A Novel Marketplace
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As television transformed American culture in the 1950s, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined. In A Novel Marketplace , Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making, marketing, and reception of American fiction. Between 1948, when television began its ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were produced and distributed changed considerably. Analyzing a range of mid-century novels—including Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky , Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 , Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit , and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place —Brier reveals the specific strategies used to carve out cultural and economic space for the American novel just as it seemed most under threat. During this anxious historical moment, the book business underwent an improbable expansion, by capitalizing on an economic boom and a rising population of educated consumers and by forming institutional alliances with educators and cold warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good. A Novel Marketplace tells how the book trade and the novelists themselves successfully positioned their works as embattled holdouts against an oppressive mass culture, even as publishers formed partnerships with mass-culture institutions that foreshadowed the multimedia mergers to come in the 1960s. As a foil for and a partner to literary institutions, mass media corporations assisted in fostering the novel's development as both culture and commodity.
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A Novel Marketplace
Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction
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All of which brings us back to Bowles, who as a first novelist in 1949 linked the commercial field of William Morris with the aesthetic field of New Directions. As noted earlier, Bowles’s account of how New Directions came to publish his novel excludes any mention of intermediaries between him and Laughlin and in fact emphasizes that Strauss was not involved, attributing the company’s decision to publish to an old-fashioned notion of aesthetic appreciation. But this account leaves out the role of Tennessee Williams, probably the most important player in the story of the publication and reception of The Sheltering Sky.
Williams was a close friend of both Laughlin and Bowles. Laughlin became Williams’s publisher after they struck up a conversation at a cocktail party (“his only literary discovery with a social origin,” according to Hall [275]) and discovered a common interest in Hart Crane’s poetry.29 Bowles, who first met Williams in Acapulco in 1940, years before the latter achieved literary success, had done what amounted to an enormous favor for him, composing music for The Glass Menagerie for its Broadway production in 1944 on short notice (one weekend) and perhaps without a contract.30 Just after Bowles had submitted the manuscript of The Sheltering Sky to Doubleday, he returned to New York to compose music for Williams’s Summer and Smoke.31 According to a lengthy Publishers Weekly feature on Laughlin drawn from an interview with him, it was Williams who asked Laughlin to read Bowles’s manuscript after Doubleday and many others had rejected it: “The Sheltering Sky had been turned down everywhere when … Williams brought it to [Laughlin]. Laughlin read the novel, was delighted by it” (Berkley 28).32 Williams was, in short, Bowles’s agent in deed if not name and, if not for his intervention, it is likely that New Directions never would have published Bowles’s novel, not because Laughlin did not like it but because he probably never would have read the manuscript.33
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