The Editor as Hero: The Novel, the Media Conglomerate, and the Editorial Critique

This essay tells the story of the late twentieth-century "editorial critique," an unusual set of essays, written mostly by book editors working for major publishers, that attacked the conglomerate takeover of the US publishing industry. That takeover began in earnest in 1966 when RCA acquired Random House (Smith 35, 41). By 2000, five conglomerates, controlling numerous formerly independent presses, dominated the US book business. The critique presented this consolidation, narrowly, as the cause of literary decline. But considered in the context of intertwined literary and business histories, including the evolution of the editor's crucial role as both writer's advocate and middle-management employee, the critique reveals something different: first, how the hidden structures that produced US fiction before the conglomerate takeover also produced a saleable idea of the novel's importance as a cultural institution, and second, how conglomerate control of the book trade undermined the production of this idea and thus the prestige of the novel. I argue that the editorial critique, ostensibly an account of the novel's qualitative decline, more precisely marks the disintegration, at the hands of corporate capitalism, of a formidable machine for generating literary prestige.

1. The Critique in Context

"Acquiring editors," Richard Marek explained in the first sentence of "How Books Are Chosen," his contribution to Grove Press's volume Editors on Editing (1993), "are hired for one primary reason: that the books they buy make money for the publishing company that employs them." And the primacy of profits, Marek continued, "does not reflect a new conspiracy on the part of money-hungry conglomerates"—the media and electronics corporations that had begun acquiring publishing houses in the mid-1960s—"it was just as true thirty years ago, when I entered the business" (84). Marek had the experience to make these assertions credible. At the time he was Editorial Director for E. P. Dutton, and previously he had worked for Dial, St. Martin's, and Putnam's. His subsequent advice for aspiring editors (concentrate on originality; look for a good story; edit what you know) drew on his lengthy collaboration, over the course of eight best-selling novels, with Robert Ludlum. The advice is mundane, but Marek's opening is something else entirely, a provocation aimed at a small but vocal group of his peers. That editors, in 1993, had to be concerned primarily with profits was an uncontroversial notion, but Marek's assertion of a profit-seeking continuity between pre- and postconglomeration publishing, and his implication that there was no recently ended golden age when literary quality, not profit, motivated publishers, put his essay at odds with numerous contemporaneous accounts of late twentieth-century book production.

These latter accounts, critiques of the concentration and corporatization of a once-varied universe of smaller, independent publishing houses, point not just to the economic reorganization of the publishing business but also to a shift in the cultural world felt deeply by late-century editors, critics, and novelists. "Today," longtime Pantheon Books publisher and New Press founder André Schiffrin wrote in 2000, "five major conglomerates control 80 percent of American book sales" (2). Connecting this corporate absorption to Christopher Lasch's diagnosis of the post-1960s US psyche, Ted Solotaroff asserted in "The Literary-Industrial Complex" (1987) that media conglomerates (including Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which had acquired Solotaroff's employer Harper & Row shortly before he was forced out of the company) have worked "like a pincer movement to narrow the scope and prospects of literary and intellectual publishing in the book trade, to capture and exploit the new mass market of the age of consumerism and the culture of narcissism" (33–34).

Solotaroff, founding editor of the influential but never profitable quarterly New American Review (published from 1967 to 1977, by New American Library, Simon & Schuster, and Bantam), would over the course of several essays become the chief author of the literary critique of corporate publishing. But he was not alone: numerous similar critiques appeared in publications also geared to potential book buyers, including journalist Thomas Whiteside's The Blockbuster...