Michael Everton

Areas of interest

I specialize in 19th-century American literature and transatlantic print culture, focusing especially on the legal and ethical aspects of the business of publishing. I’ve held fellowships at the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Bibliographical Society of America, and my articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Legacy, ESQ, Style, and the New England Quarterly, as well as in edited collections, including Edgar Allan Poe in Context. My first book, The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and my edition of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor was published by Broadview in 2016. A new book on the extra-legal informal norms governing Anglo-American publishing from the late-1700s to the mid-1900s, co-authored with Robert Spoo (University of Tulsa College of Law), is well underway, and I’ve also been working recently on postsecularism in late-19th-century America. I am a general editor of the new Broadview Anthology of American Literature.

Education

• BA (Honours), James Madison University (Virginia)
• MA, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill