Alvin Kernan in Printing Technology, Letters & Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), p. 7, characterizes the traditional definition as including all "serious and excellent" writing, and the later as being limited to "verbal works of art made by the creative imagination."

The full title is The Railroad in Literature: A Brief Survey of Railroad Fiction, Poetry, Songs, Biography, Essays, Travel, and Drama in the English Language, Particularly Emphasizing its Place in American Literature. Issued by The Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, Inc., Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts.

Freight handling by trucks and by railroad, as well as business travel by plane, have failed to capture the literary imagination, despite their significance in the American economy.

Works published in the first couple of years of a decade which depict contemporary events are usually in the chapter for the previous decade, since we assume a year or so lag between their completion and publication.

This is not to say that no one wrote about these states; just that they are not in our sample. Remember, we do not claim to have included every literary work.

Books (and movies) concerning military aviation during and after each World War are prevalent, but we excluded them from our survey.

Or it was just bad luck that canals never had a Mark Twain to write a "Life on the Erie."

Melville's Moby-Dick does this, but the ship is essentially a floating factory.

Especially in the earlier nineteenth century, physical transportation was the only means of communication - ;messages had to be delivered by hand. The telegraph and later the telephone changed all that, as dramatized by the immediate collapse of the Pony Express once the transcontinental telegraph was completed in 1861. This issue is not often directly raised in American literature.

Hayden White (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 1978) "There is no such thing as a single correct view of any object under study but … there are many correct views, each requiring its own style of representation." p. 78 "Theorists of historiography generally agree that historical narratives contain an irreducible and inexpungeable element of interpretation." p. 51.

See Charles Norris' Bread (1910) for an example of liberal sentiments concerning the place of women in the workplace and in society.