPHS . It ain't coming Fromm the self publishers.