Many of the prefaces written by American writers in the twentieth century catalogue the shifting landscape of a more self-consciously professionalized trade, one fraught with tension and compromise, and influenced by evolving reading publics. With analyses of Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Toni Morrison, Ross K. Tangedal argues that writers used prefaces as a means of expanding and complicating authority over their work and, ultimately, as a way to write about their careers.