A Novel Marketplace. Evan Brier
the subject of this book.
Institutional Change
The cultural and commercial project of redefining the novel for the television age occurred at a moment that in retrospect, like the era of mass culture itself, was transitional rather than final: when literary institutions, flush in the late 1940s with the end of wartime paper rations and the start of the postwar boom, first contended with television but before America’s publishing houses were consolidated into mass-media empires, as they would be in earnest in the 1960s. An institutional account of the book trade during this transitional moment might include the following developments. In 1939, Robert de Graff and Simon & Schuster together formed Pocket Books, resulting, after World War II’s paper rations ended, in the unprecedented ubiquity of books in America, both lowbrow genre fiction and literary classics, which were now sold not just in bookstores but also in train stations, pharmacies, and anywhere magazines were sold. The mass-market paperback would be followed by the more upscale trade paperback, which was more expensive, printed on higher quality paper, and sold in bookstores only, in the early 1950s: first Doubleday’s Anchor Books, and later Knopf’s Vintage and others. In 1943, the William Morris Agency, then the second-most powerful show business agency in the United States, established a separate department for representing authors of books, signifying both the growth of the literary agent’s profession and, just as important, a mass-culture institution’s belief in the profit-making potential of the book trade. As this book shows, the literary agent, whose role shifted markedly in this era, is a persistent symbol and presence in accounts of novel writing of the 1950s yet has received little attention. That William Morris represented not just commercial writers like James Michener but also literary stars like Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Penn Warren hints at an untold story of 1950s literary culture: the continued growth of the audience for fiction marketed and received as literary. Another important moment occurred in 1944: Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster were merged into a small multimedia conglomerate called Field Enterprises, which included four radio stations, a newspaper, and a textbook publishing company. The merger was not an immediate trendsetter, but it was a harbinger of the widespread consolidation of the book trade that was to come and to which this era served as crucial prologue.
Running roughly parallel to this set of developments, the impact of which was felt throughout the 1950s, was a set of institutional initiatives begun in 1946, when American publishers joined forces to form the American Book Publishers Council (ABPC). The ABPC was a successor to numerous earlier attempts to modernize and organize the book trade, and it was the first one that effected genuine change.18 Its explicit aim was twofold: first, to unite competing publishers in pursuit of their common commercial interests and, second, just as important, to unite publishers with other institutions that had an interest in getting people to read. These included, of course, other commercial institutions of the book trade like bookstores and book manufacturers. But more meaningful alliances were formed with institutions outside the commercial field, including English teachers and professors (who perceived a strong interest in promoting the value of literature); religious institutions; and private-sector, concerned-citizen cold warriors, who believed that an educated, literate populace was a key element in the struggle to contain Communism. These new alliances reflected the dual status of the book as commodity and form of artistic expression with both civic and aesthetic value beyond its value as commerce. As Frederic G. Melcher, longtime editor of Publishers Weekly, put it in 1953, “Books have some advantages over steel in gaining public attention, for a million and more teachers and librarians serve daily, explaining to the new generation what books are and how to use them” (“An ‘Industrial Family’”).19
Aiming to harness these advantages for the first time during a moment of extraordinary economic growth, the ABPC was instrumental in forming organizations with such names as the Committee on Reading Development (established in 1950) and the National Book Committee (established in 1954) (“Summary 1950” 224; “Review” 322). The latter committee exemplifies the collaboration that took hold during the decade. Its original officers included a university president, representatives from publishing houses, and the former Secretary of the Air Force, and its mission statement sets into relief the Cold War context of its effort to market books: “In a time of tension like the present, it is especially needful for citizens to see to it that books are made available for all … and above all, that they are read, so that we may understand the complex issues of our time and see our current crises in perspective” (qtd. in Grambs).20 To promote the buying of books, these committees established symposia and conferences on the value of reading and the need to promote it in both urban and rural areas, and they published volumes on the social and political importance of reading with titles like Wonderful World of Books (edited by Stefferud) and The Development of Lifelong Reading Habits (edited by Grambs). The ABPC was also instrumental in creating, in conjunction with other institutions of the book trade, the National Book Awards, which were first awarded in 1950, and which were designed in part to be a literary alternative to the Pulitzer prize (English 58). The ABPC and the materials it produced have yet to figure in accounts of postwar American literary culture, but they provide crucial clues not just to the literary institutions’ emerging ideology of the book but also to its increased ability to disseminate that ideology.
In these two lists of generally neglected institutional developments (only the story of the paperback has received a lot of attention; the rest have received either little or none), two overlapping stories are being told.21 The first is the story of the book trade’s emerging relationship with mass-media institutions. In the decade or so between the emergence of postwar mass culture in 1948 and the publishing industry’s own consolidation triggered by Random House’s purchase of Knopf in 1960, both sets of institutions recognized common commercial interests, or ways in which they could achieve their separate commercial interests through collaboration. The creation of the William Morris Agency’s literary department, which was headed by Helen Strauss, a former executive at Paramount Studios, and the merger of Simon & Schuster into Field Enterprises, a product of Field’s belief, after seeing the sales of paperbacks, that the book trade would be increasingly profitable in the second half of the twentieth century, exemplify this nascent, mutually beneficial collaboration (Tebbel 4: 70–71). So too does the sharp increase, largely driven by the paperback, of movie tie-ins during the 1950s, whereby new books, or new versions of older books, and their movie versions are promoted together. As Emory Austin, the ominously titled “director of exploitation” for MGM told Publishers Weekly in 1956, “When the publisher is willing to spend the money and make the effort required, then we, for our part, are happy to do the same” (“Paperback Movie” 151).
But the story of collaboration between literary and mass-media institutions in the 1950s—the story of the institutional absence of a great divide—has been obscured in large part by the second story, that of the book trade’s increasingly unified and centralized public response to mass culture’s emergence, a response that, in the light of the first story, needs to be understood as largely rhetorical rather than substantive and thus as deeply ironic. At the historical moment in which the book trade’s ties to the institutions that produced mass culture were strengthening, it had both a commercial and an ideological interest in positioning itself as separate from and opposed to mass culture, in language not dissimilar from that of the harshest and most uncompromising highbrow critics. This was a delicate rhetorical strategy, for to advertise novels as works of art or as works of transcendent social or political importance or as both, the book trade had to speak loudly about them without being noticed, without drawing attention to the fact that the production of books, whatever their artistic value and whatever their civic value, was always also a commercial enterprise.
This was one of the charges of the ABPC. As Pierre Bourdieu describes it, in the cultural world, “The less visible the investment, the more productive it is symbolically.” Thus promotions within that world, “which in the business world take the overt form of publicity, must here be euphemized” (“Production” 77). In 1955, George Brockway, a vice president of Norton, addressed the convention of the Modern Language Association, a crucial partner in the project of promoting the book as a cultural good: “The road to salvation is, however, a simple one: all one needs to do is to increase the reading of books…. Publishers would not be much better off than they are