What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 (review)

When scholars and critics eighty years from now survey the literary landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century, what kind of report will they write? What will they surmise about the reading habits of Americans? In an age that showed a marked preference for reading electronic books over print books, will these critics bemoan the loss of print culture and the subsequent difficulty they find in tracking readers' habits and dispositions for one kind of book over another? As they pore over best-seller lists, book club reading suggestions, and discussions of books on radio and television, what books will they discover as makers of literary taste for middle-class readers? What books will they discover that cater less to a certain class of readers than to particular segments of the reading public? Will they find books which never reached the best-seller lists that nevertheless shaped aspects of American culture in significant ways?

Of course, books and reading weave such a colorful pattern in the cultural quilt that covers Americans that numerous critics have published books devoted exclusively to guiding individuals in the building of their reading habits. In 1940, Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education promised to teach readers to read critically for analysis, interpretation, and significance. Aimed at middle-class readers who had neither the time or financial resources to attend college, this little book hit the best-seller lists and remained atop them for weeks; in addition to teaching individuals how to read, Adler offered a list of 131 books—and these were the basis for his "great books" curriculum at St. John's College in Maryland—that were essential reading for attaining a well-rounded education in the humanities. Twenty years later, Clifton Fadiman published his Lifetime Reading Plan, which offered a list of 133 classics and a strategy that allowed readers to use this list of books as a kind of starting point for embarking on a lifetime of reading. Even early in the twenty-first century—to take but one example—Michael Dirda, former literary critic at the Washington Post Book World, has published several books, including Classics for Pleasure (2007), that urge individuals to pick up and read any books—whether genre fiction or a best-selling thriller or a literary classic—that bring them pleasure.

In 1919, Yale English professor Henry Seidel Canby offered his own characterizations of American literature and reading in his paper, "Literature in Contemporary America." He contended that American literature would prosper as long as it respected the ways that time and place echoed throughout America. Canby goes on to distinguish four categories of literature in the United States: aristocratic (Henry James, Edith Wharton), democratic (Walt Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters), dilettante ("writers from every town and county writing what they hope will become literature"), and bourgeois ("writing that makes visible the rivers and oceans of American writing").

In his brilliant What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960, Gordon Hutner, the founding editor of the journal American Literary History and professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, provides a compelling glimpse into the fiction of mid-twentieth-century America and follows Canby's lead in probing closely "fiction written for the American middle class, by the American middle class, about the American middle class" (8). As he observes in his introduction, many of the books he examines—and the issues that they explore—have been forgotten in the academy because they concern the middle-class experience from a middle-class point of view and these books run counter to the critical ideologies of the postwar years. In his survey and critical review, Hutner focuses on those readers who had the means, opportunity, and inclination to keep up with hardback publishing in the '20s, '30s, and '40s and who continued to support that literature after...