The clerk's tale: young men and moral life in nineteenth-century America

Introduction: The Moral Economy of Literacy

Accounting for Character: Diaries and the Moral Practice of Everyday Life

The Coin of Character

Memory and the Commonplace Tradition

Self-Examination and the Devotions of Literacy

Time Is Money: The Value of the Future

Equality of Aspiration

Forms of Feeling: Habit, Leisure, and the Domestication of Literary Taste

The Drill of Nature: Habits of Writing across Time

Letters and the Debts of Family

The Profit of Pleasure

The Art of Conversation

Sentimental Pathos and the Conventions of Intimacy

Popular Philosophy and Democratic Voice: Emerson in the Lecture Hall

Becoming Whole: The Struggle for Composure

Modes of Civic Education: The Public Lecture

The Eloquence of Moral Life

Making Society Out of Books: The New York Mercantile Library and the Enterprise of Reading

Circulating Libraries and the Business of Books

Reading and Breeding for the Profession

The Liberty of Intellect and the Taste for Fiction

The Melancholy of White-Collar Work: Professional Ethos and the Modern Literary Sphere

The Blank Page and the Place of Writing

The Credit of Character, in Parts and Whole

Professional Authorship and the Literary Sphere

Epilogue: Debris from the Business of Living.