The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007

DAN N. SINYKIN

In 1968, Time, Inc. purchased the publisher Little, Brown and Company. In 1989, Time merged with Warner Communications, and Little, Brown became a division of the new conglomerate Time Warner. In this, Little, Brown was not unique, riding waves of conglomeration in the publishing industry that submitted publishers to greater commercial pressures and compelled more attention to the bottom line. In 1992, Michael Pietsch, an editor at Little, Brown (now the CEO of Hachette Book Group), acquired what became David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. When it was ready for publication in 1996, Pietsch was tasked with making Wallace’s difficult novel a hit.

Pietsch and Little, Brown launched a hype campaign, a kind of literary striptease, sending a series of postcards to thousands of reviewers and booksellers that promised, among other things, “infinite pleasure.” It worked: Infinite Jest became a hit and Wallace a literary superstar. But the marketing and success unnerved Wallace. Worse, the novel’s commercial success marks its failure on its own terms. Infinite Jest is, at heart, pedagogical and moralistic, and it decries the destruction of American cultural life at the hands of corporate power and the hegemony of entertainment, like that produced by Time Warner. Nothing could be more antithetical to the novel’s project than the promise of infinite pleasure.

With his novel, Wallace attempted to negotiate, in conversation with his agent and editor, a precarious balance between entertainment and edification that would allow him to seduce readers while ultimately criticizing the culture of entertainment that Time Warner hoped to profit from by the novel’s publication. In his words, he wanted “to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine” (61). This artistic position is occupied in the novel by James Incandenza, an avantgarde filmmaker whose ultimate ambition is to use his technical expertise to create a film so entertaining that it will, of necessity, draw his inbent son, Hal, out of himself. The film, called Infinite Jest, ends up being too entertaining: anyone who watches it dies from lack of desire to do anything ever again but watch the film. On one hand, unlike viewers of the eponymous film, many readers give up on Wallace’s novel after two hundred pages, just before the various plotlines begin to merge. On the other hand, Infinite Jest often makes readers—if they pass the two-hundred-page mark—insatiable in their desire for Wallace and his work. With its anticlimactic ending, Wallace aimed to deny the pleasures of catharsis in the hope of turning readers away from the novel and their inbent selves toward recognition of a common loneliness. He wanted his novel to serve as an antidote for a U.S. culture addicted to drugs and entertainment. That the novel remains a hit with a cult of addicted followers is ironic.

As a moment of literary history, Infinite Jest exhibits a complex formal response to changes in the publishing industry. Through attempting to position himself at the margins of literary trade publishing, criticizing its mandate to entertain, Wallace came to represent its core. Infinite Jest’s dialectic of entertainment and edification paved the way for Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the culture of McSweeney’s, and for the autofiction whose displays of the anxieties of authorship have become central to negotiating this conglomerate-era dialectic and gaining prestige in the twenty-first century.1

Little new here. Edification and entertainment: these were the terms of debate (more or less) in Plato’s Republic, Horace’s “Ars Poetica,” and Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry.” The dominant term shifts with the times. The conventional story has it that modernist literature aimed for relative autonomy from the market and its philistine demands, whereas postmodernism embraced the spectacle of commodification. We can line up these movements with developments in the publishing industry. Many of the major houses and editors of the twentieth century got their start publishing modernists and enjoyed the distinction that came with it.2 After World War II, with the GI Bill, a soaring economy, and the turn to paperbacks, the market for books boomed. Writers incorporated this commercialism into their fiction, and the balance between edification and entertainment shifted. Most everything has been elided and erased in this gross simplification of literary history.3 Yet the story itself, regardless of its accuracy, shapes the self-understanding of writers and publishers.4

Publishing houses expanded and, beginning in the 1960s, were purchased by one media conglomerate after another. Conglomerates pressured publishers to increase their profits. But the rationalization of publishing, its submission to the logic of the market, took time and remains incomplete. Against this rationalization, what comes after postmodernism (all the names for which are bad, so I will call it contemporary5), tends neither to embrace nor struggle against the market but, as in the case of Infinite Jest, attempts to negotiate its complicity.

I show how these negotiations emerge from the publishing industry and the quotidian work of making books, to which scholars have paid too little attention. Drawing on archival research and a bit of computational analysis, I show how conglomeration ripened the conditions for the contemporary trend toward autofiction and literary genre fiction. Conglomeration rationalized (through bureaucratization) and mediated (through agents) the relationship between authors and their publishing houses. The implications of these practices have disseminated through the field of trade publishing from marketing, to editing, to agenting, to authorship, with ramifications for which books are written and how.

On June 6, 1977, writers John Brooks, John Hersey, and Herman Wouk, representing the Authors Guild of America, held a press conference where they “called for the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to start proceedings that would eventually end the process of mergers and acquisitions in the book publishing industry” (Dickey). Wouk was quoted in the Washington Post the next day, calling conglomeration “a sinister process” and noting that “[i]n a conglomerate there is a narrowing down of margins— of what is safe and what is publishable,” given the conglomerate’s responsibility to its shareholders (Dickey). The Authors Guild acted in response to a second wave of conglomeration and further concentration. (The first occurred in the mid- to late 1960s when Time bought Little, Brown, and RCA bought Random House, among others.) The press conference led to a Senate hearing, which took place on March 13, 1980, before the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Monopoly, and Business Rights, headed by Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-OH). In his opening remarks, Metzenbaum made his position clear, saying, “we see in the publishing business a trend that exists in too many sectors of today’s economy—and that is acquisition by larger firms of their smaller competitors and the entry into diverse industries by the large conglomerates” (Responsibilities 24). He then opened the floor for a series of prominent writers and publishers.

The two groups testified fiercely in opposition to each other. The writers worried that the pursuit of best sellers and profitable subsidiary rights would displace the pursuit of good literature. E. L. Doctorow, speaking as a writer and as the vice president of the American Center of PEN International, was the most well spoken. He acknowledged that his own work had been published by a conglomerate and that in his experience with his house, “attention is paid to serious works in all fields of thought—fiction, the social sciences, politics, and even to a small extent, poetry” (Responsibilities 42). He avoided the common righteous hyperbole in evidence earlier in the proceedings in Maxwell J. Lillenstein’s statement that “[s]elling books is a unique business, involving the sale of ideas that can determine the fate of civilizations. Books are not commodities to be marketed like toothpaste or soap” (36). Instead, Doctorow averred, “[n]obody is objecting to commerce or to making money. Publishers have always wanted to make money. Traditionally a publishing list has always reflected the tension between the need to make money and the desire to publish well” (43). But he worried that “this delicate balance of pressures within a publishing firm is upset by the conglomerate values—the need for greater and greater profits,” until eventually the need for profits “overloads the scale in favor of commerce.” He quotes an anonymous editor who laments, “Instead of searching for good books, I read manuscripts now in dread that I’ll find someone fine and young and exciting who needs nurturing. I don’t know what hurts more—having to gun them down or going through the terrible charade of publishing them when they don’t stand a chance of distribution in today’s market.” We are approaching a situation, Doctorow argued, where “the crossword-puzzle books and cookbooks and sexual-position books and how-to books and movie-tie-in books and television-celebrity books gradually occupy more of the publisher’s time and investment.” Like Wallace’s Infinite Jest two decades later, Doctorow worried about the “tendency of the publishing industry to be absorbed by the entertainment industry, with all its values of pandering to the lowest common denominator.”6

The president of Simon and Schuster (owned by Gulf and Western), the vice president of Doubleday (which had recently acquired Dell and in 1986 was acquired by Bertelsmann), the chairman of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (who took the company public and diversified into insurance, business consulting, and Sea World), and the president of the Association of American Publishers spoke on behalf of conglomeration. (The chairman of W. W. Norton, still independent, attempted to stay neutral, if slightly favoring conglomeration.) Alexander C. Hoffman, the vice president of Doubleday, said that “the immense diversity of original trade publishing in the United States is likely to continue to expand in the future” (Responsibilities 30). Townsend W. Hoopes, president of the Association of American Publishers, supported this claim, observing that “[t]here has been uninterrupted growth in the number of active publishing firms since the Depression. The number has grown from a low point of 410 in 1934 to approximately 1,700 in 1978” (28). He added that the number of new titles each year rose “from 15,000 in 1960 to 40,000 in 1974” and similarly, “[t]he total number of book titles maintained in print” rose “from 140,000 in 1962 to 490,000 in 1978” (29). William Jovanovich, chairman of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, was more pugnacious. Addressing the threat of government intervention against conglomeration, he bristled, “That notion doesn’t say a . . . lot for a free-market economy, does it? We keep telling the Russians and others that writers ought to be independent of their governments, don’t we? Just who, then, will pay and publish writers?” (32). He showed no patience for arguments that publishers should look beyond the bottom line. “It is a business,” he said, “It is so purely a business that book publishing was the first enterprise in modern history to display all the crucial characteristics of capitalism” (33). He mocked Random House for its pretensions: The president of Random House said, “The backbone of our association has been RCA’s sensitivity to the editorial independence which is essential to publishing. We look forward to a new relationship that ensures this freedom to publish.” He might extend his study of anatomy a bit. Whatever is the backbone, the bloodstream is RCA’s money. Did Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer sell to RCA in their never-ending search for freedom? They didn’t say that at the time they sold.

No legislation resulted from the hearing. But the positions taken there have dominated debates about the publishing industry with remarkable consistency in subsequent decades. Those against conglomeration insist that books are not normal commodities because they shape culture and they fear that submission to the bottom line will constrain the ability to publish good literature. Those who defend conglomeration insist that books are a commodity like any other and assure that more books are being published than ever.7

A pair of memoirs published at the turn of the century by prominent editors exemplify the persistence of the anticonglomeration position. André Schiffrin, managing director of Pantheon until a new CEO fired him for failing to bring in adequate profits, claims that it used to be the case that publishers cared about the public good but that “as the ownership of publishing has changed that equation has been altered. It is now increasingly the case that the owner’s only interest is in making money and as much of it as possible” (5). The implications, he thinks, are dire. Publishers have been reduced, in his now familiar words, to becoming “purveyors of entertainment or of hard information. This has left little room for books with new, controversial ideas or challenging literary voices” (7).

Similarly, Random House editor Jason Epstein—whose achievements include initiating the Library of America series, co-founding The New York Review of Books, and helping trigger the paperback revolution by starting Anchor Books at Doubleday—writes in his memoir that “book publishing has deviated from its true nature by assuming, under duress from unfavorable market conditions and the misconceptions of remote managers, the posture of a conventional business” (4). To his mind, book publishing “more closely resembles a vocation or an amateur sport in which the primary goal is the activity itself rather than its financial outcome.” He luxuriates in memories of the good old days when Random House was located in “the old Villard mansion at Madison and 50th Street,” where authors frequently visited, where he might show up to find “a wayward author who had spent the night there” (5). He remembers Ralph Ellison coming to his “office, smoking a cigar and explaining with his hands how Thelonius Monk developed his chords” (6) and how Ted Geisel “arriv[ed] with his storyboards to recite Green Eggs and Ham to us” (5). Not so anymore. Editors no longer schmooze with writers like they used to, agents have toxically intervened, and “[c]onglomerate budgets require efficiencies and create structures that are incompatible with the notorious vagaries of literary production” (12).

Many continue to disagree, including, now, many academics. Michael Schudson, professor of journalism at Columbia and editor of the post–1945 volume of A History of the Book in America, argues that “consolidation, diversification, and specialization in publishing” have not produced any consequences for “unmeasured abstractions like freedom, diversity, or quality of thought” (7).

I take this impasse as the occasion for my inquiry into conglomeration’s effects. As in Wallace’s attempts to cure his reader of the addiction to entertainment by structuring Infinite Jest in a certain way, conglomeration has had implications for literary form regardless of where one lands on the question of quality. Moving beyond demonization and apologetics, I develop an account of these implications, a theory of American literature in the conglomerate era—a period that lasted for roughly forty years, from RCA’s purchase of Random House in late 1965 to the release of the Amazon Kindle in 2007.8

On one point, everyone agrees. Conglomerate publishers have increasingly committed themselves to profitability in submission to shareholder value.9 Conglomeration transformed the industry. As sociologist John B. Thompson explains, “where there had once been dozens of independent publishing houses, each reflecting the idiosyncratic tastes and styles of their owners and editors, there were now five or six large corporations, each operating as an umbrella organization for numerous imprints” (103).10 The slowing of economic growth that began in the late 1960s and intensified through the 1970s was partly responsible for this consolidation, putting pressure on independent houses until “the sale or merger of the firm [became] a way of solving . . . an intractable set of financial problems” (104). (By the 1980s, new technology made it cheaper and easier to publish, abetting the explosion of small and not-for-profit presses, a twin development to conglomeration, which I treat later.)

The conglomerates, at different speeds, worked to increase the profitability of publishing by rationalizing it, to the extent that this has been possible. Publishing managers have come to see “the acquisition process as the building of a portfolio of risk” (Thompson 136). Insofar as literary fiction fits into a publisher’s portfolio, it is likely to sell fewer copies immediately but sell longer as part of a backlist. While the success of literature remains unpredictable, “there are things you can do to inform and guide acquisitions decisions—you can look at the historical performance of similar titles, you can introduce more formalized budgeting procedures, you can give sales and marketing directors some role in acquisitions decisions” (128).

The rationalization of publishing has changed the editor’s job. Smoking cigars with Ralph Ellison has given way to filling out profit and loss forms. André Schiffrin and Jason Epstein got their starts in the 1950s, which means they experienced the dramatic shift and felt bitter about it. Later generations of editors entered and rose up in a changed business, in which the demand that each book carry its weight had become normalized as the editor’s mandate, codified by paperwork. But the pride and profit in publishing prestigious books remains. This has led to the lionization of a particular kind of book. In the words of Gerald Howard, executive editor of the Knopf Doubleday Group (a division of Penguin Random House, owned by Bertelsmann), “the arrival of a literary property that holds the promise of both review and publicity glory and substantial sales, can instantly engage the forces of irrational exuberance” (196). Publishers annually turn out a few such highly hyped books, whose authors have been paid outrageous advances, in the hope of achieving that ideal crossover of prestige and sales—recently, books like Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and Emma Cline’s The Girls. The irrational exuberance these books inspire draws resources away from the so-called midlist, books that sell between ten thousand and a hundred thousand copies.

Because editors have less time, agents now do much of the labor of nurturing and editing authors: “agents will spend time with their clients discussing their next book, and may read draft chapters and give them advice and feedback” (Thompson 97). Agents have contributed importantly to American literature since at least the start of the twentieth century, but only with conglomeration have they become indispensable. As Jason Epstein complains, “forty years ago, agents were mere peripheral necessities, like dentists” (6). The rise of the agent—Candida Donadio, Ronald Hobbs, and Andrew Wylie, to name a few who should be more well known—is a great unwritten story of contemporary literary history. Editors depend on agents to suss out the market’s desires. As Thompson notes, “editors have, in effect, outsourced the initial selection process to agents” (75). Agents facilitate an author’s business, striving for large advances, selling subsidiary rights, and negotiating contracts. They have become, for authors, “the necessary point of entry into the field of trade publishing” (73). Because of their role as diviners of the market, the publishing industry’s invisible hand, no figure is more emblematic of the conglomerate era.

The ubiquity of agents inspires some resentment among editors and publishers who have a less immediate relationship with authors than before. For example, in the first paragraph of his memoir, Epstein defends the noble intentions of the editors he has known: “If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers. They might, for example, have become literary agents” (1). For their part, agents argue that they defend authors against exploitation. For example, the Society of Authors’ Representatives fought for years to get publishers to produce more detailed royalty statements for the sake of transparency (“Notes”). Ronald Hobbs, who by his account was “the only black literary agent in his profession” in 1973 and claimed that his agency had placed “during the past decade, fully fifty percent of published black writings,” argued that agents were especially important for black writers in a business that was almost all white (“Precis”). Hobbs was quoted in the New York Times saying that, “when black writers have managed to get published in the past, they ‘have been grossly exploited by publishers. They need the assistance of a literary agent even more than the white writer’” (Watkins BR 8).

What has the rationalization of publishing meant for literary fiction in the conglomerate era? At each stage of publishing—in the hands of the agent, the editor, the publisher—a text must now, more rigorously than ever, demonstrate its potential profitability. Authors are regularly confronted with the demand that their work be sellable. Literary fiction is no different than other texts in this regard. Has this milieu from which texts emerge had any effect on what actually gets published or on literary form? What techniques have literary writers used to negotiate the pressures of the conglomerate era? Has midlist fiction, as is often feared, collapsed in favor of the elusive best seller?

It is difficult to answer this last question definitively because we lack good sales data. But what evidence we do have is illuminating. If we consider Publishers Weekly’s best seller lists next to the winners of major prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Whiting Award, a trend emerges.11 Before 1980, the best seller lists included a mix of prestigious and popular fiction: William Faulkner beside Leon Uris; Saul Bellow beside Herman Wouk; Mary McCarthy beside Harold Robbins. Around 1980 this all changes, and the best seller list suddenly becomes dominated by a small group of brand-name authors: Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel, and the like.

As a change point, 1980 makes sense. Though the first wave of conglomeration took place in the mid- to late 1960s, many of the new owners allowed the publishers considerable autonomy. The second wave, which inspired the Authors Guild to protest, brought rationalization with greater urgency. Chain bookstores had exploded in the previous decade, which allowed brand-name books to be efficiently marketed and distributed. Although this evidence does not prove the decimation of midlist books—it could well be that fiction sold better overall, and brand fiction by far the best—it does show the discovery of brand fiction by the conglomerates and a new divergence between prestige and sales.

These are the conditions under which, I argue, literary writers adopted two distinct trends that mark contemporary fiction: literary genre fiction, in which writers adopt genre forms like fantasy, the western, the detective novel, or the postapocalyptic novel, which includes Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant; and autofiction, where novelists blur the line between autobiography and fiction, which includes Philip Roth’s The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, John A. Williams’s !Click Song, Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Autofiction features protagonists whose characteristics and situations so closely resemble those of the author—often down to their name—that such novels invite readers to mistake fiction for real life.

My treatment of these developments will be too brief. But I explain why these forms flourish under conglomeration and provide a few close readings to illustrate and substantiate my claims. I consider each in turn, beginning with autofiction.

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann, contends that literary texts possess a reflexivity that expresses the institutional conditions from which they emerge. We can see the postwar “proliferation” of campus novels as a “thematic symptom of a larger shift in the institutional arrangements of postwar literary production as such” (47). More writers wrote campus novels because they worked on campuses. McGurl takes the argument further, suggesting that the “metafictional reflexivity” characteristic of postmodernism was “related to its production in and around a programmatically analytical and pedagogical environment” (47–48). His argument leads to a few curious insights. If he is right, then we can see metafictional novels like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire or John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse “not as radically ‘deconstructive’ . . . but as radically conventional, as testaments to the continuing interest of literary forms as objects of a certain kind of professional research” (48). McGurl observes how metafictional reflexivity carries “an aura of intellectual sophistication” that holds up “a flattering mirror to the critic’s own sophistication,” producing symbolic capital for such work. The campus novel and “the portrait of the artist,” of which metafiction is often a particularly heady version—think of Don DeLillo’s White Noise as the former and Mao II as the latter—are, for McGurl, “signature genres of the Program Era” (49).

I extend McGurl’s argument to autofiction, which I understand as reflexively expressing the institutional conditions of the conglomerate era. A limitation of McGurl’s magisterial project is its lack of an account of conglomeration. McGurl writes, “I have less to say about the nitty-gritty of writer-publisher relations than I might, and even less about such things as the corporate consolidation of the publishing industry” (15). The program and the conglomerate must be seen as overlapping conditions of contemporary authorship. Neither is complete without the other.

Autofiction, an exhibitionist version of the portrait of the artist, extends and riffs on that form’s long history. The idea here, following McGurl, is that autofiction takes on particular formal and thematic characteristics that express conglomeration. This is at first apparent from the term itself—that we have increasingly turned to “autofiction” to characterize what has been an emergent variation on an old form over a few decades. McGurl identifies a feature of autofiction in a review of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, noting how a certain kind of contemporary novel “can barely stand being a novel. All of its charisma, such as it is, will have to be borrowed from reality itself, reality at its most . . . real” (“Novel’s Forking Path”). This is very different from the metafiction preceding it: instead of Pale Fire, I Love Dick. Another feature common to autofiction is its fixation on the publishing industry: editors and agents become characters; participation in the milieu of literary production—from writers’ colonies to publishing lunches to launch parties to book tours—becomes part of the plot.

In both its reality hunger and its depiction of its milieu, autofiction expresses the conditions of its production and negotiates those conditions to pry from them symbolic and financial capital. Like metafiction, autofiction is a technique by which writers accumulate symbolic capital, in this case by expressing the contemporary pressures of authorship. More specifically, the earnest disruption of the boundary between novel and memoir, differently than metafiction’s spoofs, flatters literary critics (like myself) who are trained to navigate this ambiguity and pleases reviewers and industry insiders who enjoy (or enjoy finding fault with) the sophisticated treatments of their milieu. McGurl sees autofiction as a bid not only for prestige but for sales. “Think of the large audiences still commanded by biography, history, and memoir,” he writes, positing that autofiction “is hungry for some of that action” (“Novel’s Forking Path”).12 Autofiction also plays to the popular desire for gossip, a peek behind the scenes, a point Amy Hungerford makes about the publishing habits of McSweeney’s and Dave Eggers’s memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (21–22). In this sense, autofiction is a prestige version of reality TV. These texts engage dialectically with institutional developments in the publishing industry, at times resisting, at times signaling complicity, engaging at the level of both form and content.

Consider Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. It takes the form of the journal of Thelonious Ellison, who, like Everett, is a fiction writer and an English professor in southern California. On the novel’s second page, Ellison describes an encounter with a literary agent at a party in New York, “one of the tedious affairs where people who write mingle with people who want to write and with people who can help either group begin or continue to write” (2). The agent says Ellison “could sell many books if [he’d] forget about writing retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists”—both of which Everett has done—”and settle down to write the true, gritty real stories of black life.” Ellison, like Everett, is black. Ellison’s current novel, which has been rejected seventeen times, narrates how, according to one editor, “Aristophanes and Euripides kill a younger, more talented dramatist, then contemplate the death of metaphysics” (42). The editor, Hockney Hoover, asks Ellison’s agent, “who wants to read this shit? It’s too difficult for the market.”

Ellison considers dropping his agent because of the agent’s unhappiness that Ellison’s work, as Ellison himself acknowledges, is “not commercial enough to make any real money” (42). “The line is, you’re not black enough,” his agent tells him (43). Meanwhile, Juanita Mae Jenkins, a young middle-class black woman who attended Oberlin, is enjoying wild critical and commercial success for a novel written in exaggerated black English, depicting black urban life, which booksellers and reviewers receive as an authentic account of black experience. Ellison, disgusted but in need of money to support his ailing mother, writes his own hyperbolic parody under a pseudonym and calls it My Pafology—the entirety of which is included within the text of Erasure. My Pafology becomes a commercial success, and Erasure concludes with My Pafology winning a major literary award, granted by a committee on which Ellison is a member, committed to his secret, yet horrified by the depth of his colleagues’ gullibility.

Everett portrays a publishing industry in which agents, editors, booksellers, reviewers, and academics are all complicit in conflating fiction with the authentic experience of race. It is not that literature has gotten better or worse or more or less diverse, as in the debates with which I began. Instead, in this novel, literary markets in the era of conglomeration are shaping what the public understands as blackness according to a kind of liberal multicultural fantasy of authenticity that sells. That Everett gives his protagonist the handle Thelonious Ellison informs us, not subtly, of the novel’s preoccupation with how the legacy of mid-twentieth-century black cultural life (Thelonious Monk, Ralph Ellison) continues to establish expectations for contemporary black artists. Richard Wright’s Native Son is the novel that most haunts Erasure. Both Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We Lives in Da Ghetto and Ellison’s My Pafology (published under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh) replicate Native Son’s naturalism and sentimental humanism. Erasure, then, repeats fifty years later James Baldwin’s famous repudiation of Wright’s legacy, a repudiation meant to make space for different kinds of black writing. The comparison illuminates: Baldwin’s rejection of Wright in 1949 exemplified the Cold War rejection of political didacticism for aesthetic freedom (a position he revised in later years); Everett’s rejection in 2001 exemplifies contemporary frustration with an industry that allows the market to dictate racial discourse. It is finally fundamental to note that Everett published his unstinting criticism of popular readership and the entire apparatus of prestige not with a conglomerate but with Graywolf Press, a very prestigious small, not-for-profit press. As such, Erasure is not exemplary of conglomerate autofiction in the way that Infinite Jest or Lerner’s 10:04 are. It is, instead, a blistering conglomerate-era autofiction from the critically respected margins.

It is easy to see how literary genre fiction satisfies the demands of the conglomerate era. Hybrid novels like Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, however different they may otherwise be, aim for Gerald Howard’s ideal of “review and publicity glory and substantial sales.” They aspire to marry literary fiction’s symbolic capital with genre fiction’s financial capital. They want to be prizewinners and best sellers.

An alternative explanation for the emergence of literary genre fiction might quickly come to mind. Over the past several decades— the period I am charting—genre fiction has increasingly garnered academic attention and critical respect. Many of the literary writers who adopt generic forms, including Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Junot Diaz, have taken part in this reevaluation. Could it be that these writers’ motivation has more to do with this shift in judgment rather than the conglomeration of the publishing industry? But these accounts are inseparable. The critical shift with regard to genre fiction is predicated on changing conditions of labor and production in the publishing industry (along with other material factors, including the democratization of higher education as a result of the GI Bill and the postwar boom). Thankfully, many scholars have given us good accounts of the changing reception of genre fiction. Few have undertaken a study of the publishing industry that would account for the conditions that have motivated writers and critics to have an incentive to valorize and bring prestige to genre writing in the form of literary genre fiction.13

One might reasonably ask: haven’t literary writers taken up genre forms for centuries? Yes, the history of the novel is a history of mimicking and absorbing genres: romance, biography, diary, travelogue. As with autofiction, I contend that the way literary genre fiction works has changed with conglomeration. Another comparison with postmodernism is instructive. Postmodernism’s internalization of the market, its embrace of commodification, its blurring of high and low culture involved playing with genre. But that play was often ironic, heady. Compare Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) with Inherent Vice (2009). Both are detective novels. But the former is a parody built around arcane scholarly details, errata in Jacobean drama, and obscure courier agencies, whereas the latter plays hard-boiled noir in the Raymond Chandler style a lot closer to straight. Along the trajectory from Lot 49 to Inherent Vice we might locate DeLillo’s The Names (1982), a literary spy novel, and White Noise (1985), a campus novel that devolves into a thriller. What changed, we now know, was that around 1980 prizewinners and best sellers diverged in terms of sales at the same time that conglomerate publishers began more intensely demanding profitability. To be clear: my claim is not that Pynchon and DeLillo set out deliberately to adopt generic conventions in response to conglomeration; instead, they worked from within a milieu under pressure from conglomeration’s rationalization and mediation, which produced ripe conditions for the emergence of a new aesthetic form, of which their novels are emblematic.

Genre fiction, too, in its contemporary form—romance, mystery, western, fantasy, science fiction, which had developed its contours with the paperback revolution of the 1950s—crystallized with the spread of chain bookstores in the 1970s. At every level of publishing, people had to ask, what does it look like for literary fiction to truly embrace commodification? Not to mimic or mock commodification, but to truly sell? As further evidence that the relationship between literary and popular fiction changed around 1980, consider this quote from literary agent Gail Hochman, President of the Association of Authors’ Representatives. She identifies John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978) as the turning point. Before then, she writes, “a literary book was literary, a commercial book was commercial, never the twain would meet” (2). On its face, this statement is absurd. Literary books were as commercial as commercial books in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: Catch–22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Lolita. One only need consider Random House’s exultation over Portnoy’s Complaint to see the wild sellability of literary books at the time. As editor Joe Fox wrote to other Random editors in an internal memo, I hope you will all be delighted to hear that we will shortly have a new addition to the Spring list: Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. . . . Pub date: sometime in March, 1969, the tenth anniversary of the publication of Goodbye, Columbus. Advance: unknown at this moment, but probably astronomical and worth every penny of it.(“Memo”)

They indeed paid Roth an astronomical advance of $233,500 and made it up by selling more than three million copies in the first three years (“Distribution”). I take Hochman’s point to be that before 1978, agents could treat literary and commercial books as separate types because they both sold fine. When commercial books broke away, it became imperative to strategize ways for literary fiction to catch up. Beginning in the late 1970s, that is, the industry began to think newly about the possibilities of making literary fiction commercial. Earnestly taking up genre was one salient way.

An account of literary genre fiction as a conglomerate-era phenomenon will allow us to look anew at the careers of leading writers. I briefly consider Cormac McCarthy. In the early 1960s, the unsolicited and “poorly typed” manuscript of McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, “addressed simply to ‘Random House,’” landed on the desk of editor Albert Erskine (“Letter”). Erskine, who edited William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Penn Warren, among others, liked it, and Random House published it in 1965. McCarthy’s early style, from The Orchard Keeper through Suttree (1979), is densely lyrical, difficult, and gothic, and his books barely sold. He maintained a very small regional audience. Erskine used his connections to famous writers—which McCarthy was not—to help McCarthy acquire grants to live on, most notably an inaugural MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, which allowed McCarthy to finish Blood Meridian. In a letter to a friend, McCarthy describes the MacArthur as “a little windfall from a foundation,” which will allow him to “stay in the business awhile longer” (“McCarthy to Woolmer” 27 Jan.). Critics often mark Blood Meridian as a turning point in McCarthy’s career, the novel with which he moves from Appalachia to the West. Stylistically, however, it has more in common with the work that comes before than that which comes later—it is dense, difficult, allusive, and it, too, barely sold, quickly going out of print. In the late 1980s, McCarthy, who had been writing and publishing for decades, was poor and virtually unknown. In early 1989, he wrote in a letter, “I’ve been a full time professional writer for 28 years and I’ve never received a royalty check. That, I’ll betcha, is a record” (“McCarthy to Woolmer” 8 Apr.).

But in 1992, McCarthy published All the Pretty Horses. It sold 100,000 copies and won the National Book Award. It was turned into a blockbuster movie. Formally, it departs from McCarthy’s earlier stylistic difficulty and his picaresque, arguably shapeless plots, adopting the popular form of the western—though not without losing the author’s distinctive voice. It is model literary genre fiction.

A few things happened between 1985, when Blood Meridian was published, and 1992. 1985 marks the year that young adult fiction overtook literary fiction as Random House’s most published category of novel, a significant landmark in literary fiction’s fifty-year decline from making up 50 percent of Random House’s fiction list to 30 percent by 2000. As the decades progressed, literary fiction needed to make an ever-stronger pitch for its value to Random House.

In 1987, Erskine retired, and McCarthy moved to Knopf (which belonged to the same conglomerate). In 1989, Random House fired longtime executive Robert L. Bernstein. By all accounts, Bernstein was well liked by the editorial staff and served to buffer Random House from its conglomerate owners. Bernstein “did his best to sustain the old improvisational Random House style,” writes Epstein, adding that Bernstein “insulated his colleagues from the five-year budgets and other corporate nonsense that the RCA engineers to whom Bob reported demanded” (91). Robert Gottlieb, who edited Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, and Toni Morrison, writes that “one of Bob’s greatest contributions to the well-being of all of us at Random was to provide a solid barrier between us and the potentially disruptive ownership” (193). The CEO of Random House’s parent company, Advance Publications, S. I. Newhouse disliked Bernstein from the beginning but kept him on for nearly a decade not least because he liked Gottlieb and Gottlieb defended Bernstein. Shortly after promoting Gottlieb to editor of The New Yorker, Newhouse canned Bernstein and hired Alberto Vitale. The New York Times, reporting on the move, quoted an industry executive as saying that Bernstein “was able to avoid doing the unpleasant things that you have to do to consolidate businesses, like making lots of heads roll,” but that “his successor will be forced to do it” (McDowell n. pag.). Unforced, Vitale was happy to do the unpleasant work. When he showed up, he told the staff, in his own recollection, that they “needed to make money” (Knufinke n. pag.). As he remembers it, he asked André Schiffrin, who ran Pantheon, to make a budget, and when Schiffrin refused, he fired him. For his part, Schiffrin describes Vitale as an “illiterate businessman” and writes that his “new policy was that each book should make money on its own and that one title should no longer be allowed to subsidize another” (89, 91).

Such was the context for McCarthy’s first book of literary genre fiction. My claim, again, is not that he consciously chose to adopt generic forms to placate his publisher. My claim is that McCarthy’s oeuvre, his dramatic stylistic pivot, becomes newly legible when read through conglomeration. We should reimagine McCarthy’s career as divided less by Appalachia and the West than by refuge from and then submission to the conglomerate era, culminating with his publication of Pulitzer Prize–winning, Oprah Book Club–endorsed, postapocalyptic mega-best seller The Road in 2007.

Conglomeration has been accompanied by the proliferation of small presses, many of which have adopted grant-based, not-for-profit funding models. With support from local foundations, St. Paul and Minneapolis emerged as an especially hospitable site for these new presses with the founding of Milkweed Editions in 1980, Coffee House Press in 1984, and Graywolf Press’s arrival from Washington state in 1984. If, for the conglomerates, the profit motive pervades all levels of selection and production, the not-for-profits experience relative freedom. Daniel Slager, the publisher and CEO of Milkweed, notes that “the composition of our list is directed not by a desire for commercial success, but rather by a determination to find and nurture writers whose work is transformative” (222). Fiona McCrae, the longtime publisher at Graywolf, has said of the conglomerates, “the context they’re working in involves the wrong kind of economic stress—or at least, a focus on economics and commerce that is not always conducive to interesting literary dialogue, or finding the new things that are happening at the edges of the literary culture. . . . [T]hey are unlikely,” for instance, “to go anywhere near essays, or hybrid books that fall between genres or play with conventions.” Graywolf’s mission, its freedom to consider priorities other than the bottom line, has allowed it to publish such texts, including critical favorites in the past few years that have already become staples at academic conferences and on syllabi, like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. In 2016, Rankine and Nelson won MacArthur Fellowships, to Graywolf’s delight. Citizen’s unusual hybridity led to its becoming a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in the categories of both poetry and criticism, winning in poetry.

Within the conglomerate-era publishing field, not-for-profit presses function as the obverse of the conglomerates. The latter must produce sales numbers by satisfying the audience; the former must satisfy donors by producing prestige. For both, authors must negotiate the entertainment-edification dialectic, but the conglomerates privilege profit, while the not-for-profits, in the words of Slager and McCrae, privilege “transformative” work and “new things that are happening at the edges.”

As a case study in the differences produced by these two publishing milieus, consider this unlikely pair: Infinite Jest and Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004). Infinite Jest is synonymous with the maximalist novel; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a slim, spare lyric. To compare them might seem like an instance of apples and oranges. Both take as their central concern how contemporary Americans rely on drugs and TV entertainment to cope with a collective, national loneliness. Both texts position themselves as therapeutic, if fraughtly so. The texts imagine themselves as offering their readers psychological, emotional, and interpretive tools for extricating themselves from the lonely American mediascape. Comparing these otherwise very different canonical literary texts, one poetry, one a novel, sheds light on how they are shaped by their different publishing arrangements.

To review: the pressure to entertain—the promise made by his publisher that Infinite Jest would offer infinite pleasure—governed how David Foster Wallace structured his novel. He aimed for it to be entertaining enough to keep readers engaged until the end, but not so entertaining that it would be complicit with the entertainment culture it criticized. He and his publisher hoped his manic, effervescent prose and dark sense of humor would propel readers through hundreds of pages as they attempted to sort out the obscure details of the labyrinthine plot. Wallace hoped to help his readers recognize the dangers of coping with American loneliness through addiction to drugs and entertainment, a danger, he felt, that posed an existential threat to the nation.

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely imagines itself as the national liver, and, as Lisa Siraganian argues, Rankine’s “liver-writing aims to clean out the country of toxins by analyzing them and transforming them into benign substances” (n. pag.). Midway through, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely’s speaker goes to lunch with her editor to discuss the book she is writing “on hepatotoxicity, also known as liver failure” (Rankine 53). The speaker makes a point of noting that “in the public imagination, liver failure is associated with alcoholism, but the truth is 55 percent of the time liver failure is drug-induced.” Indeed, the editor shows the speaker an article that states, “the liver is particularly vulnerable to drugs” (54). Rankine makes clear her metaphorical use of the liver with a crude anatomical drawing of a human with a liver situated above the stomach, which leads to bowels drawn as the United States. Like the editor and the speaker, who are both on psychiatric drugs, Americans endanger their livers and lives with the drugs they take in an attempt to be well. In addition to drugs, the speaker uses television as a method to cope with loneliness, though, similar to the ironic self-destructiveness of drugs, TV only makes her lonelier. As Siraganian notes, “Whether we ingest pharmaceuticals such as Tylenol, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, and Lithium, or self-prescribe ‘therapeutic’ television and DVD viewing to ameliorate feelings of isolation and despair, our medicated lives paradoxically trigger an American cultural condition of hepatotoxicity that will destroy us” (n. pag.). Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, like Infinite Jest, is meant to serve as a liver, ameliorating readers’ hepatotoxicity, but in the process the speaker, taking on the toxins herself, intensifies her loneliness, which could be fatal.

Despite how much the two texts share—in terms of their diagnosis of the national ailment, in terms of their visions of the therapeutic function of literature—they strikingly diverge in terms of form. We feel this divergence when taking each into our hands. Infinite Jest, thick and heavy, takes the shape of a very large novel. When we open it, it reads as a novel, even when pushing at the novel’s narrative conventions through its labyrinthine structure and use of endnotes, which encourage us to flip regularly to the back of the book. It stretches the novel while remaining within the commercially viable genre. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, on the other hand, immediately confronts us with its unusual shape. Measuring 5.5” x 10”, it is tall and narrow, forcing adjustments in how we encounter the page. The book opens with an image of a TV broadcasting static at the bottom of an otherwise blank white page, an image that repeats intermittently, dividing the book into sections. Images feature prominently throughout, punctuating dense, lyrical prose paragraphs. Although Rankine writes short narratives in prose, avoiding poetic lineation, she identifies the text on the front cover as “An American Lyric.” Graywolf markets it as “Lyric Essay/Poetry.” It is, in other words, exemplary of the “hybrid books that fall between genres or play with conventions” that McCrae favors. While Infinite Jest’s formal innovations can be shoehorned more easily into commercial success—and were, in fact, developed with such success ambivalently in mind—Don’t Let Me Be Lonely puts up substantive impediments to its sales. Its size makes it difficult to shelve. Its hybrid genre makes it difficult to know where to put it. Its lyric voice cares less about entertaining the reader than does Infinite Jest’s narrator. Yet these same impediments to sales make it attractive in terms of innovation, transformation, and prestige, which allows Graywolf to satisfy its donors and acquire more funds to publish more books like Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, such as Rankine’s Citizen.

Conglomerates and not-for-profits express their investment in one side or the other of the entertainment-edification dialectic through their marketing. Little, Brown describes Infinite Jest on its back cover as bending “every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value.” Graywolf blurbs the prestigious Jorie Graham on Don’t Let Me Be Lonely’s back cover, saying the book exhibits “such raw political courage and aesthetic bravery [that] it sends tremors through the entire field of American poetry.” Little, Brown, fairly obviously, wants to sell as many copies of Infinite Jest as possible. In its marketing, Graywolf is pursuing symbolic capital, which can be turned into financial capital through grants and foundations. Graham writes in her blurb that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely “defines its own genre.” That the book is difficult to categorize becomes a point of pride. Marketing it as “Lyric Essay/Poetry” taps into Graywolf’s advocacy for the lyric essay as an innovative hybrid genre, promulgated by John D’Agata, the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, in a series of anthologies published by Graywolf. We can interpret Graywolf’s embrace of the lyric essay as one way it brands itself as different from the conglomerates. Even as Graywolf’s work with writers like Rankine, Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, and Leslie Jamison has been unusually successful at producing symbolic capital, it illustrates how not-for-profits create alternative conditions for authors seeking to navigate the demands of the conglomerate era.

The conglomerate era ended in 2007 with the financial crisis and Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle e-reader. With the Kindle, the dominance of online bookselling, and its own publishing imprints, Amazon has transformed the economics of publishing. As McGurl notes, Amazon facilitates self-publishing through Kindle Direct Publishing, “which for 30 percent of the proceeds on any electronic text sold is designed to circumvent the traditional gatekeepers of American literary production, ushering in a new age of self-authorized popular creativity and low-cost literary entertainment” (“Everything and Less” 449). Because e-books are easy to self-publish and sell through Amazon, the number of published novels each year has soared over the past decade. In terms of overall sales figures, by 2015 Amazon sold an astonishing forty percent “of all new books” (Wasserman 53). According to Steve Wasserman, “Amazon so dominates the marketplace that it feels free to bulldoze the competition, dictating terms to suppliers and customers alike” (54). This includes the company’s attempt to control e-book prices, which led to a highly publicized dispute with publishing conglomerate Hachette in 2014. In a strange inversion, Hachette, a large multinational corporation, which had been one of the bad guys in the conglomerate era, was now the underdog, even being defended by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. Like the Authors Guild at their press conference in 1977, allies of traditional publishing have been calling, ever more urgently, for the U.S. Department of Justice to pursue an antitrust case against Amazon.

These developments have changed the calculus for the conglomerates. The combination of Amazon’s hegemonic ascendance and the 2007–2008 global financial crisis produced a situation in which “it is more and more difficult to publish for the long term, to adopt acquisition strategies that are aimed at building a backlist over time, precisely because the overriding imperative is to meet your budget targets for the current year and to fill the gap that is opened up every year” (Thompson 379–80). In practice, this means publishers have less freedom to acquire literary fiction that may not sell in great numbers immediately but will sell steadily for a long time—once, not long ago, in the conglomerate era, this was a viable element of a publisher’s portfolio of risk. Worse, because the conglomerates demand substantial annual growth “in a market that is largely flat” (Thompson 381), publishers are set up for failure and, as Wasserman notes, “editors [are held] hostage to an unsustainable commercial imperative” (42). The increasing shift to e-books and the decline of physical books may ultimately threaten not only the continued publication of literary fiction by the conglomerates, but the viability of conglomerate publishing itself (Thompson 407–9).

The Age of Amazon, as McGurl calls it, requires further study. We have yet to see the full implications of this industry shift for authorship and literary form. In one of the few essays on the topic, Nick Levey observes how the explosion of the self-publishing market makes entrepreneurs of authors, who can claim greater agency in marketing and pricing their work than they could in traditional publishing. Such entrepreneurship, he argues, produces consequences for form, such as renewed favor for “the serialized format, expressing consciousness of strategies to increase income,” and the symmetrical notion that the “towering, intimidating form of the big novel thus needs to be viewed partly as an expression of the configuration of the literary market in the twentieth century.” Although we have good reason to believe Levey on serialization, he is wrong about the decline of the big novel, as Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire, Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, and Tartt’s The Goldfinch can attest.

Many conglomerate-era conditions—the rationalization of publishing, the ubiquity of agents, the demand for sellability—persist alongside new conditions being imposed by Amazon. As such, while we will see new formal innovations responsive to the Age of Amazon, autofiction, literary genre fiction, and the big novel continue to preside as dominant modes of literary fiction. But these forms are changing, too. We might look at Lerner’s 10:04 as an autofiction novel poised between the conglomerate era and the age of Amazon, worried about the viability of literary publishing in a “postcodex world” (154). In the novel, the narrator, Ben, describes having dinner with his agent to celebrate his enormous advance for what will become 10:04. Ben expresses confusion over the publisher’s desire to pay him so much when his previous book, despite critical acclaim, sold so poorly. His agent tells him “publishers pay for prestige.” Ben thinks, “This would have made sense to me in the eighties or nineties, when the novel was more or less still a viable commodity form, but why would publishers, all of whom seemed to be perpetually reorganizing, downsizing, scrambling to survive in the postcodex world, be willing to convert real capital into the merely symbolic?” He is asking: why publish prestige autofiction in the Age of Amazon?

Ben is rightly dubious of his agent’s answer but wrongly dismissive of symbolic capital as merely symbolic, and he misconstrues contemporary publishing. 10:04 itself is the evidence of his misconstrual. Literary fiction will not go extinct in this new publishing landscape. Just as with the old conglomeration, we are not facing a question of whether Amazon has decimated literary fiction or enlivened it by encouraging authorial entrepreneurship. We must eschew reductive framings. What we see instead are writers like Lerner—autofictionalists and literary genre writers and writers of whatever forms will flourish now—learning how to negotiate symbolic capital by capitalizing on the many ways it brings publishers not merely prestige but also financial capital, through grants, prizes, recognition, and sales. As symbolic and financial capital intertwine ever more tightly, Lerner has learned how to convert his own anxieties about contemporary publishing into a smart gamble for a publisher—Picador, owned by Macmillan, owned by Holtzbrinck— striving to stay, this year in the black once more.

University of Notre Dame

Footnotes

  • Dan N. Sinykin is a postdoctoral fellow in English and Digital Humanities at the University of Notre Dame. He has published articles on Jumpa Lahiri and Cormac McCarthy. Current work in progress includes books titled “The Conglomerate Era: A Computational History of Literature in the Age of the Agent” and “Neoliberal Apocalypse: American Literature and the Long Downturn, 1965–2016.”

  • 1 I am following Pierre Bourdieu: “to abolish the singularity of the ‘creator’ in favour of the relations which made the work intelligible, only better to rediscover it at the end of the task of reconstructing the space in which the author finds himself encompassed and included as a point” (xix). In this case, we come to see Infinite Jest not as the work of a genius but as the expression of an artistic challenge at the heart of contemporary literary production. In one of the few other attempts to consider the implications of conglomeration for contemporary literature, Michael Szalay, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, performs an allegorical reading of Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia in relation to CBS and Viacom to argue that “novelists are enmeshed in the branding and merchandizing of literary cultural capital on behalf of media corporations—often in ways they cannot control or understand.” Such branding and merchandising, attempts at synergy, certainly occur, though probably less frequently than Szalay suggests. For an account of how the publishing industry and global markets have shaped postcolonial literature, see Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers.

  • 2 Drawing in part from historian John Tebbels, Loren Glass writes that in the interwar years, “[t]he New York publishing world had been an insular community of (mostly) men, all of whom knew each other and most of whom shared a commitment to literary culture that, they felt, distinguished their industry and their product from others” (15). Specifically, I’m thinking of Alfred Knopf, Bennett Cerf, Donald Klopfer, Harold K. Guinzburg, Dick Simon, Max Schuster, Leon Shimkin, William Warder Norton, Horace Liveright, and James Laughlin, to name a few.

  • 3 This narrative tacitly focuses on self-consciously literary fiction to the neglect of various genres of popular writing, omitting, not least, the importance of the Book of the Month Club, created in 1926, in the heyday of modernism, and its role in developing middle-brow taste. See Radway for a complete account. Brier offers a nuanced account of the rising commercialism of trade book publishing in the long 1950s that helps situate modernism’s claims to relative autonomy and postmodernism’s rejection of those claims. The classic, influential, and increasingly contested accounts of the transition from modernism to postmodernism are Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism, and, for the novel in particular, Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction.

  • 4 As a term, postmodernism is obsolescent. Recent prominent accounts of this obsolescence can be found in Lee Konstantinou’s Cool Characters, Joseph North’s Literary Criticism, and Mark McGurl’s The Program Era. McGurl proposes replacing postmodernism with three terms—”technomodernism” (Barth, Pynchon), “high cultural pluralism” (Morrison, Cisneros), and “lower-middle-class modernism” (Beatty, Carver)—to fix the elisions and reductions of the old term. I contend that postmodernism retains limited usefulness to describe a set of trends that characterize some literary fiction from especially the long 1960s, including metafictionality, a parodic embrace of commodification, and the collision of high and low culture, which is how I use the term in this essay. For a sense of developments in the understanding of modernism, see Mao and Walkowitz.

  • 5 For a rigorous account of the limits and affordances of “the contemporary” as a periodizing term, see Hungerford, “On the Period,” and Martin.

  • 6 Archibald MacLeish told a more amusing tale. He told how he read in the paper, one morning, that his publisher, “Houghton Mifflin was about to be bought against its will by a California railroad” (Responsibilities 45). He told the subcommittee, “I was furious.” He contacted his “fellow Houghton Mifflin writer, John Kenneth Galbraith,” and the two of them, along with other of their “colleagues,” “informed . . . Houghton Mifflin, and then the railroad, and finally the world that we did not wish to be published by a railroad and certainly not by a California railroad—that we much preferred to be published by a publisher. And so in the end it was arranged.”

  • 7 The rise of the MFA has occasioned a different version that runs in parallel with this debate—the MFA reproduces robotic sameness; the MFA allows for more, more diverse, and better writing than ever—which Mark McGurl defuses, maps, and analyzes in The Program Era.

  • 8 These dates, like all periodization claims, artificially pin to a specific moment what is an ongoing process and so are a provisional heuristic that hopefully illuminates the object of study. In this case, we could, as Evan Brier does, look back to October 1959, when “Random House sold 30 percent of its shares to the public” as the key moment that kicked off “the wave of mergers and stock sales that would dominate the publishing world” for decades to come (130). I have chosen the sale of Random House to RCA because that is when a media corporation outside publishing first purchased a publishing firm. I say more about Amazon and 2007 at the end of this essay.

  • 9 For an account of how the creation of shareholder value has become central to the U.S. corporation since the 1980s, see Davis.

  • 10 Loren Glass’ account of the rise and fall of Grove Press serves as a great case study of the changing economic conditions for publishing in the postwar decades. Grove rose on the tide of an expanding readership and a market for quality paperbacks, then collapsed when it was unable to reconcile its growth and the pressures of conglomeration happening around it with its communal, avant-garde ethos. The occupation of Grove by feminists and an attempted unionization by its workers did the press in, in 1970, in Glass’s telling.

  • 11 Prizes serve as an index of prestige and are, in the words of James F. English, whose Economy of Prestige is the authoritative study of cultural prizes, “the single best instrument for negotiating transactions between cultural and economic, cultural and social, or cultural and political capital—which is to say that they are our most effective institutional agents of capital intraconversion” (10).

  • 12 In a revision of Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel,” McGurl suggests that the path away from lyrical realism “has itself split in two” (“Novel’s Forking Path”). One path leads toward “genre effects,” the other toward “the novel of reality hunger”: in other words, what I am calling literary genre fiction and autofiction. Christian Lorentzen includes autofiction among his categories in his taxonomic essay, “Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama.”

  • 13 For an account of the role of corporate publishing in the shifting prestige of science fiction around 1980, see Brouillette, “Corporate Publishing.”

WORKS CITED