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But authors and booksellers would be vastly better off, and so would the country” (123). The book trade’s challenge, made explicit in Brockway’s address, was to minimize the visibility of its investment in books as a form of commerce—publishers, Brockway says, do not even benefit from increased sales, but the country does—because the perception of its distance from the commercial world was one crucial source of its value as a commodity. One way of doing this, as this book shows in some detail, was to embrace works that themselves presented novels as a bulwark against a threatening mass culture. Mass culture may have been, as Huyssen famously put it, “the hidden subtext of the modernist project” (47), but by the 1950s it was out in the open, an “enemy” uncovered, which is to say a rhetorical foil; the book trade, by its own design, was what was hidden.

      Thus an inevitable irony of the book trade’s promotional responses to mass culture is that they also, wisely, exploit the enormous commercial opportunities that mass culture offered; in the 1950s, books were advertised as never before on the radio and of course on television, in the form of both actual advertisements and book-related programming. “Publishers,” Priscilla Coit Murphy notes, “embraced new media for the new advertising opportunities—even if they were competitors for their readers’ time and money” (41). The first National Book Awards ceremony was broadcast on the radio (television coverage also was sought), and it featured musical numbers to enhance the ceremony’s entertainment value, but what it aimed to advertise most of all was its literary credibility (Melcher, “1000” 1508).²² In promoting novels, the line between mere advertising and what Bourdieu calls the “production of belief” in the value of the novel beyond its market value was beginning to blur because the idea that the novel transcends commerce became a chief selling point to an increasingly educated audience in the age of mass culture.²³ To the extent that the audience for fiction marketed as literary had grown, announcing the novel’s distance from commerce and especially mass culture could quickly pay commercial dividends.

       Spheres of Cultural Production

      My aim in describing how novel-producing institutions marketed their products, here and throughout this book, is decidedly not to criticize them for engaging in commercial activities; rather, it is to show the specific commercial uses to which the idea of the literary was put into the age of television, an issue that scholarship of the era has yet to address. Nor is it my aim to suggest that because novels are always commodities and because in the 1950s the institutions that produced novels developed relationships with mass-media corporations, those novels are somehow artistically compromised. On the contrary, although it is important to recognize novels as commodities in order to appreciate how mass culture’s emergence affected them, it is just as important to recognize that not all commodities are alike: the concrete differences between the institutions of the book trade and those of mass culture affected what they produced, and those effects matter.²⁴ By Michael Kammen’s useful definition, mass culture is that which is “nonregional, highly standardized, and completely commercial” (18). The book trade, for a variety of reasons, could never be thus. For one, barriers to entry into the trade have always been relatively low: it is far less expensive to publish a book than it is to produce a movie or television show, so the possibility of “mass control” over output by a small number of well-capitalized institutions (like the major Hollywood studios or three television networks) is diminished. According to sociologist Paul M. Hirsch, “Conglomerate middlemen do not have the capacity to transform diverse readers of books into a controllable market with an oligopolistic or monopolistic structure” (114); in short, novel production could never be like television production was in the 1950s or movie production in the first half of the twentieth century.²⁵ Books are therefore inevitably a more “producer-oriented” than “consumer-oriented” trade, a distinction Hirsch borrows from Herbert Gans’s study of the relationship between high culture and popular culture, and this is a sociological insight with consequences for both literary output and institutional studies of it.²⁶

      In particular, Gans’s insight has significant implications for this study of the postwar American novel and its institutions. Institutional studies of the arts have sometimes disdained close readings of texts themselves, on the grounds that the answers the studies seek are better found elsewhere (in the structures that distribute and legitimize those texts, for example).²⁷ Throughout the 1950s, as the logic of modernization dictates and as this book shows, the machinery of literary production—the number and size of those structures, the institutions that stood between the novelist and the reader—was indeed growing, as publishing became less of a cottage industry and individual houses became more like conventional businesses. But one of the primary aims of this book is to show the degree to which novelists of the 1950s, as producers in a producer-oriented trade, participated within their novels in the promotion of the novel in general as a cultural and political good, often in terms that echoed the industry’s promotional campaigns and the rhetoric of culture critics.

      To view postwar novels in this light is, hopefully, to take a step toward overcoming what Pascale Casanova calls “the supposedly insuperable antinomy between internal criticism, which looks no further than texts themselves for their meaning, and external criticism, which describes the historical conditions under which texts are produced, without, however, accounting for their literary quality and singularity” (4–5). As there is no categorical separation between mass culture and other forms of culture, there is no such divide between the marketing of postwar American novels and the novels themselves; marketing went, as it were, all the way down, and novelists were, in effect rather than by design, essential collaborators in the project of producing belief in the novel’s cultural value, cocreators of a promotional pitch that was inscribed into the novels themselves in ways that have yet to be appreciated. For this reason, this book is neither exclusively a marketing or business history nor exclusively a study of novelistic representations of mass culture. Either project, on its own, misses something essential about the complex relationship that developed between American novels of the 1950s and the emergent mass culture, which was alternately, if not at once, a marketing partner and a foil, a collaborator and a Cold War bogeyman. This relationship is better grasped by reexamining what and how novels communicated in the context of the book trade’s slow, unsteady, largely neglected modernization, a story of a relatively small set of businesses capitalizing on an opportunity for growth, in part by collaborating with mass-media corporations and in part by advertising their distance from them.

       Advertisements for Themselves

      The novelist’s role as promoter—his or her participation in the project of articulating the specific cultural value of the novel in the age of mass culture, typically by announcing his or her aloneness—was always paradoxical in ways that rarely found expression. These paradoxes are explored in the first two chapters of this book, which outline the emergence and novelistic articulation in the late 1940s and early 1950s of a strategy for advertising the literary novel and the emergence of an institutional apparatus for implementing that strategy, a network of relationships among publishers and between publishers and a range of other institutions. In the story of how Paul Bowles’s avant-garde literary excursion became a best seller—with help from the William Morris Agency and Doubleday—and how Ray Bradbury’s version of a little-esteemed form of genre fiction, published by paperback upstart Ballantine, became a staple of high school English classes, we find far more institutional continuity than institutional divide among supposedly disparate literary spheres. Literary institutions of the postwar era—publishers, teachers, and critics—embraced works that celebrated the idea of the writer’s solitariness and juxtaposed that solitariness against a corrupt, decadent, or totalitarian mass culture, precisely because those novels did the work of producing belief in the cultural and political value of the novel.

      Conversely, the novels discussed in Chapters 3 and 4—Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, respectively—seemed to fail or refuse to do this work, and they were critically derided in the mid-1950s, the former as a “quintessentially middlebrow” compromise and the latter as a lowbrow scandal that precipitated a supposed cultural decline from which we have

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