James T. Fields was the preeminent publisher of American and British literature in the United States at a time when Boston proclaimed itself capital of literary culture in the nation, and American writing was beginning to achieve a wider readership both at home and abroad. He helped substantially to create the reputations of many New England writers, to develop a broader national market for their books, and to make authorship a paying profession. He accomplished these aims through personal charm, cultivating friendships with authors and publicists, a genuine love of literature, an instinct for public taste, astute entrepreneurship, and effective use of a variety of promotional strategies. These strategies included producing attractive-looking books, geographically expanding distribution, increasing advertisement, cultivating close relationships with newspaper editors and journalists, eliciting sympathetic reviews, creating a reputation for generous treatment of authors, and promoting an aura of literary celebrity identified with his publishing house.
For the last decade of his career as a publisher (1861-1871), Fields was also an able editor in chief of the Atlantic Monthly , which was owned by his firm, Ticknor and Fields, and which he brought to the high point of its literary influence.
