A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. By Evan Brier. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 200 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4207-2.)

Abstract

This book explores the cultural situation of postwar American fiction by examining Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956). The spread of mass culture, Evan Brier argues, required authors and publishers to reposition the novel as a genre that asserted the separateness of art from commerce while enabling them to exploit new marketing opportunities. Each of Brier's examples involves a version of that paradox. Bowles bypassed his William Morris Agency agent, Helen Strauss, by taking his manuscript to James Laughlin at the New Directions Publishing Corporation. But, to sell the book, Laughlin cannily mobilized Tennessee Williams's review praising Bowles's anticareerism. Thus distance from a mass audience became the basis for courting it. Bradbury's characters lament the existence of too many readers, yet the publisher Ian Ballantine enlarged Bradbury's public with a paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451. By endorsing a title change, Wilson's publisher Richard Simon obscured the rebellion against conformity that Wilson actually depicted but Wilson himself capitulated to corporate demands. Peyton Place resembled a prewar best seller more than later blockbusters because the advertising executive Aaron Sussman promoted it the way he had earlier sold James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).