My dissertation, “American Paratexts,” studies the frontispieces, prefaces, introductions, postscripts, footnotes and endnotes that accompany nineteenth-century books. From Washington Irving’s elaborate newspaper hoax promoting History of New York, to John Neal’s frontispiece tomfoolery and sixty-page prefaces, to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s serious reflections about dialect and storytelling in The Custom House, authors in the early republic took every opportunity to engage readers by using “Dear Reader” moments of direct address and paratextual experimentation. It is in these parts of their books that authors speak most often about their own participation in a transatlantic literary culture. That participation made them highly self-conscious about three topics much discussed in the early republic: the status, position and responsibilities of authors; the opportunities to create, hold, and manipulate communities of readers; and the genres best calculated to reach those readers. I argue that these moments of direct address show an American literary culture in the process of transforming itself from an anonymous republican print sphere to one in which readers relished the biographical gossip the authors themselves provided in paratexts.