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the condition of possibility for Bowles’s career as a novelist and for the writing of his first novel, the reason that Helen Strauss and Doubleday (however briefly) showed interest in and invested in him, the driving force behind New Directions’ commercial success. Bowles capitalized on the opportunity afforded him by the growth of this audience by writing a novel depicting the uncompromising flight from it and, in so doing, created a blueprint for intendedly highbrow novelistic success in the 1950s—a novel that achieves success in the consumer-culture market by depicting the bankruptcy of that market. Ironically, the cultural problem that Port and Kit try to escape was more than just subject matter; it was what enabled the novel’s writing and publication in the first place.

      The links between the novel’s meditation on art and audience, on the one hand, and the shifting institutional relation between novel production and the larger economic and cultural fields, on the other, become clear in the story of The Sheltering Sky’s rocky path to the best-seller list. The novel was an immediate success when it arrived in bookstores in late 1949, but it did not reach the best-seller list until January 1950. The reason for the delay is that Laughlin had only 3,500 copies printed when the book was first released; they sold out quickly, but he did not print more until the year’s end. It is at this point that Bowles grew disenchanted with Laughlin’s disavowals of the market. As Bowles recounts in the preface, written fifty years later yet with his ire for Laughlin still evident: “Because his accountants had already filed income tax returns for 1949, he could not risk showing a profit on an item that he had already written off as a loss (since his interest in publishing was literary and not commercial), and so he restricted the edition to 3,500 copies instead of the 10,000 which Publishers Weekly had recommended. It came out the second week of December, but holiday sales were limited to what was available” (6).⁴² The story Bowles tells is confusing because it offers two separate reasons for Laughlin’s initial refusal to print more copies. First, he suggests a curious tax-related reason, that because Laughlin had already written the novel off as a loss, increased profits would mean he would have to redo his tax returns. Parenthetically, however, and perhaps sarcastically, Bowles hints at a second reason: Laughlin did not want to print more copies because his interest was “literary,” not “commercial.” The rest of Laughlin’s career, and of course his subsequent printing of more copies of The Sheltering Sky, suggests that Laughlin was not averse to selling a lot of books. He was, however, noted for being a lax businessperson, preferring skiing to taking care of business matters. It is possible that he simply missed the opportunity to sell more books in December due to inattention or because he underestimated the demand for the novel. Whatever the cause, the dispute over the printing of the novel likely accelerated Bowles’s departure from New Directions.

      As noted earlier, Bowles hired an agent and decided to write a novel only after Dial Press told him he could not publish a volume of his short stories without having first published a novel. The success of The Sheltering Sky put Bowles in an ideal position in which to have this volume of short stories published. The details here are sketchy but suggestive: we know that Bowles orally agreed to let Laughlin publish the volume and then reneged and moved on to Random House, a much larger publishing house, prompting Laughlin to threaten a lawsuit (which he apparently never filed). Bowles’s stated reasons for leaving New Directions vary. He tells the early version of the story in an April 1950 letter to Vidal: “It was orally understood that the volume was to be done by [New Directions], until I got a cable from [Helen Strauss] saying that she had a far better offer from Random House and strongly advised me to take it” (In Touch 218). Characteristically, Bowles shifts the burden of a financially motivated decision onto his agent. But in another letter, written thirty-four years later, Bowles offers another explanation for his move: Laughlin’s “principal reader, David McDowell, left at the end of December [1949] and went to Random House” (521).⁴³ Bowles here claims he left avantgarde New Directions for powerhouse Random House for specifically literary reasons, to maintain a tie with a literary collaborator. Bowles’s two explanations for his move to Random House are not irreconcilable; both may be true. The luring of both Bowles and McDowell away from New Directions by Random House—Bowles as an established, now legitimate novelist and McDowell as a legitimizer of texts, himself now legitimized in and by the mainstream book world—epitomizes how ripe the postwar book market was believed to be for avowed avant-garde detachment from the market.

      The moves of Bowles and McDowell barely affected New Directions; its formula—literary writers and an avowed indifference to commerce—had met its historical moment and its success continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, although larger publishers poached talent and marketing strategy from New Directions, New Directions cemented its own profitability by following the leads of some of those larger publishers. As Greg Barnhisel notes, Laughlin’s decision to produce New Directions books in the new “trade paperback” format in 1954 ensured the company’s commercial success (161–62). As conceived by Jason Epstein at Doubleday, who developed the idea for Anchor Books in 1953, soon to be followed by Knopf’s Vintage Books, trade paperbacks were less expensive than hardcover books, so they could reach a wider audience of readers; unlike mass-market paperbacks, however, which were produced on a cheaper grade of paper and which had attached to them a lowbrow reputation, trade paperbacks were printed on higher-quality paper and were sold in finer bookstores.⁴⁴ The trade-paperback format allowed New Directions to market its highbrow fare to a wider audience. In the early 1950s, the distance between mainstream and avant-garde publishers was shrinking as the audience for books produced by both was growing. As the next chapter shows, even publishers of mass-market paperbacks would reach for that audience.

      Chapter 2

       The “Incalculable Value of Reading”: Fahrenheit 451 and the Paperback Assault on Mass Culture

      You’re probably tempted, as we were at first, to work up a sputtering head of indignation about this … this … indignity. But hang on a second. Ray Bradbury got the medal in 2000, and while he can now be painted as a man who gave a popular genre a literary flair, were they saying that when “The Martian Chronicles” made its debut in 1950?

      —From “The Shining Moment,” a New York Times editorial, October 16, 2003¹

      In suggesting that a recent decision to honor Ray Bradbury’s writing constitutes a revisionist attempt to deem literary what was once considered mere genre fiction, the New York Times had it backward. The answer to its question is yes: as early as 1950, Ray Bradbury was credited with the feat of making literature of science fiction, using strategies similar to those used by James Laughlin and Tennessee Williams to promote The Sheltering Sky. But when, in 2000, the National Book Foundation (NBF), the organization that gives out the annual National Book Awards, awarded Bradbury the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, its version of a lifetime achievement award, it was not for accomplishing this feat. In fact, as the NBF’s announcement of the award attested, the honor had little to do with the perceived artistry of Bradbury’s literary output. Bradbury’s “life work has proclaimed the incalculable value of reading,” the announcement said, adding that “these values are the bedrock of the National Book Foundation. Our mission is to promote the reading and appreciation of great American literature among audiences across the country.”²

      The decision to honor Bradbury and the reason given for that honor resonate in the context of two distinct, parallel, and seemingly unrelated institutional shifts in the American book trade in the era immediately after World War II: the emergence of a network of institutions, both commercial and nonprofit, designed to promote the value of reading, represented well by the formation of the National Book Foundation, and the emergence of science fiction as a commercially viable literary genre in book (as opposed to pulp) form. The NBF, officially established in 1954 (though the National Book Award, with which it would soon be attached, was first given in 1950), is the kind of literary institution that was new to postwar America, an example of the modernization of the book trade and, more specifically, of the trade’s efforts to capitalize on the postwar economic boom and the growing population of educated consumers that made The Sheltering

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