Michael Anesko

Michael Anesko is a U.S. literary critic, writer and professor. He is perhaps best known for his studies of 19th-century American novelists, in particular, Henry James and William Dean Howells. He is currently a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and previously served as faculty advisor for the department's undergraduate honors program. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, where he was born, and also in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Educated at Penn State and Harvard, Anesko published in 1986 a study of the economic factors that shaped Henry James' literary career. Titled "Friction with the Market": Henry James and the Profession of Authorship, the book argued against the image of James as a mandarin artist who ignored the dictates of the marketplace. Anesko showed how James actively sought the best prices for his works, used literary agents extensively, and was not afraid to pit one publisher against another. The book also calculated James' income from his writings for each year of his career, and explored how James constructed the New York Edition (1907–1909) of his works. In 1997 Anesko published a complete collection of the correspondence between James and his friend and editor, William Dean Howells. The collection, Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells showed how the two writers' careers developed from their earliest days to eventual prominence in their profession. Again, the focus was on the interaction between professional demands and artistic development. Anesko’s next project, The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Monsieur de l’Aubépine and His Second Empire Critics (Ohio State, 2011), was a collaborative effort, featuring six essays originally published in French periodicals during Hawthorne’s lifetime and never before translated into English. The discovery that Henry James plagiarized some of them in his 1879 biographical study, Hawthorne, made this work even more compelling. The following year, Anesko publish