A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction

As television transformed American culture in the 1950s, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined.

In A Novel Marketplace, Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making...