{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02392604676454595, 'fraction_numerical': 0.008156606851549755, 'mean_word_length': 5.237288135593221, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. By Christopher P. Wilson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. xviii + 239 pp. $24.00.)

This ambitious social and cultural history of the mass literary marketplace significantly extends our awareness of the paradoxical nature of "progressivism' at the same time that it further complicates the definition of that term. Christopher Wilson's task is to show how the arrival of a progressive publishing elite at the end of the nineteenth century gave impetus to a form of managerial organization that has had a lasting impact on American literary history. According to Wilson, a new breed of publishers came to the fore in the 1890s whose methods of operation fostered the development of a distinctive literary idiom ("popular naturalism") and a distinctively professional attitude toward the literary vocation. This group of professionals deliberately repudiated the reigning view of literature as something thankfully divorced from the struggles of life; they yearned for a more democratic and realistic national literature; and they hoped to reverse the feminization of American culture that had left authorship (as they felt) in the delicate hands of overly fastidious amateurs. If professionalism's assault on gentility was successful, however, its new practitioners were ultimately imprisoned by their own progressive ideology, victimized by the very power they helped to create. The same forces that impelled and shaped the new professionalism also made it difficult to sustain. Within a decade, some of the major converts to the new professional ethic became its loudest critics. Wilson's book traces this pattern of success and disengagement in the careers of four of these writers: Jack London, Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips, and Lincoln Steffens.