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P O S T S C R I P T In writing a book devoted to the middle-class realism of mid-twentiethcentury American fiction, three concerns of method and scope persisted. Since I was describing a subject of previously unregistered proportions, I first had to determine what kind of literary history I was writing: my research entailed a host of social, cultural, often political, sometimes material, as well as aesthetic ways of assessing the contours of this fiction, so rather than a thematic study, I needed to construct a format capacious enough to incorporate the array of interests that these novels aroused. And, second, since I was addressing the absence of a historiographical interest in this literature, my study would also have to be about critical values as well as their shaping. Perhaps most vexing of all, I had to consult the needs of potential students of the subject, whom I considered to be readers who care about American fiction and who may know its critical history well but who would also like to learn more about it. That audience included scholars and students as well as other readers who might want a deeper background. To write a literary history that met these di≈culties and that comprehended its salient questions, I developed multiple strands of inquiry to be followed throughout and that were often interwoven. These included, first, a history of the novels that generally appealed to what I saw as recreational readers (readers who understood these novels as the opportunity to re-create themselves), readers who were also what I call citizen-readers, that is, readers for whom these novels o√ered opportunities of civic engagement: educated , mainly middle-class readers who embraced the realist literature that critics identified as ‘‘better’’ than formula fiction. So I was freed from writing only about popular books and came to see that classifying books as either { 338 } POSTSCRIPT popular or elite was a way of not treating the vast store of American novels that were neither works of genius nor best sellers. The readers of these novels may or may not have been interested in popular literature, but pursuing the popular was not necessarily the defining aspect of their appetite for fiction. Mostly, these readers were looking, as the reviewers understood, for something edifying as well as entertaining, and they turned—not to genre fiction that mythologized the conquering of evil or the purging of social ills through the allegory of an astute detective or the integrity of a cowboy loner—but to realism for guidance on how to think about modern life. At the same time, these readers proved less interested in masterpieces, including those we now associate with the modernist movement, than they were in what might be described as a consistently high level of modest achievement, and for that they turned to magazine critics and newspaper reviewers for their cue about what was worth reading and why. I found, amid yearly roundups in places like the New York Times Sunday Book Review, an unending supply of well-regarded titles I had never heard of. I was then led to encounter hundreds of books—reading a season’s overviews of new novels and features on authors, predictions of the most promising of the new novelists , roundups of books already considered wrongly forgotten. Sometimes I would happen upon reviews of books because they were placed next to one I was searching for, or perhaps another book was included in an omnibus review of the one I was tracking down. The Book Review Digest was absolutely indispensable—it saved me time, but, more important, it sparked a myriad of new inquiries. All in all, I read about two hundred novels by nearly as many authors. Ultimately, I discerned an archive coming before my eyes. So little had been written about this plethora of novels that, in order to develop a way of talking about them, I had next—my second line of inquiry—to turn to those reviews, the dailies as well as those in the opinion magazines, journals, belles lettres quarterlies, and newspaper supplements, to help me appreciate the range of the corpus as well as the reputation of the novels. It was intriguing to learn that reviewers hailed some of these novels with astounding encomiums: ‘‘the greatest novel of its time,’’ ‘‘the best American book since Huckleberry Finn,’’ ‘‘the novel by which the decade would be remembered ,’’ ‘‘the best book of the year.’’ And I found...

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