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ing logic of the market is intricately, if silently, bound to theories of autonomous creativity, the writer is surely caught in a bind. Considering the trials of Coleridge and Wordsworth is enough to drive one into the arms of Trollope, abjuring forever the cycle of hypomania and depression, inspiration and silence. If the market is inescapable, turn its discipline to good effect. Such is Trollope's response to Romanticism: There are those [...] who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till-inspiration moves him. When I have heard such a doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting (102). Trollope scorns those who wait for inspiration, and embraces the analogy of novel writing to shoe making, pointedly refusing the Romantic separation of Art from craft: A shoemaker when he has finished one pair of shoes does not sit down and contemplate his work in idle satisfaction [...]. The shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages half his time. It is the same with a professional writer of books [.. .]. I had now quite accustomed myself to begin a second pair as soon as the first was out of my hands (265). God is on the side not so much of the angels, as of the man who settles down to do his work here on earth, for idleness is a vice, industriousness a virtue. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Sat, 25 Jun 2016 05:12:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Writer's Block, Merit, and the Market 637 Just do it. This familiar marketing slogan is applicable to all walks of life, it seems. Donald Murray, in The Craft of Revision, echoes Trollope and Boice, too, when he urges writers to [make] writing a habit [ . .]. The writing becomes expected in the way you are expected to wait on tables, show up for your job in the emergency room, deliver papers. Roger Simon of the Baltimore Sun explained, 'There's no such thing as writer's block. My father drove a truck for 40 years. And never once did he wake up in the morning and say: 'I have truck driver's block today. I am not going to work' (17). There's something bracing about this. Murray appeals to the complex network of social relations any worker must enter into, which carry obligations that must be honored. The market makes us all interdependent and we are all expected to work, indeed, required to work if we need to earn our incomes. So Murray, like Trollope, urges one to internalize these obligations, which are both ethical and economic, and thus take advantage of the support this network can provide. Replace the Romantic agonies of inspiration with an ethic of work and you will be rewarded. You will have your writing, your copyright, your income, and your peace of mind. Yet the work ethic is by no means our salvation, as Max Weber's magisterial study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, makes clear. Weber argues that Protestants developed in the seventeenth century an ethic that he calls worldly asceticism (120). This ethic is motivated first by religious belief and later, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the force of capitalist accumulation. For Calvin, the purposeful organization and arrangement of the cosmos is evidence of a divine plan, even if the will of God is mysterious. Obvious in the order of the natural world, this organization extends to the order of society as well, in which every person has a calling, a job to do. Those who are in a state of grace glorify God by fulfilling his commandments, which providentially organize social relations. Each individual Christian must therefore work in his or her calling, regardless of his or her desires, and must work methodically, honestly, prudently, steadfastly, all for the glory of God. As Weber observes, Labor in a calling was [.. .] the ascetic activitypar excellence (133). Alone in an individual relation with God, quit of priestly mediation and Roman Catholic acts of penance, the Protestant went to work and prospered. Such labor is endless since it is not a goal in itself; done conscientiously, it will yield riches on earth that represent prospectively (given the grace of God) the Protestant's reward in heaven. I sketch the theological dimensions of the Protestant ethic to stress the fact that it is predicated on deeply felt belief, and to recall how inextricable this belief is from the discourse of political economy. Weber argues that the logic of utilitarian political economy is an effect of Protestant theology and religious belief. Calvinism holds that This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Sat, 25 Jun 2016 05:12:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms