At a time when American writers were hardly appreciated at home and not at all in the rest of the world and when American publishers were pirating English and American works to make quick, easy money, George Palmer Putnam made a name and a career for himself and his descendants by promoting American writers at home and abroad. He paid them well for their manuscripts, sometimes at great personal financial risk, and he paid British and other foreign authors for rights to publish their works in the United States. In 1837 he began to draft letters to congressional committees, arguing for an international copyright law. He continued this pursuit through a number of organizations until his death in 1872. At fifteen he began collecting and arranging historical facts; in 1833 he published them in a four-hundred-page work which he revised, updated, and republished for the rest of his life. At thirty-four...