American literary output from early 19th to late 20th century: Age, gender and spatial dimensions

This paper examines the evolution of US literary output in terms of four factors relating to its main authors: their geographic location and migration patterns over almost two centuries, the links between their literary output and age, variations by genre and gender, and motivations for location, especially in New York.For this, we have constructed a yearly data set on the 481US writers listed in Encyclopedia Britannicaborn between 1800 to 1949.The dominance of New England in the earlier period and thereafter New York as a location for writers is highlighted, reflecting major in-movement of writers to the city in certain periods. It is also shown that migration is strongly linked to ageand that such migrationresulted in authors in most casesbeing located muchnearer to other authors. It is alsothe casethat there is a marked jump in literary output at certain ages, thesameagesaswhen most movement of authors takes place. The decline in literary output with advancing age isnot marked in the more recent subperiods.No clear impact on the level of literary output is detected from living in New York.