Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States until very recently. Even now the number of those who support themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the reading public and the establishment of great magazines, such as _Harper's_, the _Century_, and the _Atlantic_, have made a market for intellectual wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend to poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius like Hawthorne. About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines--_Godey's Lady's Book_ and _Graham's Monthly_--began to pay their contributors twelve dollars a page, a price then thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine of the modern type was _Harper's Monthly_, founded in 1850. American books have always suffered, and still continue to suffer, from the want of an international copyright, which has flooded the country with cheap reprints and translations of foreign works, with which the domestic product has been unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the first ocean steamers there started up a class of large-paged weeklies in New York and elsewhere, such as _Brother Jonathan_, the _New World_, and the _Corsair_, which furnished their readers with the freshest writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other British celebrities within a fortnight after their appearance in London. This still further restricted the profits of native authors and nearly drove them from the field of periodical literature. By special arrangement the novels of Thackeray and other English writers were printed in _Harper's_ in installments simultaneously with their issue in English periodicals. The _Atlantic_ was the first of our magazines which was founded expressly for the encouragement of home talent, and which had a purely Yankee flavor. Journalism was the profession which naturally attracted men of letters, as having most in common with their chosen work and as giving them a medium, under their own control, through which they could address the public. A few favored scholars, like Prescott, were made independent by the possession of private fortunes. Others, like Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, gave to literature such leisure as they could get in the intervals of an active profession or of college work. Still others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the country and making their modest competence--eked out in Emerson's case by lecturing here and there--suffice for their simple needs, secured themselves freedom from the restraints of any regular calling. But, in default of some such _pou sto_, our men of letters have usually sought the cities and allied themselves with the press. It will be remembered that Lowell started a short-lived magazine on his own account, and that he afterward edited the _Atlantic_ and the _North American_. Also that Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to journalism after the break-up of the Brook Farm Community.