RECREATIONAL SUBJECTS rethinks the category of the professional author by considering ways in which authorship in eighteenth-century Britain wasn't always or only conceptualized as a matter of production and publication. In response to the public's increasing fascination with literary celebrity, the authors I consider—Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, Hester Thrale, and Elizabeth Carter—imagined conversational, recreational encounters between readers and writers. They shape what I am calling the recreational subject: a subject who writes, not for a living, but as living . Inhabiting so-called minor genres like letters, diaries, and occasional writing, this subject is not wholly created in or reliant upon the conditions of the literary marketplace. The recreational model prizes process over product: in the dialogical back-and-forth that characterizes recreational writing, these authors envision selves always subject to revision at the hands of another, something more akin to a circulating manuscript than a published product. Following in the tradition of Mark Rose, scholars of authorship have tended to privilege publication as the ultimate goal of any authorial enterprise, but such an approach pushes to the margins forms of writing and modes of authorship that don't fit neatly into this production model. In these recreational texts, however, the all too familiar image of the professional author, writing alone and always with an eye to publication, gives way to a vision of authors and readers engaged, actively and sociably, in the interactive process of textual formation.