The murky dividing line between the concepts of plagiarism and originality, as well as the public’s confusion over these terms, are illustrated with historical and contemporary examples. A summary of the history of plagiarism begins with the origins of the English term in the writings of the Roman writer Martial, and changing attitudes toward the phenomenon are illustrated by writers of the 14th century (Chaucer), 16th century (Shakespeare), and 18th century (Benjamin Franklin). Charles Dickens emerges as the first great crusader against plagiarism, and ultimately a moral transgression largely morphs into the lawbreaking act of copyright infringement. Examples in the chapter include a famous public feud involving Dorothy Thompson, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis as well as allegations that famous authors like H. G. Wells and Margaret Mitchell made use of the work of others without attribution. The chapter concludes with the decades-long struggle of Victor DeCosta, who claimed that the CBS Western “Have Gun – Will Travel” was appropriated from his Paladin character. His story illustrates the difficulties in seeking redress for appropriation by large corporations.

In the early 1910s, the extension of copyright protection to moving picture adaptations of literary works resulted in the emergence of film rights, and this phenomenon had a profound effect on film production and the writing of fiction. Paramount Studios, originally the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, became the most powerful studio of the 1910s and 1920s, in part, due to its unparalleled ability to exploit preexisting literary and dramatic properties: to produce “Famous Plays with Famous Players.” At the same time, this new regime altered the constitution of the American literary field. Authors and studios alike reflected on the importance of preparing fiction for eventual adaptation. I call the capacity for authors to imagine the afterlives of their prose works before writing the “transmedial possibility” of fiction. This possibility influenced the work of several writers who published in American modernism's great year 1925, all of whom responded in some way to Paramount: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

This chapter studies the historical “Chicago fictions” that Theodore Dreiser published between 1900 and 1915, showing how they chart the city’s growth and development between the Fire of 1871 and the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter also outlines some of the literary techniques that Dreiser used in his attempts at capturing the city's dynamism, focusing on his novels’ indeterminate sense of historicity, their generic and stylistic heterogeneity, their emphasis on unsettled and changeable characters, and their simultaneously backward and forward-facing perspectives.