American Publishing's Founding Father

It was Noah Webster.

From a piece in the Daily Beast...

The newly minted Yale grad was feeling discouraged. The 24-year-old teacher had quit his day job to write a book, and only his two closest college buddies thought anything of his work. As he noted in his diary, he encountered “serious obstacles.” He couldn’t get an advance, and he “was destitute of the means of defraying the expenses of publication.”

This familiar-sounding tale of the struggling young author seems as if it could have happened last year. But the date was 1783. The man was Noah Webster, Jr. (1785-1843) and the literary offering was his legendary speller, initially entitled, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, the first book ever published in the new United States of America.
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With the digital revolution now turning the book biz upside-down, we might do well to remember how Webster single-handedly put American publishing on the map. While the Hartford wordsmith is today synonymous with his American Dictionary, first published in 1828, in his lifetime, he was better known for his stupendous bestseller. The Harry Potter of its day, his text for grade-school children would sell better than any other book except the Bible for nearly a century. The final tally: a staggering 100 million copies.