In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

I N T R O D U C T I O N T H E E N V I R O N M E N T O F F I C T I O N Why are so few novels remembered while so many thousands are forgotten? Is our literary history incomplete without accounting for these books? These questions, and others like them, have stimulated this study of ‘‘better fiction’’ —novels that were better than formula fiction but not as good as high art. In their time, these novels were within educated readers’ reference and memory , but over the years they have passed out of sight. Although these novels frequently won prizes and were often greeted respectfully, even eagerly, in the review columns of important magazines and newspaper supplements, they go unrecollected and unread not because their authors su√ered from gender, racial, or political prejudice. On the contrary: because they occupied the very center of the literary landscape, these middle-class realistic novels—and not genre writing like Westerns, romances, or mysteries— constituted the merely ordinary, that is, the fiction against which academic tastemakers later needed to contradistinguish the best. While the unfamiliarity or remoteness of more complex literature or more explicitly ideological fiction frequently necessitates sustained acts of critical preservation so they might be appreciated, the novels I am writing about issue no such challenge. Instead, they comprise the widely read, easily comprehensible fiction that Americans chose for their edification and literary entertainment. These novels mean to please and instruct middle-class America in all its diversity of social marking, economic position, political standing. Strongly pedagogical, these novels often meant to shape public awareness of cultural values as well as individual pursuits, and how they came together. { 2 } INTRODUCTION In presenting this history of modern American realism in its ascendant years, the middle decades of the twentieth century, I am mindful that perhaps no other period of U.S. literary history has been so thoroughly analyzed, in its time or since. Yet this history, although written by so many hands, with so many di√erent missions, has been left significantly incomplete, largely as a result of a critical bias against middle-class readers and their so-called middlebrow taste. Critics and scholars, unlike reviewers, have for a long time understood their job as creating hierarchies of literary achievement, ideologies of taste. Essential as that errand has been, the unfortunate byproduct of this zeal to identify a few works by a few writers (who have from time to time been replaced by a few other preferred writers) is the neglect of a vast resource; in turn, that oversight keeps us from fully understanding how cultural values are made, circulated, and recalculated. Taken together, these novels may be said to represent the kind of engaged literary experience that so many readers during the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s shared, the quotidian novels that inevitably clued readers to the ways their fellow citizens were thinking, believing, and acting. Arguably, these bourgeois novels were the literary forms of print culture through which Americans were most likely to enter into and perhaps to participate in the public life of the century’s middle decades. In a way that I think is underestimated, such books perform the cultural work of helping to shape the public sphere in modern America.∞ Because there are so many of these books, the first need is to recover them and ascertain their reception. So I will be surveying novels that were scarcely brilliant artistic achievements or dazzling commercial successes, although several of the novels I discuss were both critically recognized and sold by the tens, even hundreds of thousands. Most, however, sold much more moderately; published by large commercial presses—mostly in New York—they were issued in print runs of 1,500, 2,000, or 3,000. They were often good without being great, interesting without being indispensable, accomplished without being profound. Yet why should they disappear when we read so many books from other periods no more fully realized or more vital to our understanding of the nation’s literary history and the drama of its cultural production? A great many of the books in my purview fell into disregard, while a few works by a few writers that we do honor—some would say fetishize—might be remembered. The fact is, readers will encounter here a few more or less familiar names, like James Gould Cozzens and John Marquand, but many, I suspect, will...

Share