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Chapter 2

The “Incalculable Value of Reading”: Fahrenheit 451 and the Paperback Assault on Mass Culture

You’re probably tempted, as we were at first, to work up a sputtering head of indignation about this … this … indignity. But hang on a second. Ray Bradbury got the medal in 2000, and while he can now be painted as a man who gave a popular genre a literary flair, were they saying that when “The Martian Chronicles” made its debut in 1950?

—From “The Shining Moment,” a New York Times editorial, October 16, 2003¹

In suggesting that a recent decision to honor Ray Bradbury’s writing constitutes a revisionist attempt to deem literary what was once considered mere genre fiction, the New York Times had it backward. The answer to its question is yes: as early as 1950, Ray Bradbury was credited with the feat of making literature of science fiction, using strategies similar to those used by James Laughlin and Tennessee Williams to promote The Sheltering Sky. But when, in 2000, the National Book Foundation (NBF), the organization that gives out the annual National Book Awards, awarded Bradbury the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, its version of a lifetime achievement award, it was not for accomplishing this feat. In fact, as the NBF’s announcement of the award attested, the honor had little to do with the perceived artistry of Bradbury’s literary output. Bradbury’s “life work has proclaimed the incalculable value of reading,” the announcement said, adding that “these values are the bedrock of the National Book Foundation. Our mission is to promote the reading and appreciation of great American literature among audiences across the country.”²

The decision to honor Bradbury and the reason given for that honor resonate in the context of two distinct, parallel, and seemingly unrelated institutional shifts in the American book trade in the era immediately after World War II: the emergence of a network of institutions, both commercial and nonprofit, designed to promote the value of reading, represented well by the formation of the National Book Foundation, and the emergence of science fiction as a commercially viable literary genre in book (as opposed to pulp) form. The NBF, officially established in 1954 (though the National Book Award, with which it would soon be attached, was first given in 1950), is the kind of literary institution that was new to postwar America, an example of the modernization of the book trade and, more specifically, of the trade’s efforts to capitalize on the postwar economic boom and the growing population of educated consumers that made The Sheltering Sky a best seller and New Directions a profitable company. This modernization coincided with Bradbury’s crossover from the world of American science fiction pulps to the more mainstream literary world: Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury’s first novel, was published in 1953, a consequence of both his own high standing and of the book trade’s new interest in science fiction and the emergence of the paperback.

One indication of the separateness of these two institutional developments (and thus, perhaps, an explanation of the Times’s incredulity in 2003) is that in the more than fifty years since the NBF was founded, it has not awarded a single one of its annual National Book Awards for Fiction to a science fiction novel.³ Critical acceptance for science fiction as literature has been elusive and, in this context, it is notable that in its announcement the NBF does not explicitly honor Bradbury as a writer of the “great American literature” that it is the NBF’s stated mission to promote; rather, it locates Bradbury’s achievement in his promotional activities. In and of itself, this is unexceptional. As the NBF’s general explanation of the Distinguished Medal makes clear, specifically literary accomplishment is not a necessary criterion: “The recipient is a person who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.”⁴ Past winners include esteemed novelists Toni Morrison (1996), John Updike (1998), and Philip Roth (2002), as well as more peripheral literary figures, such as Clifton Fadiman (1993), Oprah Winfrey (1999), and James Laughlin (1992). The presence of these latter figures suggests that the service criterion encompasses any work that in some way contributes to the dissemination of literature, the promotion of its importance to the reading audience, or both, and it further suggests implicit, rarely articulated connections between the mid-century projects of disparate figures Bradbury and Laughlin.

Bradbury’s promotional activities are ample. In interviews and essays, he has never shied away from proclaiming the cultural importance of the book.⁵ His remark, quoted in the NBF’s announcement of the honor, that his job is “to help you fall in love” (with the book) is but one example of many such pronouncements over the past half century. It is in the service of this cause that, as Bradbury himself notes, he has “spun more stories, novels, essays and poems about other writers than any other writer in history that I can think of” (Afterword 168).⁶ But undoubtedly Bradbury’s most important work in this regard is Fahrenheit 451 itself, the novel that followed The Martian Chronicles, the “seminal book-lover’s book,” as Steve Martin put it at the NBF ceremonies honoring Bradbury, a star-making, moneymaking novel about what the NBF calls the “incalculable value” of books.⁷ The unusual place in the literary field that Bradbury has occupied since Fahrenheit 451 was published, as the genre writer who has made the importance of literature a primary topic, helps to explain the ambiguity surrounding the reasons for which the NBF honored him in 2000. What distinguishes Bradbury’s “service” from that of Laughlin and Fadiman is the fact that it is located within and is inseparable from his literary output, his corpus of work. His work is at once literature and promotion, and it is this that marks Bradbury as an emblematic figure of the rapidly changing book trade of the early 1950s.

Fahrenheit 451, which imagines or predicts a future American society dominated by television and largely devoid of books, is thus an emblematic text of this era in two crucially related senses. First and more obviously, it takes as its subject the much discussed threat to the book posed by the emergence of postwar mass culture, a fact that links it to classic texts of its decade’s mass-culture debates, though this fact has received little attention in Bradbury scholarship and in scholarship of the mass-culture debate itself.⁸ Second, it is enabled by the generally neglected, if not deliberately and necessarily obscured, opportunity that accompanied the threat, an irony that also has received little attention but which is crucial to an understanding of the novel, its reception, and the larger issue of the shifting cultural and economic status of American novels in the early 1950s. As a dystopia that links the destruction of Western civilization to the predicted decline of the book, Fahrenheit 451 might be the best advertisement for the book ever devised. Although the novel has received a great deal of scholarly attention since its publication, mostly in the form of close readings of its quasi-allegorical plot and mostly in sources devoted to science fiction specifically, its effectiveness as a promotional piece—and the way that effectiveness situates it in the context of similarly themed book promotion efforts of the time, complicates its relationship to mainstream intellectual culture and the genre from which it emerged, and sheds light on a developing network of 1950s literary institutions—has yet to be examined.⁹ Bradbury’s honor in 2000, and the decades of unlikely recognition it embodies (in 1952, Time magazine called Bradbury the “poet of the pulps”), might be explained as a result of his defense of timeless literary values—certainly the NBF would like to explain it this way—but it demands to be understood as well as a time-bound product of the twin institutional shifts in the literary field noted earlier: the emergence of science fiction and the emergence of a sophisticated network of promotional institutions. These shifts, moreover, though seemingly unrelated, are connected at the root, both products of the growing market for books in the United States in the postwar era and in particular of the triumphant emergence of the paperback after the war.

To draw these connections and to tell this largely untold story, this chapter reconstructs the rapid emergence of the institutional structures that could enable both the writing and the recognition of Fahrenheit 451 in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the NBF’s decision to honor both Bradbury and Laughlin attests, it is a story inseparable from the rise of New Directions to profitability; in both we see the emergence of a distinctive strategy for selling literary fiction in the age of mass culture, the emergence of a promotional apparatus that could implement that strategy, and the growth of an audience receptive to it.

National Book Awards

In 1949, the Book Manufacturers’ Institute (BMI), a trade association of American book manufacturers, awarded what was billed as the first annual Gutenberg Award—it turned out to be the only award so named—to Robert Sherwood for Roosevelt and Hopkins because, according to the BMI, the book “most progressively influenced American thought in 1948” (qtd. in “Roosevelt” 8). Covering the event, Publishers Weekly discussed the ways in which the BMI sought to publicize the event and the award, which now seem modest to the point of quaintness: “The BMI has run full page ads about the award and the ten books named as candidates for it, in the Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review and the Saturday Review of Literature, and has secured extensive publicity, samples of which were shown mounted on a poster at the dinner…. Harper’s advertising in connection with the award to Mr. Sherwood will include 150-line, two-column space in the New York Times Book Review” (“Roosevelt” 9).