An Icon Adrift: The Modern Library in the 1990s

This article examines Random House’s decision to relaunch the Modern Library of America series in 1992. The series had a major influence on American culture in the interwar period, making significant works of modernist literature available to middle-class readers for a low price, but it faded after the paperback revolution of the 1960s. I follow the New Modern Library as it repopulated its catalog, experimented with electronic media, and published a controversial Best Books list, and I argue that instead of returning to its roots in democratic cosmopolitanism, the series came to resemble the very middlebrow ventures it had historically been defined against.