In the antebellum United States, labor and literature were so entangled with each other that one cannot be understood without consideration of the other. These were the years of America's celebrated "literary declaration of independence" from the European past, of that extraordinary outburst of creativity known later as the American "renaissance." Yet, these were also the years when Thomas Jefferson's dream of an America populated by independent yeoman farmers yielded to the inexorable pressures of industrialization, to its concomitant divisions of labor, and to the drawing of sharp class distinctions based on the different kinds of labor men and women performed. Industrialism not only threatened some of the traditional republican values espoused by Jefferson and many others but called into question the work ethic itself: After all, if industrialism was transforming the work many Americans performed into mindless drudgery, how could these...