Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature 9780231192941, 9780231192958, 9780231550062

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Big Fiction

LITERATURE NOW

Literature Now Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures. John Brooks, The Racial Unfamiliar: Illegibility in Black Literature and Culture Vidyan Ravinthiran, Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics Ellen Jones, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas Thomas Heise, The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel Sunny Xiang, Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War Jessica Pressman, Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age Heather Houser, Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data Christy Wampole, Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in TwentyFirst-Century France Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel Gloria Fisk, Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature Zara Dinnen, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present Ashley T. Shelden, Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union Jesse Matz, Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature For a complete  list of books in the series, please see the Columbia University Press website.

Big Fiction How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

Dan Sinykin

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sinykin, Dan, author. Title: Big fiction : how conglomeration changed the publishing industry and American literature / Dan Sinykin. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] | Series: Literature now | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023009636 (print) | LCCN 2023009637 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231192941 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231192958 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231550062 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—Publishing—United States—History—20th century. | Fiction—Publishing—United States. | Publishers and publishing—Economic aspects—United States. | Publishers and publishing—United States—Mergers. | American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | American fiction— 21st century—History and criticism. | Authors and publishers—United States. | Books and reading—United States. Classification: LCC Z480.F53 S56 2023 (print) | LCC Z480.F53 (ebook) | DDC 070.50973/0904—dc23/eng/20230601 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009636 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009637

Cover design: Inspired by the Vintage Contemporaries cover designs, originally created by Lorraine Louie Cover image: Masha Vlasova

For Richard Jean So

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 1. Mass Market (I): How Mass-Market Books Changed Publishing

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2. Mass Market (II): How the Mass Market Won the World, Lost Its Soul— Then Lost the World

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3. Trade (I): How Women Resisted Sexism and Reinvented the Novel

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4. Trade (II): How Literary Writers Embraced Genre

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5. Nonprofits: How Rebels Found Funding and Rejected New York

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6. Independents: How W. W. Norton Stayed Free and Housed the Misfits 167 Conclusion 211

Glossary of Publishing Figures 225 Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

A personal record keeping of the collaborative foundations on which creative writing is based can be found in the oft-skipped text that precedes or closes almost all book-length works: the acknowledgments page. — Clayton Childress

W

hen this book was only a paragraph on my website about a fantastical “second project,” Philip Leventhal asked to hear about it. He’s been its steadfast champion since. Across phone calls, Zoom meetings, countless emails, and a drink once in Manhattan, he has, for more than five years, given his time and thoughts to make this a better book—to make it happen at all. A brilliant editor, he taught me how to tune my voice. For most of the process, he was joined by Marisa Pagano, my guide to and informant from the world of conglomerate publishing who gave me crucial leads to pursue, honed my language, and engaged—refined, refuted—my theories about the industry. It would be impossible for me to recommend her highly enough. Matt Hart joined the editorial team toward the end and his good sense shaped my judgment about balance and calibration in the final manuscript. I couldn’t be happier to be joining his, David James’s, and Rebecca Walkowitz’s series, Literature Now, which features so many scholars I admire and so many titles that have influenced me. Thank you to Caitlin Hurst, Kathryn Jorge, Monique Laban, and the rest of the fabulous staff at Columbia University Press,

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who made the process a pleasure. Thank you to my superb copyeditor, Glenn Court. Thank you to indexer extraordinaire Josh Rutner. One of the great joys of scholarly life is thinking with others, building community, and reading and learning from the work that thereby enters the world. As I worked on this book, I collaborated with Gordon Hutner and Lee Konstantinou on a special issue of American Literary History titled “Publishing American Literature, 1945–2020” that included superb essays by Angela  S. Allan; Jacqueline Goldsby; Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young; Laura B. McGrath; Mark McGurl; Kinohi Nishikawa; and Ignacio M Sánchez Prado. As an editor at Post45, I commissioned Jeremy Rosen to guest edit a cluster of essays gathered under the title “Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing,” which included terrific work by Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires; Matthew Kirschenbaum; Laura  B. McGrath; Simone Murray; Élika Ortega; and Jeremy Rosen. Parts of this book appeared previously in different forms in Contemporary Literature, a special joint issue of Cultural Analytics and Post45, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Thanks to my editors: Michael LeMahieu, Richard Jean So, and Sarah Chihaya. Archives were essential to the writing of this book. I thank the archivists and librarians at Columbia University Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections, the University of Iowa Libraries’s Toothpaste/Coffee House Press Records, and the University of Minnesota’s Upper Midwest Literary Archives. A special thanks to Erin McBrien and Pearl McClintock at the University of Minnesota. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, I was beginning my work on W. W. Norton in earnest. Unable to travel, I wrote to Norton, where I reached Louise Brockett, who was extraordinarily helpful, hospitable, and kind. She facilitated interviews with John Glusman, Drake McFeely, and Starling Lawrence, each of whom was generous with his time and gracious with me. I’m grateful, too, for the generosity and graciousness of others I interviewed for this book, including Carol Bemis, Bob DeWeese, Beverly Haviland, Gerry Howard, John Lane, Alison Lurie, and David Romtvedt. Special thanks to Jim Sitter, who spoke with me repeatedly, opening his vast repository of knowledge about the history of nonprofit publishing. Thanks to Elizabeth Schwartz for putting me in touch with Sitter in the first place. Just as I had piled a teetering tower of bound annual compilations of Publishers Weekly on the desk in my office to comb through, Jordan Pruett told me that its archives had been digitized and were accessible with a paid membership, which, as a quick scan of my works cited confirms, was a game-changing tip.

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I could not have completed this book nearly as quickly if it weren’t for Matt Wilkens. He gave me time. He employed me as a postdoc for the two years when I began this project and allowed me to dedicate myself to research. He is a mensch. At Emory, I have been blessed with smart, supportive colleagues and, for their friendship and for helping me finish this book, I especially want to thank Heather Christle, Lauren Klein, Mitch Murray, Ben Reiss, and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma. Thanks to my research assistant, Stephen Altobelli. Eric Canosa, Tanesha Floyd, and Alonda Simms are tremendous departmental administrators, whose assistance and expertise made my work on this book much easier. The members of the Fox Center Junior Faculty Seminar provided useful feedback on the introduction; I especially thank Chris Suh. I’m grateful for the students of Contemporary Publishing who asked the right questions and thought through the complexities and inequities of the industry with me. That course was part of a larger partnership with Jenny 8. Lee and Plympton Literary Studio: Jenny is astoundingly bright and dynamic and I’ve learned so much about how publishing works in the third decade of the twenty-first century from her. Though it feels like a million years ago, I presented the first version of my idea for what became Big Fiction at a Post45 conference and the comments I received guided me the rest of the way. Even before then, J. D. Connor introduced me to John B. Thompson’s indispensable Merchants of Culture. Angela Allan, Xander Manshel, Simone Murray, and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma read some or all of the manuscript and responded with essential notes. I’m deeply indebted to three anonymous reviewers who strengthened this book immeasurably. For their friendship and intellectual camaraderie, I want to thank Ari Brostoff, Sarah Brouillette, Sean DiLeonardi, Gloria Fisk, Nathan Goldman, Annie McClanahan, Laura McGrath, Kinohi Nishikawa, Ben Ratzlaff, Meg Reid, Francisco Robles, Melanie Walsh, Sarah Wasserman, Johanna Winant, and, I confess, all the weirdos on academic, literary, and publishing Twitter (you know who you are), where more than a few ideas from this book were first tested, and from where the title, via Vincent Haddad, comes. Jeremy Braddock set me down the path toward book history a long time ago and introduced me to archival research; for these reasons he maintains some guilt for what has transpired. Sarah Chihaya is the best writer I know, a model to aspire to, and a brilliant editor, too, who coaxes the best writing out of me, some of which appears here. Kevin McNellis has put an outsider’s eyes on much of this book, assisting in the translation for a nonspecialist audience; he also canoed with me in the wilderness each summer, a necessary removal from this project and everything else, to

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restore perspective. When I first moved to Atlanta, I frequented a small local restaurant with an open kitchen where I befriended the chef, Nicholas Stinson, an astounding autodidact and lover of books and music with a particular fondness for pulp fiction from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It was at the counter at Gato (RIP) and over meals elsewhere across town with Nicholas that I verbalized and thus clarified my efforts in Big Fiction, and received mind-opening suggestions in turn. This book is dedicated to Richard Jean So. It wouldn’t exist without him, nor would I still be in the academy. Back at its origins, Richard and I would sit in Medici in Hyde Park, Chicago, and imagine possibilities for scholarship on the U.S. publishing industry and its adjacent fields. We began collecting data on publishers’ lists and book reviews, dreaming of a map of the total system. (For various reasons my use of that data is understated in this book; the pursuit, muted here, led me, in turn, to partner with Laura McGrath to build the Post45 Data Collective.) Big Fiction is the closest I could come to that map, for now, even as it’s just a tiny step. My parents, Stu and Carol, and my brothers, Andy and Alex, have always supported my work, for which I’m very grateful. Zuzu, that ludicrous goose, got me out on regular walks, where the best thinking happens. Eulia, my new daughter, lit a fire of urgency within me to finish this project so I could be free to meet her. Masha is my love. She makes my thoughts thinkable.

Big Fiction

Introduction

I

t was a Monday in late February  1990, the coldest day of the year. André Schiffrin, a natty fifty-four-year-old New Yorker, left Random House headquarters in midtown to plod through the evening crowds. Wind blew down from the Hudson River, tousling his graying red hair, stinging his wide-set, mousy eyes. He shivered and pulled his overcoat tighter around himself, heading home to his wife. He had just been fired. For twenty-eight years, he had worked at Pantheon, which his father cofounded and later sold to Random House. The younger Schiffrin became Pantheon’s editorial director. He petitioned Random House for autonomy and its executives granted it. He extended his father’s cosmopolitan vision, bringing European ideas to the United States. He published John Berger’s G., Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. He published leftist writers—Barbara Ehrenreich, Michel Foucault, Ralph Nader, Edward Said, Studs Terkel, E. P. Thompson—who wrote history and theory imagined through the experiences of ordinary people. Schiffrin fancied himself a bit of a subversive. After his daughters encouraged him to acquire his FBI file, which noted a trip of his to Cuba and his protests against the Vietnam War, he wrote a jocular essay for the New York Times, suggesting that the  Bureau’s surveillance “adds some dignity and meaning to our efforts, to those who fear that no one has paid any attention. By all means, let us pay for more scissors and paste, more files and more agents. How nice to know that someone outside the family will clip our every word.”1

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THE ENEMY RISES

Rumor of Schiffrin’s firing caught the wind, which carried it through the city. A notice appeared in the next day’s Times. It spurred the kind of convergence of energies that we recognize in retrospect as an event. In coming days, Pantheon’s editorial staff quit en masse, opinion pieces were written, protests were held. In one way or another, this event touched everyone in the book world. The firing of André Schiffrin revealed that a monumental shift had taken place, one that had begun thirty years earlier, that everyone had watched unfold in slow motion, had tried, some of them, in fits and starts, to stop, but no one, not even the old giants, could stop it now. It would pull everyone into its vortex, dominating the creation of literature for the next thirty years and more. The enemy, according to those who rallied to Schiffrin’s defense, was conglomeration, which, in this instance, found its agent in Alberto Vitale, Random House’s new president, a jowly Italian with a PhD in economics. Vitale canned Schiffrin, and conglomeration was the inimical force that, in the eyes of Schiffrin’s defenders, had displaced publishing’s cultural mandate in favor of the bottom line. Conglomeration did not stop in 1990—it continues to this day. A German conglomerate, Bertelsmann, acquired Random House in 1998, and, under Bertelsmann, Random House merged with Penguin, one of the other big six publishers, in 2013. Through these acquisitions and mergers, a vast accumulation of historically independent houses whose dramas are detailed in these pages have become Penguin Random House properties, among them Ballantine, Bantam, Berkley, Crown, Dell, Dial, DK, Doubleday, Dutton, Knopf, New American Library, Putnam, Viking—and Pantheon. The books available to us today are products of the conglomerate era. As his partisans took to their pens, writing letters and op-eds in support, Schiffrin, gagged by his severance agreement, waited. He waited a decade. His vengeance came cold in his passionate if not wholly clear-sighted polemic, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read.

INTO THE COLOPHON

It’s true, conglomerates took over publishing and changed how and what we read—and how and what writers write.2 But Schiffrin was still too resentful,

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too close to it, to see much other than avarice. This book defers judgment about whether conglomeration was good or bad in an effort to explain what it has meant for U.S. fiction and how we should read it. Our first move requires a simple change of perspective. Publishers know that readers pay attention to a book’s cover so they invest in its design and emblazon it with what they want everyone to see: the title and the name of the author. If we turn a book ninety degrees so that we are facing its spine, then look to the bottom, we will find what is often overlooked: the publisher’s mark, its colophon. Publishers take quiet pride in these: Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s three fish; Knopf ’s borzoi, Random House’s illustration of Voltaire’s Candide’s house: a somewhat random house. Or, if you’re holding a physical copy of this book, Columbia University Press’s geometric crown. For centuries, such marks have served as the publisher’s promise: “We affirm the quality of editing, proofreading, design, typesetting, and printing in this book.”3 The colophon is an emblem that contains within in it a collective, all the people who work to make the book we hold in our hands but whose names we seldom know. Historically, and still sometimes today, publishers included a page at the end of books with information about how it was made; this page was also called a colophon. I want us to enter the world of the colophon, to unfetishize the commodity, to respect the author whose name adorns the front cover by returning her to the milieu from which she sprang. Our outsize attention to the author alone is a trick of history, the legacy of copyright: authors needed to be made responsible for books if they were to collect royalties; lawyers needed someone on whom to lay the blame for libel. If we want to know what conglomeration did to books—why books are different now than they were—then we need to unearth what conglomeration did to the people who live inside the colophon, how it took power from some and gave it to others, transformed incentives, and invented new jobs altogether. My cast of characters is vast and spans decades. And though my quarry is the system, it expresses itself through the people whose ambitions fill these pages: Victor Weybright, a farm kid from rural Maryland who wanted the whole country to read Faulkner—at least his smuttier books; Jane Friedman, a Jewish girl from Long Island who invented the author tour—or so she told every journalist she met; Morton Janklow, a corporate securities lawyer who fought for his friend to publish a book that made Nixon look good after Watergate, and who found he liked to make publishers sweat—so he became a literary agent. They made books popular, glamorous, and costly at auction. As readers at home found Stephen King, Judith Krantz, and Danielle Steel atop the New York Times bestseller lists, agents tippled martinis at Manhattan’s Four Seasons. I introduce the cast gradually

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in the hope that, by the end, through the magic of accretion, you feel, like I do, the intimacy, almost the incestuousness, of this influential but hidden world. It is a competitive, dynamic world in which everyone is at all times fighting a war for position at multiple scales: inside their own publishing house, against peer institutions, and to dominate the field as a whole. Some fight more for art, some more for money, but always, by necessity, a bit of both. Weybright had to outwit his German business partner, whom he distrusted, crush the philistines at Bantam, Dell, Fawcett, and Pocket, and get as many of us reading Faulkner’s Sanctuary and The Wild Palms as he could. The weapons are books. The battles are fought through style and voice, pacing and genre, covers and blurbs. To read a book through its colophon is to read it anew. Aesthetics double as strategy. Author and publishing house might be—often are—in tension, a tension that plays out between a book’s lines. The game a book plays is significantly different depending on whether its colophon is Bantam’s rooster, Doubleday’s anchor, Graywolf ’s wolves, or W. W. Norton’s seagull, for reasons this book unfurls. I linger over books in these pages, reading them through the colophon’s portal, in light of the conglomerate era. I show how much we miss when we fall for the romance of individual genius. In novels, the conglomerate era finds its voice.

CONGLOMERATION HAPPENS (AND HAPPENS)

In 1959, U.S. publishers—unlike film and radio, which had been corporately run and consolidated for nearly forty years—were relatively small and privately held, usually by the founders or their heirs. They functioned like big families: hierarchical, loyal, built on relationships: houses. Authors might stop by to chat with editors. Editors might finagle to support an author through a bad decision or three. Dr. Seuss visited Random House to recite his latest work. Albert Erskine, an editor there, had helped keep Malcolm Lowry afloat for many years and would soon do the same for Cormac McCarthy. Publishers were mostly located in New York City or, to a lesser degree, Boston. One set was established before the Civil War: Harper; Houghton Mifflin (as Ticknor and Fields); Little, Brown; Macmillan; Scribner. A new set appeared in the 1910s and 1920s, many created by Jewish bookmen: Knopf, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Viking. Pocket Books brought modern mass-market publishing to the United States in 1939 (imitating Penguin in the UK), followed by Dell in 1943, Bantam in 1945, New American Library in 1948, and Fawcett in 1950.

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It—1959—was a good time to be in the business of books. During World War II, the military shipped millions of books to soldiers, creating a vast body of readers, many of whom came home and went to college on the GI Bill. Universities expanded and kept expanding to keep up with enrollments as they opened their doors to more than white men, churning out more readers. Many classics were free to acquire from the public domain. The economy was in the midst of one of the greatest growth spurts in the history of capitalism. Beginning in 1960, houses found themselves swept up by business trends far beyond their control. People had moved from farms to cities for factory jobs and, in many cases, to escape the terror of Jim Crow. Large industrial corporations such as Ford Motor Company, General Electric, and U.S. Steel “had become the organizing structure for economic and social life.”4 They were run by bureaucratic managers who were incentivized, above all, to grow the organization, “even at the expense of profitability.”5 By 1960, many corporations had reached limits of internal growth and had to look outward. Antitrust law inhibited mergers and acquisitions within an industry, so corporations acquired in others, forming conglomerates. ITT, for example, was a telecommunications company before becoming, in the 1960s, a conglomerate that contained “Sheraton Hotels, various auto parts manufacturers, the makers of Wonder Bread, a chain of vocational schools, insurance companies, and Avis Rent-a-Car.”6 Times Mirror, a newspaper company, bought New American Library (NAL), a mass-market publisher, in 1960, inaugurating what I call the conglomerate era. Times Mirror hired McKinsey, a consulting firm, to restructure NAL, with dire results that I chronicle in the first chapter. The previous year—1959—Random House became the first major house to go public and used the influx of cash to acquire Knopf in 1960. In 1961, it acquired Pantheon—hiring André Schiffrin in 1962. In 1966, RCA, an electronics company, acquired Random House. Doubleday acquired radio and television stations in 1967, and the New York Mets in 1980. Time Inc. acquired Little, Brown in 1968. A Canadian communications company acquired Macmillan in 1973. Bantam went to IFI, an Italian conglomerate that owned Fiat, the car company, in 1974. Simon & Schuster went to Gulf + Western in 1975, Fawcett to CBS in 1977. As we will see, it hardly stopped there.7

SHAREHOLDER VALUES

It—1977—was a bad time to be in the book business. Economic growth had stalled. Inflation hiked the price of books even as consumers had less money to

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buy them. Conglomerate owners, who, unlike Times Mirror, had in many cases refrained from interfering in their publishing properties, became more involved in concert with a transformation in the theory of the corporation. The old notion of the large corporation as a social institution that considered the common good was out. Executives came to treat corporations as the legal fictions they are, mere means for their one goal: increasing shareholder value. That meant executives needed to squeeze every drop from all of their properties, including publishers. Ed (“Bottom Line”) Griffiths, the new president of RCA, began pressing Random House’s head for quarterly growth and five-year plans. Editors had once been the uncontested suzerains of title acquisition. Their tastes drove lists, front and back. In the 1970s, however, they watched their power wane. Aggressive literary agents staged high pressure auctions and came for subsidiary rights. Houses brought in directors dedicated to selling those rights—for reprinting, translation, and film and television adaptation. Marketing departments grew and gathered influence, producing baroque campaigns of total saturation for top titles. Authors, observing these developments, became anxious. They worried that houses would focus their energies on just a few potential blockbusters by newly stratospheric brand names who could carry a budget: Stephen King, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel.8 At the other end, houses hired cheap writers to crank out formulaic genre fiction or serial novelizations of popular films and TV shows. In late May 1977, Star Wars debuted in theaters, on its way to instituting the tentpole, synergistic, franchise entertainment model that would lead to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in film and endless genre series in publishing. Worst of all, authors feared that houses would abandon literature altogether for the surer bets of cookbooks and celebrity memoirs. On June 6, 1977, John Brooks, John Hersey, and Herman Wouk, representing the Authors Guild—an advocacy group for professional writers—held a press conference at which 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.” Wouk was quoted in the Washington Post the next day, calling conglomeration “a sinister  process,” noting that “in a conglomerate there is a narrowing down of margins—of what is safe and what is publishable,” given the responsibility to shareholders.9 The press conference led to a Senate hearing on March 13, 1980, before the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Monopoly, and Business Rights, headed by Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, Democrat from Ohio. 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

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acquisition by larger firms of their smaller competitors and the entry into diverse industries by the large conglomerates.”10 A series of prominent writers and publishers then spoke and were questioned by senators afterward. The two groups testified fiercely in opposition to one another. E. L. Doctorow, speaking as a writer and the vice president of the American Center of PEN International, 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.” He avoided the righteousness in evidence earlier in the proceedings in a statement by Maxwell Lillenstein, general counsel for the American Booksellers Association, who said that “selling 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.”11 Doctorow, instead, averred that “nobody is objecting to commerce or to making money. Publishers have always wanted to make money.”12 “Traditionally,” he observed, “a publishing list has always reflected the tension between the need to make money and the desire to publish well.” He worried, though, that “this delicate balance of pressures within a publishing firm is upset by the conglomerate [that] values the need for greater and greater profits,” until, eventually, the need for profits “overloads the scale in favor of commerce.” He 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.”13 Executives from Doubleday, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Simon & Schuster—all known for their commercialism—defended conglomeration. They pointed to the persistent growth both in the number of publishers and titles in the industry. William Jovanovich 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.”14 A few months later, the country elected Ronald Reagan president. Reagan’s government did the opposite of what Senator Metzenbaum and the Authors Guild wanted. It loosened the barriers to consolidation and vertical integration.15 Magazine magnate Si Newhouse bought Random House in 1980, building a media empire that included Condé Nast and would soon add the New Yorker. The German conglomerate Bertelsmann acquired Doubleday in 1986 and took Random House off Newhouse’s hands in 1998. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp swallowed Harper & Row in 1987, creating HarperCollins. The next year, Murdoch’s rival, Robert Maxwell—the two were in the midst of warring through British tabloids they owned—nabbed Macmillan. Simon &

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Schuster, at that point, had been on an extensive shopping spree with Gulf + Western money, accumulating profitable educational and professional publishing imprints, arriving, by 1991, at the position from which its president, Richard Snyder, could say with impressive frankness, “We are not a publisher, we are now a creator of copyrights for their exploitation in any medium or distribution system.”16 Books were now content.17

CONGLOMERATE AUTHORSHIP

But this book is not only a narrative of the conglomeration of publishing. It also tells how fiction was transformed. It transformed because conglomeration changed what it means to be an author. It would be a ridiculous exaggeration to say that authors are merely the humans attached to books to fulfill the legal requirements of authorship and the cultural expectations of creative originality.18 Yet such an exaggeration is useful to break our habit of romanticizing authorship and begin instead to see the author through the colophon’s portal. The idea is that authorship is social and distributed widely. Some version of this picture has been advanced often by artists, critics, and theorists, though it has been difficult to sustain. Jack Stillinger devoted a book to “the joint, or composite, or collaborative production of literary works that we usually think of as written by a single author,” a phenomenon, he argues, that is “extremely common.”19 It is an editorial norm, established by Maxwell Perkins in the 1920s, to aim for invisibility, insisting that the editor only facilitates an author’s vision, adding nothing of their own, no matter how false this often is.20 A good financial reason explains the dogma. As Abram Foley writes, corporate publishers, “have a vested interest in promoting their authors in such a way that the guiding hands of editors, publishing houses, marketers, and the market remain invisible. In corporate publishing, the author’s name, more than the publishing house’s colophon, is the most valuable sign.”21 We tend to revert to the image of the solitary author toiling away—in a cabin in the woods, at their cluttered desk in a book-filled room—to produce the text that arrives like a missive from their mind to ours.22 One version of the epiphenomenal author is the romantic author’s obverse. Here the writer becomes a vessel who channels something greater: culture, gods, tradition, the unconscious. Homer asks the Muse to speak through him at the opening of The Odyssey. “Who is the poet?” asks Hugh Kenner, in his study of

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modernism, “A medium?”23 The Surrealists came up with practices like automatic writing and the game exquisite corpse to ease the artist’s metamorphosis into a vessel. The poet Jack Spicer argues that the work of the writer is to get out of her own way so that she could let what he called Martians speak through her. The novelist Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, hears voices who guide her writing. The musician Grimes—inspired by large language models that learned to imitate human writing after ingesting most of the scrapeable internet—said, “we all kind of function like AI; we’re all a product of all the content that we feed ourselves. And so, it’s just funny to be like, ‘Oh, this is my work.’ In reality, it’s the result of thousands of years of human art making.”24 Modern psychologists call the state that authors enter of total absorption that doubles as dissolution: flow.25 In such states, the life of the author is not solitary but suffused with social plenitude. A second version was advanced by French theorists in the 1960s. These theorists were captured by their enthusiasm with the thought that the era inaugurated by modern philosophy and political liberalism might almost be over, that we might overthrow the concepts of rationality and of man, that we might transcend what they called the sciences of man, or the social sciences. Major works, in 1966, by the feuding Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault—the latter published by Schiffrin at Pantheon in the United States in 1970—ended the same way: with prophetic trepidation that an epoch characterized by preoccupation with humanity was ending, that “man” might “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”26 Both were trying to persuade us that language as a system was more consequential than the pretense of individuals.27 The next year, 1967, their elder, Roland Barthes, penned a short playful essay riffing, half in jest, on their self-serious ideas. “The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture,” he lamented, “is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions.” This was bad theology, a reification of a much more interesting and complex process. He proclaimed, “it is language which speaks, not the author.” The text, he said, “is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” He called it “The Death of the Author.” A third version was propounded in the discipline of textual scholarship and began as a retort to the French theorists and their followers.28 Their obsession with language, argued Jerome McGann, left them oblivious to what he considered fundamental aspects of a text’s meaning: its materiality and its sociality. He advocated attention to “the physical form of books and manuscripts (paper, ink, typefaces, layouts),” which others have extended to include tools.29 Think of Jane Austen’s desk, Emily Dickinson’s fascicles, George  R. R. Martin’s word

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processor.30 McGann posits texts as “social acts”31: many people work together to produce them.32 “Literary production is not an autonomous and self-reflexive activity; it is a social and an institutional event.”33 Such attention to the physical form of books and the people who produce them motivates the dynamic field of book history.34 John Young argues that textual studies has not gone far enough in decentering the author. Drawing on insights from African American studies, Young asserts that any adequate analysis would incorporate the “broader social dimension” of a text, such as the racism that constrains the possibilities for all whose hands and minds shape it.35 Each of these formulations urges us to see the author as a portal through which collectives find expression. They challenge the notion that we can attribute a published work of fiction to a single individual. Authors access a world beyond their conscious selves. That world goes by different names: the unconscious, language, the imagination. The published author also channels the norms of a cultural system, its sense of literary value. She forges a commodity that will appear attractive to scouts, agents, editors, marketers, publicists, sales staff, booksellers, critics, and readers. Its attractiveness depends on which sector one hopes to publish with. Sometimes this is egregiously explicit: Lester del Rey, a mass-market editor, sensed demand for an inchoate genre that would become “fantasy” based on the rabid fandom of Lord of the Rings. For mass-market books in the 1970s, under pressure because of conglomerate interventions, formulas and seriality became increasingly important techniques for securing sales numbers. Del Rey provided a template for would-be authors to follow, taken up by Piers Anthony who used it to write his Xanth series, which frequently landed on the New York Times bestseller lists.36 Sometimes the norms are subtler, or emerge unbidden through incentives generated collectively, as when Cormac McCarthy fell in with an ambitious agent, editor, and publicist and transformed his style from dense prose and aimless plots to more crowd-pleasing literary Westerns. At around the same time— the late 1980s and early 1990s—Joan Didion wrote her most genre-bound thriller, E. L. Doctorow did a crime novel, and Morrison’s Beloved capitalized on the new market for horror created by the success of Stephen King. Conglomeration, that is to say, generated the incentives for literary genre fiction. Meanwhile, nonprofit presses, which rose in response to conglomeration, rejecting its values, needed, in the 1990s, to embrace multiculturalism, leading authors who published in that sector to write dazzling allegories in which they toyed with the racialized demands placed upon them through their narratives. Successful authors learn the rules by which they are judged. They internalize these rules in what sociologists call anticipatory socialization. Sometimes they even know it:

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“I think writers in a lot of ways write to the acquisition editors,” one author told a sociologist. “Like, we are aware.”37 Conglomeration rationalized (through bureaucracy) and mediated (through agents) the relationship between authors and publishing houses. At different speeds, conglomerates worked to increase the profitability of publishing by rationalizing it, to the extent possible. Publishing managers came to see “the acquisitions process as the building of a portfolio of risk.” Although 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.”38 These calculations are quantified by editors in profit-and-loss statements when they decide on whether to publish the work of an author and how much to pay them.39 Successful books become comparative titles (comps), required for prospective acquisitions, institutionalizing a feedback system by which homogeneity— and whiteness—is encouraged.40 Over time, conglomerate rationalization made the work of editors more managerial, less editorial.41 By 1993, when Grove published Gerald Gross’s Editors on Editing, the notion that editors no longer edit was a cliché. Time must be devoted to “unceasing reports, correspondence, phoning, meetings, business breakfasts, lunches, dinners, [and] in- and out-of-office appointments” where editors attempt “to explicate author and house to one another.”42 One editor could write, “today’s editors must master an entire gamut of disciplines including production, marketing, negotiation, promotion, advertising, publicity, accounting, salesmanship, psychology, politics, diplomacy, and—well, editing.”43 Because editors are busier with the business and marketing side of publishing and have less time, agents—along with “copy editors, writers’ groups, book doctors, packagers, and well-meaning friends”—do much of the labor of nurturing and editing authors.44 Agents “spend time with their clients discussing their next book, and may read draft chapters and give them advice and feedback.”45 Agents have played a formal role in talent management since the advent of modern copyright laws, but only with conglomeration have they become essential.46 As one prominent editor complained in 2000, “forty years ago, agents were mere peripheral necessities, like dentists.”47 Editors depend on agents to suss out the market’s desires: “editors have, in effect, outsourced the initial selection process to agents.” Therefore, agents have become “the necessary point of entry into the field of trade publishing.”48 They play the role of diviner of the market and vetter of the author: the publishing industry’s invisible hand, which they enact

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through their cultivation of “corporate taste,” their transmutation of perceived demand into claims of aesthetic sensibility and professional ability—their brand.49 Myriad figures introduced or empowered by conglomeration exercise influence on each stage of a book’s life, from conception to its acquisition and editing to publicity: subsidiary rights specialists, art directors, marketing managers, sales staff, wholesalers, chain book buyers, philanthropists, government bureaucrats. We will meet many of them. Each working interdependently with the others produces conglomerate authorship. Conglomerate authorship operates according to the model of emergence. Emergence is sometimes proffered as a theory of consciousness. Consciousness does not reside in single neurons. But when billions of neurons interact, consciousness, which cannot be attributed to any individual part of the brain, emerges. Emergence also accounts for the behavior a colony of bees or ants, who “practice agriculture and animal husbandry” and are considered, as a unit, “an individual of a higher order, a ‘superorganism’ with unique emergent properties.”50 Individually, an ant or bee will appear to behave erratically. Thousands together, though, display an extraordinary intelligence unattributable to any single element. That intelligence is emergent. Unlike the individual units in these examples, people in publishing experience, one hopes, consciousness, and a sense of at least some degree of rational decision-making; the point is that like an ant farm or a beehive or consciousness itself—or a Hollywood film— conglomerate era fiction displays properties attributable not to any one individual but to the conglomerate superorganism.51 This book charts the emergent properties of conglomerate era fiction.

DIALECTICAL FRACTAL

A logic of sameness and differentiation repeats itself across the many scales of publishing. This is true at any given moment in time. Because we’ve already been lingering there, let’s take 1990. If we were to survey the industry, we would notice that Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) and Random House (RH), writ large, had staked out roughly elite versus middlebrow positions in the literary field, established across the previous decades by representative authors such as Susan Sontag (FSG) and Gore Vidal (RH).52 These positions were reinforced by  the fact that FSG was independent and RH was conglomerate: Roger Straus  at FSG could, and did, lob regular accusations to the press about how

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conglomeration led RH to become vulgarly commercial. Let’s drop a level, to an individual conglomerate, where, within Random House, Pantheon hovered nearer the avant-garde pole whereas Crown, acquired in 1988, homed in on the commercial pole, with novels on its lists from Douglas Adams, Jean Auel, Ken Follett, Judith Krantz, and Richard North Patterson. Knopf was closer to Pantheon, Random House was between Knopf and Crown. Drop another level and within Random House itself, as an imprint, we find editors who span the distance between Joe Fox’s narrower and Joni Evans’s more catholic taste. At the scale of the individual editor, authors range. Joe Fox edited Renata Adler and John Irving. Joni Evans did Ann Beattie and Mario Puzo. Individual authors might contain such differentiation within their oeuvres, as with Cormac McCarthy’s alienating, difficult masterpiece, Blood Meridian, and his popular, National Book Award–winning bestseller, All the Pretty Horses. Even within a single work, such as All the Pretty Horses, the logic of sameness and differentiation replicates itself, in this case containing at once the popular genre of the Western and McCarthy’s Faulknerian style, however lightened. All the Pretty Horses is internally differentiated because it internalizes the conflicted logic in play at every scale above it, set in motion by agents, editors, executives, and publicists. Making all this more difficult, each position on the literary field shifts over time, and with each shift, new possibilities emerge for the aesthetics of the novel. In 1994, Holtzbrinck, a German conglomerate, acquired FSG, compromising its Sontagian elite standing, bringing it closer to Random House, and therein creating the conditions that would enable a new leader, Jonathan Galassi—once fired by Random House—to enact what I later call the (Jonathan) Franzenization of FSG. Nearer the elite pole, nonprofits were, in 1994, solidifying as a coherent sector of the literary field. They became possible in the first place as a reaction against the dominance of conglomerates. Nonprofits, in turn, published fiction that was too risky for conglomerates—unless it succeeded for the smaller presses first. But even the same author, the same idea, the same strategy would be transformed through its new locus of publication. The mention of Holtzbrinck alerts us to this book’s largest lacuna: the world.53 To accomplish an account of U.S. fiction from the 1960s through the present, I have restricted my purview to U.S. writers and the U.S. literary field. No study can be unbounded. This restriction, though, introduces artificiality. Sontag, for example, rejuvenated the elite form of the novel for FSG by turning to France.54 Czech writers proved crucial interlocutors for Philip Roth and John Updike.55 Foreign markets gained in importance across the conglomerate era, and with them the clout of the Frankfurt Book Fair.56 I have less to say about the

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extraterritoriality of conglomerates and the consequences for fiction than I might.57 Work in translation receives short shrift in the coming pages.58 By lending focused, sustained attention to U.S. literature, this book attempts the otherwise impossible task of limning one crucial node in the world literary system. The fractal, dialectical nature of publishing means that to state flatly the tidy takeaways from the conglomerate era is to make dynamic phenomena appear static. Danielle Steel is deeper than you think. What it means to write elite or middlebrow fiction is different every day. Autofiction is not one thing. Literary genre fiction is not one thing. Multiculturalism is not one thing. Each changed depending on who was using it, when, after whom else, under which financial constraints. Each is a mode, a strategy, a tactic deployed by the hundreds of players playing the game. Each was, and is, fundamental to the conglomerate era. I strived to include much that is left out of literary history as it’s been told. You can’t understand the conglomerate era without the details. I offer them in the  spirit of building: toward a better collective understanding of literary production.59

BEING AND TIME WARNER

In 1989, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications. Little, Brown, owned by Time, became a division of the new—and world’s largest—media conglomerate, Time Warner. In 1992, Michael Pietsch, newly an editor at Little, Brown (as I write, the CEO of Hachette Book Group), acquired what would become David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a long and difficult novel that decries the destruction of cultural life at the hands of corporate power and the hegemony of entertainment. The parallels between Time Warner’s aspirations and Wallace’s dystopian vision are not merely gestural. In 1991, Time Warner’s CEO, Steve Ross, announced a plan to augur “the third age of television”: first networks, then cable, now interactivity. As the New York Times reported, Time Warner had “started putting a 150-channel interactive cable system into Queens that Ross believes is a precursor of a world in which the television set will become an all-purpose computer-cum-entertainment box.”60 Wallace included a similar device in his novel, written in such a way as to ensure readers understand that he understands the conglomerate economy within which he writes, “What if a viewer could more or less 100% choose what’s on at any given time? Choose and  rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands

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of  second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non‘Happy  Days’ programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all prepared by the time-tested, newly lean Big Four’s mammoth vaults and production facilities.”61 Ross rationalized the implementation of interactive TV in service of pedagogy. “One of the ways you have to educate is to make it entertainment,” he said. “If you don’t make it entertaining, if you are unable to get the right equipment in the home to sell education, we will not be able to educate America.”62 But, trying to explain how entertainment would encourage, say, reading, Ross lost the thread: “So anyhow,” he said, “getting back to . . . I don’t even know what we were talking about. . . . The written word is the key.”63 Wallace wanted Infinite Jest to teach readers to extricate themselves from addictive entertainment that, he felt, ultimately made them lonely. To do so, he needed the novel to be entertaining enough to keep readers interested so they could swallow their medicine. He calibrated—in collaboration with his agent, Bonnie Nadell, and Pietsch—a balance between entertainment and edification that would allow him to seduce readers but ultimately criticize the culture of entertainment that Time Warner hoped to profit from by the novel’s publication. How much could he try the reader’s patience? In Wallace’s 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.”64 This artistic position is occupied in the novel by James Incandenza, an avant-garde filmmaker whose ultimate ambition is to use his technical expertise to create a film so entertaining that it will, of necessity, draw his inward 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. Instead of arriving at a narrative climax, the novel descends into stasis before ending abruptly. With its anticlimactic ending, Wallace aimed to deny the pleasures of catharsis in hope of turning readers away from the novel and their selves toward recognition of a common malaise, toward something like the communities and gift economies engendered through Alcoholics Anonymous.65 Pietsch, a Harvard alum, had a knack for marketing and a feel for popular taste; early in his career, he served as the marketing coordinator for Scribner; he moved to Crown in 1986, where he acquired business titles, nonfiction about Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and fiction by Mark Leyner (“the writer for the MTV generation”) and the flashy British writer Martin Amis.66 At Little, Brown, he continued to acquire in music, including biographies of Elvis, Hank Williams, and Muddy Waters.

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He had little interest in the midlist, saying, “It’s hard to make money on books that sell only 10,000 copies. We’re looking for writers who can break through to a larger audience.”67 He long felt that Wallace was one of those writers. He courted him as early as 1987, inviting Wallace, in a letter, to “remember that you’ve got a fan here at the home of Martin Amis, Stephen Wright, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard.” Manuscript in hand, Pietsch worried that its size and erudition would put off readers. Like a latter-day Maxwell Perkins with Wallace as his Thomas Wolfe, he cut hundreds of pages and made “numerous microchanges” for the sake of preventing “readerly alienation.”68 Wallace agonized over the cuts, writing to Don DeLillo that he felt “uncomfortable” doing them for “commercial reasons.”69 Wallace’s collaboration with Pietsch was friendly but not harmonious, pitting his artistic pretensions against Pietsch’s conglomerate sensibility, a conflict Infinite Jest expresses as its core preoccupation.70 As publication neared, 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. The marketing, though, unnerved Wallace. Nothing could be more antithetical to the novel’s project than the promise of infinite pleasure. On one hand, many readers gave up on Wallace’s novel after two hundred pages, just before the various plotlines begin to merge. On the other, Infinite Jest often made readers—if they passed the two-hundred-page mark—insatiable in their desire for Wallace and his work, a horrific reductio ad absurdum that could have come out of the pages of a Wallace story. In the end, Infinite Jest was a win for everyone at Little, Brown. It worked. They understood the meaning of the book—or, at least, the system within which it was written, marketed, distributed, and consumed—better than Wallace himself. His dream of saving America from itself was a fantasy that allowed him to complete the project but had little to do with the phenomenon that spurred decades of debates, listicles, and personal essays about the myth of genius, his bandannas and misogyny, and the cultural politics of men recommending books to women. The house’s investment paid out handsomely. The example of Infinite Jest demonstrates the limits of authorial agency in the conglomerate era. Wallace’s error was to put too much faith in the ability of his writing to transcend its conditions of production. He overestimated the power of his message and underestimated that of his medium. His voice proved fascinating, enchanting, addictive. The moral of the story, for many, was lost in the fireworks of his prose and the hype of his promoters. In some small way, his critique of media conglomerates did the opposite of what he intended, handing

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Time Warner an ability to demonstrate the editorial freedom it allowed its publishing properties. If the novel was, on its own terms, a failure for Wallace, it was a triumph for Pietsch, who, with his marketing sensibility and his distaste for the midlist, was an exemplary conglomerate era editor. For the fullest understanding of the meaning of the novel, we need to recognize its provenance and the forces that carried it through: Wallace’s mind, saturated by the culture and threat of Time Warner; Bonnie Nadell, his agent, who provided aesthetic counsel; Pietsch’s red pen that cut and rearranged hundreds of pages; the publicists who planned the promotional campaign; the reviewers who made it the it book of 1996; the book buyers for Barnes & Noble and Borders who embraced the sales potential of a massive brick of a novel; in short, conglomerate authorship. One mode of conglomerate authorship, on display in Infinite Jest, is allegory. Conglomeration led to the production of fiction that allegorized conglomeration itself.71 No one, to my knowledge, has interpreted Infinite Jest as an allegory for the conglomerate publishing industry. It is a novel about addiction set at an elite tennis academy and a halfway house. It features no figures from publishing. Yet an investigation into Wallace’s compositional method and the introduction of the most immediate and materialist context brings into focus the tale the novel tells of a heroic artist hoping to cut through a culture overwhelmed by media conglomerates with a work called, in the novel, Infinite Jest. We will see such allegorical storytelling repeat itself in heavy-handed commercial instances, such as Stephen King’s Misery and Michael Crichton’s Disclosure, but also in more surprising, veiled cases such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted.

OVERTHINK IT

Infinite Jest is populated by characters who worry that they overthink things, that they are too self-reflexive. Their concerns, which have become ubiquitous, are characteristic of the conglomerate era, in which reflexivity is expressed as allegory, ironic multiculturalism, and the genre called autofiction. This tendency to turn inward, to write about the conditions that make writing possible, is not an effect of conglomeration alone. Literary critic Mark McGurl attributes the “reflexivity of so much postwar fiction” to the fact that more and more writers labored within the “programmatically analytical and pedagogical environment” of creative writing programs, which—following the work of sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens—he saw as merely one component of the

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much broader “disintegration of traditional communities (Gemeinschaft) into the impersonal, rationalized, and highly mediated collectivities (Gesellschaft) of modernity.”72 We are going to discover how fruitful it can be to investigate conglomeration—which took as its aim precisely to make publishing impersonal, rationalized, and mediated—as a reflexivity engine that produces characteristic forms of fiction.73 Autofiction is the latest name for a long-standing novelistic practice in which the author uses their own life transparently as the source of their story. It is a mistake, as Pierre Bourdieu long ago noted with reference to Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, to think that this use of the author’s self entails the “complacent and naïve projections” of strict autobiography. Bourdieu argued that we should instead “perceive an enterprise of objectification of the self, of autoanalysis, of socioanalysis.”74 Explicitly not writing a memoir, the autofictionalist invents a fictional avatar through whom the author can submit the literary world to their (hopefully) penetrating scrutiny. Readers are not wrong to spy John Irving in the figure of T. S. Garp, Vladimir Nabokov in Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, Percival Everett in Thelonius Ellison, Sheila Heti in Sheila Heti, or  Philip Roth in Philip Roth—even if we ought to recognize the character transfigured. Just because autofiction is old, though, does not mean its mode of deployment is unchanged. That it has a new name ought to tip us off. It, for one, is another kind of genre play that makes a bid for a large readership under the current market dispensation. “Think of the large audiences still commanded by biography, history, and memoir,” writes McGurl, suggesting that autofiction “is hungry for some of that action.”75 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. Beyond whatever literary innovations it is or is not making, autofiction has become a kind of literary genre fiction. It is also the perfect form for conglomerate marketing. It amplifies the romantic myth of the author, her celebrity, which raises her value as a walking, talking advertisement at the same time that she is, in fact, progressively shedding control over her image and her work, making her at once more useful and more disposable. The author gets to feel more authorial and the publisher gets to obscure the unsexy conglomerate rationalization that has diminished the status of the author. Conglomerate authorship always wants to hide itself, and never more than in autofiction. It is, in Lee Konstantinou’s phrasing, “literature that addresses the becoming institutional of the individual,” which explains why so many works of autofiction—by Rachel Cusk, Helen DeWitt, Percival Everett,

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Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Ben Lerner, among others—are preoccupied with the book industry.76 Autofiction projects the fantasy of victory over the systems that threaten to interfere in the cultivation of the expressive self, whether the creative writing program or the conglomerated publishing industry, which is why it is so useful in the conglomerate era.77

THE CONGLOMERATE ERA

This is a book of literary history. It tells a single story—with many subplots— about U.S. fiction since 1960, a field that, in the words of Mark McGurl, “has grown so large and internally complex that few scholars even attempt anymore to gather its splinters.”78 I have attempted it, and in doing so have elided much that others would include, an inevitable limit given my hope to keep this from becoming a tome of unwieldy size, elisions that I hope readers take in a generative spirit, as occasions to expand on what I have begun. The story I tell is about what I call the conglomerate era, a term that pays homage to Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, the book that inspired me to begin this quixotic investigation. His argument is simple. The rise of the creative writing program after World War II transformed U.S. literary production. It made writers into professors, which altered the meaning of their work, and it ensconced the values of modernism, as inaugurated by Henry James, in institutions. These values are captured and banalized by clichés: show don’t tell; find your voice; write what you know. Productive dialectical tension cleaves the institution itself, given its definitional creativity and its necessary concession to the programmatic. The Program Era is capacious. It reached back in spirit to Hugh Kenner’s exuberantly written The Pound Era, which delivered its readers to the immersive junction of biography and close reading, poetics and institutions, staging the human stakes of formal choices. Like McGurl, I hope to show how attention to an institution enables interpretive vim and helps make clear how fiction works and why it changed. The incentives and agendas of a house and everyone in it depend on its sector. Bantam, a mass-market house, acquires for a markedly different set of exigencies than Knopf, a trade house. Knopf has an utterly different financial logic it needs to obey than Graywolf, a nonprofit. By 1995, only one large trade house remained independent—and remains so today: W. W. Norton, which, because it is employee owned and has a flourishing relationship with colleges and universities, operates uniquely. What happens in one sector affects the others. They

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define themselves against each other, fight for markets at the boundaries where their audiences meet, and experiment with tactics that others have tried. This book is thus divided into six chapters: two each for the mass market and trade, and one each for nonprofits and independents. Within each chapter, I explain how the changing logic of that sector in the conglomerate era transformed how individual publishers published fiction, laying the groundwork on which, by this book’s end, I will have built a vision of how the sectors behave interdependently to form the logic of the industry, which thus shapes the literary field. I begin with the mass market, which vastly expanded the numbers of book readers in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. I follow E. L. Doctorow— who grew up loving these cheap little books—as he found a career publishing them at New American Library and Dial before, in 1975, selling his own novel, Ragtime, for the highest advance to that point in history. That year was a peak for literary fiction, the fortunes of which fell steeply as aggressive agents, empowered publicists, and buyers for the new chain bookstores elevated brand-name writers of genre fiction such as Jean Auel, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Judith Krantz, and Danielle Steel. In the later years of the conglomerate era, the format itself would fall dramatically out of favor. It gave way to trade paperbacks, invented by Jason Epstein at Doubleday in 1953, which is where I begin the second chapter, which is about the conglomeration of trade publishing. Epstein, who moved to Random House in 1958 and stayed there for decades, was a leading figure in a culture of misogyny. I show how leading women writers who published with Random House in the 1960s and 1970s turned to autofiction to give themselves space to experiment with new novelistic forms, devised in response to the misogyny of publishing. Beginning in the 1980s, we find conglomerate authorship expressed in the form of literary genre fiction in novels by Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and Joan Didion. In the hope of freeing houses from the market demands of conglomerate publishing, a little-known literary impresario named Jim Sitter began an epic campaign to subsidize literary publishing, which became the nonprofit publishing movement. I follow it from its roots in Port Townsend and Iowa City to its maturation in the Twin Cities where Coffee House, Graywolf, and Milkweed took root, publishing fiction that commercial houses did not consider viable, such as the oeuvres of Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita. I spend the sixth chapter with W. W. Norton, whose status as an employee-owned house and its robust relationship with higher education allowed it to publish misfit fiction: Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring novels, Walter Mosley’s black detective fiction, the lad lit of Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh, the complete works of Isaac Babel and Primo Levi, the graphic novels of R. Crumb.

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The 2007–2008 financial crisis transformed publishing and ushered the conglomerate era into a new phase. Amazon launched its Kindle and created a vast publishing ecology of its own, which cut into the power of legacy publishers. Conglomerate and nonprofit publishing, though, remain at the center of what we might call mainstream U.S. literary culture. The financial crisis and competition from Amazon led to intensified managerial interventions among conglomerates in the name of customer service and profit growth. When the financial crisis hit, young members of the Silent Generation and old Boomers had only recently retired or were in the twilight of their career, people like Jason Epstein, Robert Gottlieb, and André Schiffrin, who entered publishing during the postwar boom, when editors held sway, it was a more personal business, and business was good. They resisted the managerial revolution and clung to the idea that their work was about the cultural life of the nation, not economics. With them out of the way, and a financial crisis to take advantage of, some members of the next generation, who got their start in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, often as marketers, publicists, or subsidiary rights managers, accelerated the neoliberalization of publishing. Conglomerate publishers now have corporate marketing managers, directors of social media, digital marketing managers, business intelligence analysts, and directors of media planning and mass merchandising. I describe the consequences of the contemporary phase of the conglomerate era in the conclusion.

SCHIFFRIN, REDUX

Later, André Schiffrin would say that the day he was fired—possibly even as he was heading home to his wife on that coldest day of the year—he began planning his next move. With former Pantheon editor Diane Wachtell, he cofounded The New Press as a nonprofit. Although it is known for its nonfiction, The New Press published prominent global fiction by Marguerite Duras, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Henning Mankell, Lore Segal, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. It published The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander in 2011 with a very modest first printing of three thousand copies, but which went on to spend many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Schiffrin launched an internship program designed to bring underrepresented voices into the extremely white publishing industry. In 1996, the house received a $1.1 million grant—$2 million in 2022 dollars—the largest in publishing history to that point, to extend its outreach programs.79 It has sent dozens of former interns into jobs at Hachette; Little, Brown; Routledge; Riverhead;

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Scribner; and Penguin, among other houses; and the revered scouting agency of Maria B. Campbell Associates.80 He and his wife held frequent parties on the wraparound terrace of his penthouse on the Upper West Side, where Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City, rubbed shoulders with Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and Studs Terkel, chronicler of the working class. “You’d think it’d all be tweeds and pipes with André,” said one occasional guest. “No, not at all.” Schiffrin’s career was emblematic of the conglomerate era. He reappears from time to time in the coming pages because he touched every sector of publishing. His first job was at New American Library, a pathbreaking mass-market house. The year after he arrived, it was purchased by Times Mirror, which hired McKinsey to restructure the place, leading to an editorial exodus: the conglomerate era’s opening act. Schiffrin left for Pantheon, owned by Random House, until conglomeration came for him there. André Schiffrin was not just a victim of conglomeration, but also a figure whose career paralleled the conglomerate era. It is an era that would outlive him. We remain ensconced as I write. But he gives us our start, an entrée into an opaque world that shapes our lives with books.

1 Mass Market (I) How Mass-Market Books Changed Publishing

S

tu watched from his dorm room window as students marched down Washington Avenue. “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” they chanted. Two days earlier—on May  8, 1972— President Nixon had announced that the United States would prolong its war in Vietnam. In response, Stu’s classmates, students at the University of Minnesota, organized a historic protest for peace. Stu watched the protestors marching from the east carrying eggs and rocks. The well-armed riot police approached from the west. The two groups collided in the street beneath him. The police drove a wedge through the student body, shearing off sections and leaving many bloodied, injured. The next day, Stu would find himself accidentally thrown into the chaos, sprinting to escape blows from a baton-wielding cop as a helicopter dropped tear gas over the campus. But now he chose to turn from the window, grab a worn, mass-market copy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, and, as he would tell me decades later, “escape.”1

TALISMAN

In 1972, college kids across the country were grabbing Tolkien’s trilogy. Although it had been in print since the 1950s, it only began to take off in the United States in 1965 with the publication of competing cheap mass-market editions by Ace Books and Ballantine. Over the next seven years, the series became a campus sensation, supplanting The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies as

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the novels of choice for disaffected youth, causing cultural commentators to compare the frenzy to Beatlemania and to term it—with its accompanying Elvish and “FRODO LIVES!” paraphernalia—a cult.2 My aesthetic education begins here, with these books. Stu is my father. He graduated, found a job as a sales representative in the furniture business, got married, had kids, and moved to the suburbs. He and my mother are avid readers. He sought out the latest bestsellers at B. Dalton; she made monthly selections from a book club. When I was a colicky baby, they quieted me by setting me in front of shelves to be distracted by the variegated spines and their colophons. Tolkien’s paperback success in the United States revealed to writers and publishers the possibility of a new genre: fantasy. But it didn’t take off until 1977, when Ballantine editors Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey started their own imprint and had quick success with books by Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson.3 They also published Piers Anthony, a forty-something science fiction writer, born in England, but living in Florida, the grandson of a wealthy mushroom tycoon. Under the aegis of the del Reys, Anthony wrote his first fantasy novel—A Spell for Chameleon, set in the magical land of Xanth—as a Ballantine mass-market paperback original in 1977.4 By the time I picked up Spell it was 1994; Anthony had published seventeen more and was still going strong. Now, almost thirty years later, I remember them as they looked on the shelves dedicated to fantasy at the Barnes & Noble in the Har Mar Mall in Roseville, Minnesota. Each summer my family spent a week in a cabin near the border with Canada. We had a ritual: the night before we left, we went to Barnes & Noble; each of us kids could spend twenty-five dollars. Passing through those paired doors, through the anteroom with discounted self-help titles or cookbooks, into the wide airy earth-toned space felt like entering a temple to potentiality. It smelled like new ideas and coffee. A Starbucks was located in the middle, slightly elevated, where my parents sat while we shopped. I took my time. I roamed. But I always ended at Xanth. The spines stood in a long row with titles whose puns struck me as signs of wit: Night Mare, Heaven Cent, Isle of View. Over the years, I worked my way through them. Eventually, I outgrew Xanth. My parents recommended what they liked: Conroy, Crichton, Follett, Grisham, King, Michener, Uris, Vonnegut, and Wouk. But Follett and Grisham and Michener seemed, to me, expressions of a cookie-cutter suburban culture long ago dubbed middlebrow. That was our world. I wanted out. I was now drawn to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Heller and Salinger. Their tales and how they told them—even more, their cultural cachet, how they were marketed—reflected my adolescent aspirations for East Coast reinvention, for travel in Europe, for sophistication and worldliness. That all of

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these, from Conroy to Salinger, were white men reveals as much about the homogeneity of the publishing industry as it does my family’s gendered and raced purchasing habits.5 I came to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow via an online list providing recommendations for the AP English exam. I tracked the book down at Barnes & Noble. I found the Penguin trade paperback edition, bound with a dark blue cover etched with outlines of V-2 rockets. No one I knew had heard of the book, so it felt like I had made a discovery. (No matter that it was in print and in stock at Barnes & Noble.) It became my talisman. The tale the novel told was Tolkien in a funhouse mirror. An epic quest across wartorn Europe, a battle fought between good and evil—except this time evil would win. Pynchon’s hopes were modest: ephemeral utopias, oblique liberation. Carrying the book made me feel unique, and reading it made me feel smarter than everyone else, but it was more than that. The language was exhilarating, the sensibility hilarious, the politics strange and enchanting. Gravity’s Rainbow gave me everything I needed to become, years later, an English professor: a talismanic object, with its teal spine and blueprint design, later to be held together with a strip of duct tape; a lesson in how to distinguish myself from others based on my taste; a fondness for liberatory politics; and a love of challenging prose, lush language. It would be many more years before I learned to narrate my aesthetic education not as a triumphant journey of self-discovery but as a slightly embarrassing cliché: my pretension to uniqueness, through Pynchon in particular, was repeated by cocky young white men across the United States. I was a type and played to it. In graduate school I met iterations of myself, again and again.6 If this book has a villain, it is the romantic author, the individual loosed by liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to acknowledge. To make this claim is already a derivative act, preceded by, among countless others, Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel that imagines that, against the allconsuming military-industrial complex, we either succumb, hopelessly resist, or disintegrate, losing all sense of personhood, becoming vessels through which flow the currents of culture.

POLARIZED

Books serve our self-image. The books we like say a lot about us, whether we know it or not. This is a common enough observation, associated with the

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French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who showed that—at least in France in the 1960s—aesthetic taste correlates with socioeconomic class. Yet scholars of contemporary U.S. literature rarely reflect on how we’ve tacitly selected a tiny canon of objects of study and what that says about us.7 To be clear, scholars spent considerable time in the 1980s and 1990s debating which authors should be among the elect. More white women and people of color, fewer white men. We have spent less time, though, studying the ramifications of our narrow purview in the first place.8 It turns out we have predictable habits. Scholars of contemporary U.S. literature have written reams on Bechdel, Cisneros, DeLillo, Erdrich, Kingston, McCarthy, Morrison, Pynchon, Robinson, Roth, Wallace, and Whitehead. We’ve written much less on Auel, Clancy, Crichton, Follett, Grisham, Koontz, Krantz, McMillan, Picoult, Steel, and Woods.9 At the time of writing, Toni Morrison generates 3,109 hits on MLA International Bibliography, Danielle Steel six. We avoid authors who sell the most books. Too often, we let the authors we choose—or who have been quietly chosen for us, through the work of publishers, reviewers, booksellers, and prize committees10—stand in for literature itself in the arguments we make. How we read is historical. What it means to open a book changes depending on where we are, and when. Amid the morass of the Vietnam War, Tolkien’s novels offered the fantasy of moral clarity. Audiences weren’t always so polarized between popularity and prestige. “It used to be thought that ‘serious writing’ and ‘best-sellers’ were mutually exclusive categories,” wrote the eminent critic Malcolm Cowley in 1958. “The popular book never had literary merit, and the work of distinction would never be popular. The paperback experiment has destroyed that superstition.”11 Mass-market paperbacks were printed in unprecedented numbers after World War II to keep pace with the rapid increase of readers in the postwar United States. Mass-market houses multiplied like suburban subdivisions. They used the format—small, pocket-sized, printed on cheap paper—to publish and promote Philip Roth alongside Harold Robbins, William Faulkner alongside Mickey Spillane. The covers were provocative.12 The impulse behind their design often was about democracy as much as profit: get a wide range of books in as many hands as possible. For the first several decades of the twentieth century, if you didn’t live in an East Coast city, books were hard to find. Bookstores were few and far between.13 Mass-market paperbacks changed the game. These cheap and portable books could be placed “on newsstands and in drugstores, variety stores, tobacconists, railroad stations, and other locations visited by thousands of people who might never have entered a bookstore.”14 Young John Updike was thrilled when

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mass-market novels first appeared in his small Pennsylvania town.15 The wellestablished Henry Miller, meanwhile, in New York, thought the format was trash, degrading the value of a book. Writing in 1954, Kurt Enoch, head of New American Library, one of the most profitable paperback houses, took a highminded view. “It is no longer safe, or indeed possible, for the sort of diverse communication ‘in depth’ afforded by books to be confined to an elite.”16 The ethos of the mass market was to unify, not stratify.17 “Winners of Nobel prizes, Pulitzer prizes, National Book awards, and other literary accolades, and talented novelists from many countries in the world, appear side by side on drugstore display racks,” wrote Enoch.18 For the first forty years—1939 to 1979—Faulkner, Robbins, Roth, and Spillane, not to mention Baldwin, Kosinski, Susann, and Vonnegut, shared real estate on bestseller lists because publishers launched them together. During the flush years of the postwar boom, mass-market publishers reinforced (by instituting genre categories) and subverted (by publishing all fiction as cheap commodities) notions of high and low. Large media conglomerates began buying mass-market houses in the 1960s, but in the 1970s the boom bled into a downturn, and the book business slowed. Wages stagnated and inflation grew, hollowing out the middle class. Conglomeration intervened, creating a class of mega-bestsellers, engineering the harder (if still porous) divide between popularity and prestige that we live with today. By 1980, market segmentation and sales prioritization had become the norm, bestseller lists populated by a small group of brand-name authors. Between 1986 and 1996, “63 of the 100 bestselling books in the United States were written by just six authors: Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel.”19 Meanwhile, the mass-market distribution model introduced in 1939— sell books like magazines and candy, in between necessities and novelty items at kiosks, supermarkets, and airports—had been cannibalized by trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Only a few books make it into Walmart and O’Hare, but those that do sell in outrageous numbers. In short, conglomeration stratified reading. The world of books changed: how they were written, sold, read. This chapter describes the rise of the mass market, its invention and expansion. More money was flowing through the industry than ever before. Artists and hacks alike cashed in. Littérateurs could be celebrities: James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal. Even hermetic Pynchon’s V. sold two hundred thousand copies on the mass market. Gravity’s Rainbow reached the bestseller lists in 1973. The great divide was 1980. Conglomeration had arrived. The second chapter begins then, at the mass market’s peak, the glitzy realm of Judith Krantz and

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Danielle Steel. The 1980s also witnessed the triumph of formulaic romance novels and middlebrow blockbusters and the decline of original science fiction in favor of profitable series. But even as mass-market authors like Steel and Krantz were becoming more profitable, the mass-market format was losing readers, a victim of its own success, cannibalized by trade. The writers in these two chapters—E. L. Doctorow, Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, Piers Anthony—wrote for the mass market. That meant that they were, in a sense, industrial writers: they wrote from within an increasingly complex bureaucracy struggling to maximize its returns on investments; they were those investments, and they knew it. Their writing was not their own. It was property that their publisher would copyright, per Simon & Schuster’s Richard Snyder, for “exploitation in any medium or distribution system.”20 Each of these four writers negotiated their peace in their own way in their work. I read them among their industrial collaborators, the agents, marketers, wholesalers, and booksellers who made them rich. In the process, the contours of a new literary history—a first step toward synthesizing popular culture, postmodernism, the rise of the creative writing program, and the institutions of literary prizes—begins to take shape.

APOTHEOSIS

Edgar was extremely thirsty. His appendix had burst. He was eight years old. A reader in a family of readers—he was named after Poe—Edgar found consolation in books. (Years later, he narrated the event in a work of autofiction.)21 As he lay in the hospital, recovering from surgery, his parents brought him a gift, “a book that could fit into your pocket, a pocket book or paperback that cost only twenty-five cents.”22 In fact, they brought him three. Published by the aptly named Pocket Books, Edgar’s gifts were chosen from a line of ten mass-market paperbacks Pocket had just introduced. Among the titles were Bambi, Lost Horizon, and Wuthering Heights, each now placed in Edgar’s hands. They sparked an obsession. Pocket had announced its inaugural list with a full-page ad in the New York Times on the day of the launch, July 19, 1939: “Never again need you dawdle idly in reception rooms, fret on train or bus rides, sit vacantly staring at a restaurant table. The books you have always meant to read ‘when you had time’ will fill these waits with enjoyment.”23 Pocket’s inexpensive, mass-produced books were a success. Within a few years, a slew of imitators followed. The leaders, in terms

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of market share, were, along with Pocket, Dell (1943), Bantam (1945), New American Library (1948), and Fawcett (1950).24 Demand was high and these publishers flooded the market with books. When Edgar grew up, he secured a position as an editor at NAL. He later wrote that he felt lucky, “getting paid to find and read good books and buy the rights and print up a hundred thousand, say, of a good obscure first novel, give it a jazzy cover, and ship it out to all the airports in the country, all the drugstores and railroad stations.” Genre fiction—then often called category books— turned out to be the mass market’s bread and butter: mysteries, romances, and Westerns sold well during the format’s first decade and included science fiction by the time Edgar entered the game in 1959. His work inspired him to write his own Western, Welcome to Hard Times, followed by a science fiction novel, Big as Life. Tired of pulp, Edgar originally intended Hard Times to be a parody, but as he kept at it, his “desire to destroy the genre forever turned into a serious engagement with its possibilities.”25 After ten years, he quit the publishing industry to build a career as a novelist. Although he is read less and less, Edgar—known as E. L. Doctorow—would, with his fourth novel, Ragtime, earn a staggering $1.85 million mass-market contract in 1975 (about $10.5 million in 2022 dollars). “It’s really the first time that so much money has been connected with a book of such high quality,” said an industry source in the New York Times.26 It would be one of the last times.27 The coming divide between popularity and prestige would limit the financial ceiling for books deemed, by the industry, as quality. Ragtime was notable, too, for its breadth of appeal: it topped the bestseller lists in 1975, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was respected by the academy. Fredric Jameson, the influential literary theorist, called Doctorow “one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists at work in the United States.” He read Ragtime as an exemplary postmodern novel, a “peculiar and stunning monument.”28 It was the apotheosis of the egalitarian impulse of the mass market.

ENOCH AND WEYBRIGHT, WEYBRIGHT AND ENOCH

Kurt Enoch’s publishing partner at NAL, Victor Weybright, offered Doctorow a job in 1959. The house had just lost its only Jewish editor to Dell, and Doctorow, also Jewish, arrived at the right moment to fill what he would later call NAL’s “Jewish seat.” (One of his colleagues, hired the same year in the college

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marketing department, was André Schiffrin.) NAL was the most progressive big house. In 1950, it published Richard Wright’s Native Son, establishing itself “as the only mass-market reprinter willing to consistently handle serious work by black writers.”29 NAL went on to publish James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and Ann Petry. Weybright built a relationship with the “Negro leadership of the 1940s” and advocated “the distribution of books in predominantly Negro neighborhoods such as Harlem, South Chicago, Atlanta, and Baltimore, where previously the magazine wholesalers had insisted that self-service book racks would be doomed by excessive pilferage.” NAL’s experience “demonstrated the very opposite.”30 In 1957, Fawcett staked a claim to black sleaze with Mandingo, a historical plantation novel about slave breeding that sold millions of copies in the United States and Canada.31 Mandingo’s outlandish success set the stage for Holloway House to publish Iceberg Slim’s classic novel, Pimp, a “major force behind diversifying the pulp and genre fiction industries in the late twentieth century.”32 At the end of his life, Weybright was nostalgic for his childhood in Maryland farm country, for its heavy horses and camaraderie born of hard work, its integrity and “gentility,” its “splendid rural culture” that had given way to urbanization. “The automobile and the movies,” he wrote, “seemed to be creating only an illusion of happiness, tempting people to false escapism,” unlike the noble leisure of books. Weybright claimed that he learned to read “simple adult books” by the age of four, that he was reading Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth by six, and Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo by nine.33 He moved to New York City in the 1920s, immersing himself in its literary world, dominated by figures who would be responsible for some of the most consequential twentieth-century literary institutions: John Farrar, of the future Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Horace Liveright, of Boni & Liveright, which spawned Random House; H. L. Mencken, whose American Mercury was publishing Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, and James Weldon Johnson; Condé Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair; and Harold Ross, who founded the New Yorker. At the outset of World War II, Weybright was stationed in London at the Office of War Information with poet Archibald MacLeish, who was assistant director there and, simultaneously, the Librarian of Congress.34 Weybright’s disposition was moralistic, his taste catholic, and his milieu that of high literary distinction, positioning him to take advantage of the new infrastructure to bring modernism to the masses. After the war, Weybright was asked by Allen Lane, the head of Penguin Books in the UK, to help his struggling U.S. branch. Weybright bought the first hundred mass-market paperbacks he saw: Pockets, Dells, Bantams. He found almost nothing, to his mind, of literary merit: “not a trace of Faulkner, Farrell,

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Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Wolfe, Cather, Joyce, Proust, or James.”35 That convinced him of his postwar mission. (Weybright had every reason to exaggerate; he was writing for his legacy.36 Pocket, as we have seen, included Wuthering Heights on its initial list, alongside work by Samuel Butler and William Shakespeare. Paula Rabinowitz argues that mass-market houses were bringing modernism to broad publics in the immediate postwar years.37) Weybright went to meet the man in charge of Penguin US, a German-Jewish refugee, Kurt Enoch. Enoch and Weybright ran Penguin US for a few years before tensions with Lane over the licentiousness of their books led them, in 1948, to break off and found New American Library. Enoch was thin and smoked a pipe. Weybright was rotund and smoked a pipe. Enoch tended the business side of things, Weybright editorial. It was a pragmatic, if not terribly friendly partnership. “Despite the fact that I had many misgivings about the secretive authoritarianism of Enoch,” Weybright later wrote, “I loyally supported his prowess as a production and distribution man.” They rented offices at Fifty-Sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, just a few short blocks from Random House, “the city’s most cheerful publishing group,” who, Weybright wrote, “were making literary history.” Knopf, too, was nearby. Weybright came to feel “a part of the Knopf family, personally and professionally.” Some of NAL’s “best authors” came from Knopf ’s list, including Thomas Mann and D. H. Lawrence.”38 Within the first several years, NAL reprinted fiction by Truman Capote, James Jones, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Gore Vidal, and Richard Wright. Weybright, after a conversation with his black butler about Faulkner, thought the respected but underread writer could sell far better than he had to date. He made a smash out of Sanctuary. Next, he wanted to reprint The Wild Palms, but Random House couldn’t even find a file copy. Weybright bought a rare used edition for $14 ($170 in 2022 terms), which NAL used “as a setting copy.”39 By the end of 1949, NAL had sold nearly a million copies of Sanctuary and eight hundred thousand of The Wild Palms.40 Weybright launched New World Writing in 1952, with Arabel Porter at the helm, envisioned as a little magazine in paperback form. The first volume included work by Christopher Isherwood, James Laughlin, Alain Locke, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal, and marked the debut for William Gaddis, with a selection from his forthcoming The Recognitions. NAL’s top sellers were Erskine Caldwell and Mickey Spillane, both of whom, like Faulkner, drew condemnation on grounds of obscenity. Caldwell’s and Faulkner’s NAL books were seized in 1948 by the vice squad of the Philadelphia police and had to be defended in court. Weybright, believing that Catholics

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were behind much of the censorious sentiment, held a cocktail party with Caldwell, Spillane, and “a handful of literary Catholic priests.” It turned out that Spillane, whose hard-boiled fiction hardly betrayed any religiosity, was a serious Jehovah’s Witness. He and the priests ended up “in theological debate,” with Spillane “thrusting copies of Jehovah’s Witness literature into the hands of the clergy and defying them to produce Biblical justification of purgatory.”41 The other successful mass-market houses had somewhat less literary ambitions. Even though Pocket published classics from the public domain, its top seller year after year was mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, who ran a selfproclaimed fiction factory from his California ranch, accompanied by strong sales from Agatha Christie and Western writers Max Brand and Zane Grey.42 Dell, which began as a spinoff from a pulp magazine, published mostly mysteries. Fawcett mostly published original paperbacks in category fiction, especially mysteries and Westerns “aimed at the male adventure reader,” notably Louis L’Amour.43 After NAL, Bantam was the most literary, putting out books by Carlos Bulosan, Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, John O’Hara, Mark Twain, and Leon Uris. It added a line of Bantam Classics in 1958, which included Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Aldous Huxley. When Doctorow took his position as editor at NAL in 1959, the mass-market model had reached its twentieth birthday. It had revolutionized reading in the United States. It took reading, which had been the privilege, in Weybright’s words, of “the small educated class in the nineteenth century,” and made it, thanks to the GI Bill and postwar prosperity, widely accessible; Weybright claimed a major role in the profound expansion “of learning and literature” that “was bound to have an enduring and a constructive influence upon domestic education and culture.”44 All this reading created a riddle for status. Literary prestige—according to authors and critics—was supposed to depend on not being for the masses, on making art that wasn’t validated by its success as a commodity. It had only been a few decades since Henry James had fought to attain such prestige for the novel.45 Clement Greenberg theorized the opposition between avant-garde and kitsch in the pages of Partisan Review in 1939, the same year Robert de Graff founded Pocket Books. What happened when even William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon wrote for mass-market houses, when modernism became mass media? Had the rules changed?46 Cultural critics worried about a new category, sinister fiction that pretended “to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact water[ing] them down and vulgariz[ing] them,” associated with the work of John Hersey, John Steinbeck, Herman Wouk, and winners of the

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Pulitzer Prize, such as Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea: what we’ve come to call the middlebrow.47

WATERSHED

NAL conquered the book world, but all was not well with Enoch and Weybright. Their pragmatic partnership was under stress. By 1959, Weybright felt that Enoch “had become increasingly querulous and constantly critical of the editorial team.”48 They were both preoccupied with NAL’s future. In a mere decade, they had built a large and well-respected house. NAL’s imprints, Mentor and Signet, were dependable brands. Growing old, Enoch and Weybright worried about the damage the cost of estate tax could wreak. If they kept NAL private, it would be up to the Internal Revenue Service to determine the house’s value when they died and to tax their heirs accordingly. They considered going public, but decided against it on the advice of a consultant who said that to do so would tie them up fulfilling requirements for the Securities and Exchange Commission, leaving little time to publish. They solved their problem by selling NAL to Times Mirror, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. It marked the beginning of the conglomeration of the publishing industry. Doctorow joined NAL “just as the merger was being negotiated.”49 Times Mirror took control of NAL in 1960, a watershed year for publishing. Pocket went public, ceding control of its operations to shareholders. The relinquishment of editorial ownership by the two leading mass-market houses signaled the start of a new era for the business of books. Enoch embraced corporate life, but Weybright quickly came to regret it. The Chandlers, who owned Times Mirror, were conservative Republicans going back to the party’s “earlier union-busting days.”50 Enoch, not Weybright, was their man. To Weybright, it felt like Enoch went from a difficult partner to “a bitterly cantankerous opponent” overnight.51 Enoch did not leave memoirs, but André Schiffrin, who worked at NAL from 1959 to 1962, took the German Jew’s side. (Schiffrin was hired by Enoch and believed that Weybright, for that reason, would never let him move into editorial.) To Schiffrin, Enoch was “a model German intellectual” and Weybright a “flamboyant man who gloried in his snobberies and pretensions” whose criticisms of Enoch as an authoritarian money man displayed “unmitigated anti-Semitism.”52 On the advice of McKinsey, the consulting firm, Times Mirror instituted what, for Weybright, was a “devastating set of rules” that sidelined him. He

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grew paranoid and sensed that Enoch “conducted a continuous series of communications with Los Angeles” while he, Weybright, was ignored. He hemorrhaged editorial control, which was “delegated almost entirely to marketing executives.” Within six years, the once-formidable editorial team had scattered to other houses, and NAL went from the black to the red. “The barbarians had taken over,” Weybright wrote. “NAL had been pulverized and I was lost among the rubble.”53 He returned to Maryland farm country. NAL became a cautionary tale. Doctorow left NAL in 1964. Asked why, he corroborated Weybright’s account. He left because, “Times Mirror brought in their business consultants and personnel people who had no sympathy for this kind of work. The soul went out of the place.”54 Doctorow moved to Dial Press, where, as editor in chief, he oversaw the publication of books by James Baldwin and Norman Mailer. Dell bought Dial in 1968 and made Doctorow publisher (in addition to editor in chief), which meant that he was now responsible for business and personnel. Fixated on completing the manuscript for his third novel, The Book of Daniel, Doctorow soon left publishing altogether for a series of teaching gigs in creative writing programs—the University of California Irvine, Sarah Lawrence, Yale, Utah, and, finally, New York University—and a fuller commitment to writing. The decimation of NAL left a mark, however. It showed Doctorow and everyone else in the book business the damage conglomeration could do when implemented. Times Mirror was unusually detrimental but its practices became endemic to publishing. Editorial judgment and a democratizing ethos were devalued in favor of more calculable virtues—determined by production, marketing, distribution, and sales—under the banner of privileging the bottom line. Doctorow gave voice to criticisms of mass culture through his new novel’s eponymous Daniel, a red diaper baby caught up in the fervor of the New Left. Humphrey Bogart movies, to Daniel, are “cheap trash” and Disneyland enacts “a process of symbolic manipulation.”55 Ironic distance separated the author and his characters. Doctorow’s own relationship to mass culture was more dialectical: his next trick was to write a novel that heightened those dialectics to a fever pitch while being a perfect mass cultural document itself.

RAGTIME

I’m not telling the familiar story of a rise and fall. Notwithstanding Victor Weybright’s analogy, this is not a tale about a Golden Age ransacked by barbarians. I don’t believe the novels written in the last forty years are worse than those written in the forty years previous. This is, instead, a tale of transformation.

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Doctorow’s first two novels, written during his participation in the institutionalization of genre fiction, were a showdown with the Western and an experiment in science fiction. That’s why Ragtime, internalizing conglomerate ecology as setting and plot, is about an artist betraying his political values to become a cultural entrepreneur in the budding film industry. Ragtime is a historical novel. It is about New York City in the early years of the twentieth century, Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan, labor politics and wealth inequality. Doctorow veils, however thinly, his criticisms of Nixonian politics in the distant mists of the Gilded Age. This doubling—it takes place in 1912 as much as it does, just beneath its surface, in 1972—creates uncanniness: events in the novel pretend to both reveal the historical source of the present and represent the present. Ragtime’s history is not linear but cyclical. The novel offers a heterodox account of the origin of the cultural industries, how we came to manufacture culture like the Model T. Harry Houdini, a character in the novel, is an avant-garde artist whose innovations are mainstreamed and banalized into “mindless entertainment.” Evelyn Nesbit, “the first sex goddess in American history,” prefigures Marilyn Monroe. Watching her testify at a celebrity trial, businessmen realize they could “create such individuals,” which would mean “more people would pay money for the picture shows.” The anarchist Emma Goldman befriends Nesbit and offers her—and Doctorow his reader—a tidy bit of ideology critique: “How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is by being persuaded to identify with them.”56 In this case, working-class men join with rich men in objectifying Nesbit. The cultural industries, for Doctorow, recently a professional member, facilitate class domination. Doctorow’s avatar, type to his antitype, is Tateh, a Jewish immigrant, silhouette artist, and socialist in the slums of New York City. Impoverished, he moves with his daughter to a Massachusetts mill town, where he joins a Wobbly strike and is brutalized by the police. Underwhelmed by the gains won through the strike, Tateh escapes poverty through cultural entrepreneurship. He makes flip books and puts on magic lantern shows before learning that “others were doing animated drawings like his except for projection on celluloid film.” He enters the booming movie business, which in the novel stands in for publishing’s 1970s: “Film companies were forming overnight, re-forming, merging, going to court, attempting to monopolize distribution.”57 (By the time it was published, Ragtime itself had been sold to Hollywood, attached to Dino De Laurentiis and Robert Altman.58) Tateh pretends to be a baron to disguise his Jewishness. He creates The Little Rascals. He gets rich. No wonder Jameson argues that the novel depicts the “depoliticization of the workers’ movement” at the hands of “the media or culture generally.”59

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Doctorow’s concern is the mechanical reproduction of culture: the “accoutrement of patriotism,” films, Ford’s Model T, sex symbols. At novel’s end, he extends the process of mechanization to history itself: “the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano.” To posit a fatalistic logic to history is to nod to literary naturalism and writers such as Theodore Dreiser (who makes a cameo in Ragtime) and Frank Norris, writers who found their drama in the futile human struggle against deterministic systems. Ragtime explores Doctorow’s preoccupation with mass-market fiction obliquely, tells his truth but tells it slant. His life had been governed by the mass production of books, from reading Wuthering Heights in the hospital as a boy to his employment at NAL to his latest labor in creative writing programs—to writing Ragtime itself, the most popular novel of 1975. With Ragtime, Doctorow’s aesthetic dilemma—how to retain integrity under conglomerate mass production—became the subject of his work. His conclusion is unhappy. His avatar is a class traitor and a sellout who still claims to be a socialist. Ragtime gives an especially pointed example of an affect that pervaded the novel in the conglomerate era: a fear that art, like history, is made by deterministic machines. Random House, which published Ragtime in hardcover, was a subsidiary of RCA, which owned NBC. Bantam, which bought the mass-market rights to publish Ragtime, was owned by IFI, an Italian conglomerate. Doctorow’s novel reflects his own story, conquering and capitulating to the conglomerate era, an expression of disdain for the system in the system’s own language. It is entertaining even while indicting conglomerate entertainment for its complicity in wrecking the working-class left. Ragtime accommodated the aesthetic demands of popular readers, the literary establishment, and academia. It was, to each of these groups, a good book. But lots of books are good. Some are even good in all the ways that Ragtime is. Good is not always enough to make it big, and it’s not what made Ragtime unique in its time. The window for a book like Ragtime to dominate the market and critical consciousness was narrow and brief and depended on Doctorow’s curriculum vitae.

UNITE AND CONQUER

If Doctorow’s novel was out of step with contemporaneous fiction, he was ideally situated to pull it off, commercially. He’d worked in mass-market paperbacks;

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he’d worked in trade. He had all the right friends and protégés, the industry connections. He’d had the dream since he was eight of seeing his words on that cheap paper, in those books that fit in your pocket. He knew the system as well as anybody. He mastered publishing, and that mastery expressed itself in Ragtime’s success and in the novel itself as allegory for the book industry. Jim Silberman was part of NAL’s editorial team, along with Doctorow, when Weybright ran the house. After Times Mirror took control, Silberman left for Random House, where he started as a senior editor, becoming editor in chief in 1968. He then brought his former colleague, Doctorow, over to Random House through the acquisition of The Book of Daniel, published in 1971. But it wasn’t until Ragtime that Random House went all in. Ragtime was the title RH would use to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. As part of the original promotion, RH’s marketing department sent Ragtime-themed bags and cassettes to bookstores. It designed posters, bookmarks, and window streamers, and constructed a “35copy display dump in the shape of a piano, complete with keyboard and pedals.” It placed “radio spots, newspaper ads, and bus cards.”60 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt—lead critic at the New York Times, the most important reviewer in the country—had worked under Doctorow at Dial.61 He wrote a rave. “E. L. Doctorow’s ‘Ragtime’ is a highly original experiment in historical fiction,” it began. “But the first thing to be said about it is that it works. It works so well that one devours it in a single sitting as if it were the most conventional of entertainments. And the reviewer is tempted to dispense with analysis and settle down to mindless celebration of the pure fun of the thing.”62 Experimental and entertaining! Pure fun! Worth a $1.85 million advance for its paperback rights, by Bantam’s calculation. Mildred Marmur, an acknowledged master of subsidiary rights, ran the auction for Random House; she waited until the novel cracked the top spot on bestseller lists.63 The man who bought it for Bantam, Marc Jaffe, was the Jewish editor who left NAL in 1959, freeing for Doctorow the house’s “Jewish seat.” Doctorow had a theory that explained contemporary literature and how his novels fit in, or didn’t. In 1990, drawing on a life’s experience of writing and working in publishing and academia, he told Bill Moyers that “anthropology, psychology, and sociology are now using many of fiction’s devices and forcing [novelists] to become more and more private and interior. We have given up the realm of public discourse and the political and social novel to an extent that we may not have realized.”64 (He might not have been paying close enough attention to writers of color.) Creative writing programs exacerbated the trend, he said, with insular communities dedicated to craft, with devotion to honing a single metaphor rather than experimenting with the sloppy but big ideas of, say,

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a Theodore Dreiser. Doctorow had been making this argument at least since 1970, when he wrote to Jim Silberman, his editor on The Book of Daniel, in an attempt to find a promotional angle, If you think about the political scene of the last few years you are immediately struck by the silence of name novelists. We are not hearing from them. The regionalists are working their regions, the miniaturists are working their psyches, the golden loudmouths for whom we all have such hope are doing journalism. Maybe what ought to be advertised is the incredible gall of a novelist who sees the novel as the primary form for our culture, a large public medium for major cultural acts.65

It is an underappreciated theory. Scholars have been more likely to point, if not to creative writing or prizes or the latest stage of capitalism, to television or the Vietnam War to explain literary trends. But Doctorow was insightful. In 2019, Ted Underwood used computational modeling to show that, since the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, fiction has, in the aggregate, steadily differentiated itself from biography by focusing on perception and embodiment rather than big political ideas.66 Technical innovations enabled this trend, such as Jane Austen’s facility with free indirect discourse—when a narrator slips into the mind of a character—and Henry James’s mastery of close third-person perspective, innovations that modernists valorized and creative writing institutionalized with the shibboleth show don’t tell. The novel has evolved, Underwood suggests, according to the logic of comparative advantage. We might synthesize Underwood’s and Doctorow’s theories. The social sciences—anthropology, psychology, sociology—established themselves as privileged modes for understanding human experience with the rise of the modern university at the end of the nineteenth century, just as James was elaborating, as theorist and practitioner, the aesthetics of the novel that would increasingly dominate the twentieth century, an aesthetics that homed in on the perceptual, embodied experience that lay beyond social scientific methods. Doctorow felt this history intimately; he was struggling to swim against its tides. Whereas his contemporaries learned from Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, he took inspiration from Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Farrell. The former were masters of expressing psyches and sense experience, whether through maximalist, classical, or minimalist style. The latter wrote messy social novels. Mark McGurl, in his account of creative writing programs, observes that Faulkner offered the template for Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon,

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Fitzgerald for Anne Tyler and John Updike, Hemingway for Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver. Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Farrell fall out of the system.67 Doctorow believed that American life in his time demanded messy social novels from its writers. But, he told Moyers, “I’m not so sure that our crisis today is something that we writers recognize, or that we have any particular passion for.” Doctorow also had a feel for the importance of sensuousness to the modern novel, which he located not in the work of his anglophone predecessors, but in that of Gustave Flaubert whose “fiction is so unsurpassingly great because he invokes all the senses all the time.”68 How to write sensuously without being insular? How to write about big political ideas without sacrificing the particularity of embodiment? With Ragtime, Doctorow wrote a sweeping sociopolitical novel that was unusually engaged in perception and embodiment, a synthesis of Dreiser and Flaubert.

DIALECTICS

“What’s real and what’s not?” Doctorow said in response to an interviewer’s question about the nature of history in Ragtime. “I used to know but I’ve forgotten.”69 For theorists of postmodernism, Ragtime’s playful use of history makes it typical. Linda Hutcheon coined a phrase, historiographic metafiction, to describe the trend in which novels self-consciously rewrite history: A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Fredric Jameson diagnosed our inability to know history as a symptom of history itself: we had arrived at a moment defined by capitalism’s expansion and intensification beyond comprehension. Because our lives are organized and saturated by capitalism, from our jobs to our commodities to our patterns of thought, the inability to comprehend capitalism broke our ability to comprehend history. Because we could not comprehend history, we also could not represent it. Every attempt became fictional. Unable to represent Harry Houdini or Henry Ford, Doctorow had to invent them.70 Postmodernism, though, has long been in decline as an account of literary history. It explains a slice of literary fiction that won critical acclaim and academic consecration in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—that of Kathy Acker, John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Art Spiegelman, some Toni Morrison, some Philip Roth—but strains to explain the rest. Hutcheon and Jameson weren’t

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claiming that postmodernism explained everything, despite the zeal with which their concept was adopted for a time. Scholars came to realize, too, that for all its theoretical force, postmodernism lacks an explanation for how authors came to adopt its style. Mark McGurl and James English have addressed these criticisms. McGurl observes that maybe the biggest change in how Americans wrote novels after 1945 was that many of them now wrote them on college campuses. The rise of creative writing programs created an expansive patronage system that organized life and labor for novelists and had far-reaching aesthetic implications. McGurl supplants postmodernism with a new system: the writers conventionally named postmodernist he dubs technomodernists (John Barth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon), alongside lower-middle-class modernists (Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver), and high cultural pluralists (Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth). These categories capture, for McGurl, the manifestation of creative writing clichés and their affiliated values: write what you know (experience, authenticity), show don’t tell (craft, tradition), and find your voice (creativity, freedom). Genre is beyond McGurl’s purview. He explains how professorial labor shapes the aesthetics that Jameson had attributed to the culture of late capitalism. If we borrow McGurl’s theory, we might read Ragtime as about culture’s fall into the constraints of institutions—film studios, publishing conglomerates—written by an author embedded in the institution of the university as a professor of creative writing, that constitutive contradiction: the idea that individual creativity can be taught in a program. English emphasizes how prizes, like the Booker and the Pulitzer, organize how readers and writers value literature. He tests Perry Anderson’s claim that historical novels surged in popularity in recent decades. To avoid the problem of focusing on a narrow subset of consecrated literature, English constructs a sample of bestselling and prizewinning novels from 1960 to 2013 and makes a “truly astonishing” discovery.71 English finds a “divergence where before there had been parity”: around 1980, historical novels take hold among prizewinners and disappear from bestseller lists.72 (English uses Publishers Weekly’s annual lists; Jordan Pruett has come to similar conclusions using the New York Times’s weekly lists.73) Why? English looks to the Booker Prize, which rose to global influence in 1981 on the back of a savvy marketing campaign. Televised for the first time that year, the award went to Salman Rushdie for his historical novel, Midnight’s Children, ushering in, English argues, a new age. As for the United States, English notes in passing that the intensification of conglomeration in the late 1970s threatened to compromise literary value—worry was widespread that attention to the bottom line

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would erode literariness—and that the National Book Award responded to this concern by taking its cues from the Booker. After 1981, it, too, began to privilege the historical novel, which lent gravitas to fiction, a differentiation from blockbusters, which tended to take place in the present. These are, English admits, only the “first sketchy strokes” toward a richer picture of contemporary literature.74 We might then see Ragtime as setting a trend, helping establish the prestige of historical fiction by winning the National Book Critics Circle prize. We have, then, three stories that describe what contemporary U.S. literature looks like. Each has its share of truth. What we need is an account that subsumes three crucial institutions of fiction during this period (postmodernism, creative writing, and prizes), an account that demonstrates how all three belong to a single history. Publishing and its conglomeration are the site of that account.

CIRCA 1980

The rapid disappearance of historical fiction from bestseller lists belongs to the broader trend in which bestsellers and prizewinners, previously integrated, become segregated. Before 1980, prizewinners showed up on bestseller lists. After 1980, far less. What happened? To answer this question, we need to look at literary production from the perspective of publishing. After World War II, far more Americans went to college, far more earned a livable wage, and so far more bought books. These were great years for publishers. As publishers grew old, they, like Enoch and Weybright, looked to secure their legacies. Conglomerates were buying. Bantam could spend $1.85 million on Ragtime because in 1974 it had been purchased by IFI. The next year, Gulf + Western bought Simon & Schuster. Doubleday bought Dell in 1976. CBS bought Fawcett in 1977. From 1960 to 1973, book sales climbed 70  percent, but between 1973 and 1979, with a slowdown in the economy, they added less than another 6 percent— and declined in 1980.75 Publishers studied the numbers and realized the business had to change. They implemented new management techniques. Subsidiary rights—book clubs, serialization, translation—became crucial to profits, seen as key to generating new revenue and enhancing the bottom line at a moment of “increased willingness of those abroad to embrace US popular culture.”76 Meanwhile, domestically, a distribution revolution made business easier for  booksellers, enabling the rise of the chain bookstores: B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. Until 1970, retailers “mostly ordered their stock directly from

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publishers,” which usually shipped slowly, fourth-class, if the publisher even still had the title in stock. “To run a bookstore,” writes Keel Hunt, “you had to accept the cumbersome reality of ordering from dozens if not hundreds of publishers and never really knowing when any particular shipment would arrive,” which helps explain both their paucity beyond East Coast cities and the importance of mass-market distribution.77 Harry Hoffman set about to change that. He arrived at Ingram Book Company in 1968, at that time a small regional wholesaler located in Tennessee. Hoffman recognized the inefficiencies of trade distribution and felt he could do better. He built warehouse space, filled it with titles purchased in bulk from publishers, designed a system where each title received a unique code, and sent catalogs to bookstores. Already by 1970, Charles Haslam of Haslam’s Books in St. Petersburg, Florida, wrote to Publishers Weekly to praise Ingram as “one of the sensations of the [admittedly young] 70s.” He marveled, “The amazing part of the story is that if I call in an order on Monday I receive it by book post on Thursday, and I am 800 miles away.” He said this allowed him to fulfill his responsibility to his customers, congratulating Hoffman for doing what publishers couldn’t.78 Hoffman’s biggest innovation came in 1973—demonstrated at the American Booksellers Association conference that year—when he developed a microfiche catalog of Ingram’s stock that could be sent to retailers weekly, making ordering books “incalculably easier, faster, and more reliable.”79 Publishers Weekly ran a feature about Hoffman’s microfiche, noting that, thanks to the technology, Ingram had “become the primary book distribution point for the South,” and was “fast becoming a service to booksellers elsewhere in the country.” The catalog informed retailers “weeks in advance” about “national magazine reviews and appearances of authors” on “television shows,” also providing lists of “Ingram’s fifty best sellers” and its “recommendations.” Microfiche was, according to Publishers Weekly, “a giant step forward in book distribution.”80 It also led to a “steep ascent” for Ingram’s sales. Quickly, bookstores switched to buying stock from Ingram. The company’s revenues in 1970 were about $1 million. A decade later, “they’d grown to more than $100 million.” A decade after that, they reached about $400 million.81 Adjusted for inflation to 2022 values, this is a growth from $8 million in 1970 to $360 million in 1980 to $900 million in 1990. With the spread of bookstores, supported by Ingram and its marketing apparatus, trade publishers (owned now by conglomerates that demanded quarterly growth even as the market was contracting), realized they could reach much larger audiences than previously, adopting the mass-market model and focusing on a small number of titles distributed widely for strong returns on investment.

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The goal became to place titles in front-of-store displays. It worked best if the title had a familiar author name on the cover, a brand name. It helped too if that brand name worked in a recognizable genre such as mystery or romance or, thanks to Stephen King, horror. Publishers and booksellers alike discovered that attaining a spot on the New York Times bestseller list was great marketing, a label to slap on a cover, an honor meriting privileged display space on the sales floor and a discounted price, encouraging a self-perpetuating feedback loop that exacerbated a tyranny of bestsellerdom.82 What happened in 1980? Why did bestsellers and prize winners become segregated? Follow the money. New conglomerates infused publishing with capital, but growth had stalled. How to secure returns on investment? New infrastructure provided by Hoffman’s wholesaling and by chain bookstores made it possible for trade publishers to behave like mass-market houses, distributing titles at an unprecedentedly vast scale. This model, though, relied on a much smaller set of brand names and bestsellers. Crucially, the New York Times bestseller list had only ever counted hardcover books. Genre fiction such as that produced by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel, before 1980 would often only be released in the paperback mass-market format. After 1980, because of the distribution revolution, these titles would come out in hardcover, enabling them to make the list. They crowded out prize winners, which rarely found success at the same scale. The logic of publishing split in two, into popularity and prestige, if not without room for aspirations to find those unicorns that could achieve both. The incursion of trade hardcovers into the mass-market market, amid a general slump for the economy of publishing, hit mass-market houses especially hard. Ron Busch, head of Pocket, put things bluntly in 1982: “There is a huge fire burning within the paperback business. And I don’t think that anybody gives a damn.’ ”83 They avoided big advances by moving away from reprinting proven successes and into the business of acquiring original titles. If growth couldn’t be gained in sales, because year-on-year inventory wasn’t moving like it had in the 1960s, it would have to be gained in profit margin. “In an effort to hold down costs,” the New York Times reported in 1982, “mass-market publishers are expanding their list of category books, including romantic fiction, spy stories, thrillers, male adventure books, adult westerns, occult novels, and science fiction.” They focused on the security and profitability of series. The Times quoted Oscar Dystel, the recently retired chairman of Bantam, saying that the market for category books “is far more definable and sales are more easily predictable.” He added, “The emphasis now will be financial rather than editorial, which may be sounder and maybe even safer, but will it be as exciting a business?”84 As we’ll see, his successors believed they could say yes—for a time.

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The next chapter describes the consequences for the logic of popularity after 1980, including the rise of romance and the pulp historicism of fantasy. First, though, a word on the fate of prestige.

CONSENSUS

Publishing runs by tacit consensus. Around 1980, conglomeration demanded a reconfiguration of that consensus about what works, what doesn’t, when, where, and how. Editors could no longer sell mass-market rights for literary novels to pad their margins. The new Doctorows at NAL were not printing a hundred thousand copies of “a good obscure first novel” like he said he did in the early 1960s. Editors at trade houses continued to drum up sales through book clubs and college classrooms, but what those readers wanted was changing, reflected (and maybe led) by what was happening with literary prizes and creative writing programs. The 1980s was a decade of flux from which emerged the dominance of several contemporary forms, among them autofiction, literary genre fiction, minimalism, and the new historical novel. Each of these was a reaction against or repurposing of postmodernism, or a dialectical combination thereof. Around 1980, literary types were gravely anxious. It looked to them as if conglomeration were going to make publishing a mere extension of the culture industry, Victor Weybright’s project in an inverted mirror: whereas he wanted to flatten hierarchies in the name of elevating everyone’s taste, conglomerates would flatten them to entertain and flatter the lowly boor in each of us. The Booker Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize intervened in this existing crisis for the prestige of literature by elevating historical fiction, which borrowed history’s gravitas. (These prizes are variously entangled with the publishing industry; the Booker was founded by the head of Jonathan Cape, a prestigious UK publisher, whose books went on to win more prizes than any other’s;85 publishing executives sit on the National Book Award’s board.) Publishers saw hope for status that might sell given the enormous success of Alex Haley’s Roots in 1976 and the miniseries version that broke viewership records on ABC in 1977, spurring a genealogy craze in the United States and alerting publishers to the salability of neo–slave narratives. In 1979, changes at the National Endowment for the Arts—including a push for more representation from disadvantaged groups and the appointment of Toni Morrison to the Literature Program’s advisory council—led to an increase in awards for historical

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fiction.86 Early such titles that won or were shortlisted for the NBA or Pulitzer include William Wharton’s Birdy (1978), Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance (1978), Wright Morris’s Plains Song (1980), Doctorow’s Loon Lake (1980), William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1982), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Thomas Berger’s The Feud (1983), and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985). The defining event, though, was Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which occasioned dramatic backlash when it was snubbed for the NBA, went on to win the Pulitzer, and was a leading factor in Morrison’s garnering of a Nobel in 1993. It provided the paradigm for historical fiction to come, as Alexander Manshel argues, the foremost way by which writers of color would win awards. During the canon wars of the 1990s, historical fiction became pedagogically useful, as it remains, taken up by book clubs and selected for university syllabi.87 Just as Doctorow was complaining to Bill Moyers about the political quietism of the American novel, multicultural historical fiction was heeding the call. It was also in the 1980s that creative writing programs vastly expanded, becoming a substantial national patronage system rather than relatively minor. Particularly influential were the workshops of Raymond Carver at Syracuse and Carver’s editor Gordon Lish at Columbia. Lish was also an editor at Knopf. Together, Carver and Lish generated a craze for minimalism, which found a secure home in creative writing where the tendency of the mode toward highly crafted short stories was a good match.88 The National Endowment for the Arts under Reagan found minimalism a safe bet.89 For publishers, creative writing programs were now, in the 1980s, a mass institution and a useful system for sorting writers, privileging those praised by esteemed professors or who came from elite programs such as Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, Stanford, and, above all, Iowa.90 Historical fiction and minimalism were one another’s obverse: past or present, sprawling or condensed, research or life experience, multicultural or white. Both were reactions against high postmodernism. The new historical fiction was not metafiction that meditated on the metaphysical uncertainties of writing history at all. The new historical fiction was not ironic. It was earnest. It wanted to teach, to engage in ethics.91 Minimalism rejected high postmodernism’s maximalism, its silliness and spoof and tricks. They, in turn, spurred dialectical movements in the 1990s, including a return to maximalism, epitomized by David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,92 as well as literary genre fiction.93 Undergirding all this was the system of prizes and programs that gave the publishing industry tools for developing a new consensus about what would work for literary fiction after 1980.

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We can return now to E. L. Doctorow and Ragtime. Ragtime appeared in 1975, toward the end of the old regime. Timing was everything. Literary works had not yet been largely demoted from bestseller lists. Doctorow was accompanied there by Saul Bellow, if also by Michael Crichton. It was the beginning of the flux. Bantam had massive hits with Jaws, The Exorcist, and Valley of the Dolls, in addition to Ragtime. Fawcett had a smash with The Godfather, Dell, as we’ve seen, with Roots.94 Ragtime was peak postmodernism. Its National Book Critics Circle Award hinted at a future for historical fiction. It was written by a creative writing professor just before that situation became common. It was politically serious fifteen years before the field caught up. It told the story of a creator’s complicity with media conglomeration. It provided a template for a future in which books like Ragtime would not come anywhere close to its sales success. It seemed as if John Irving could be the next Doctorow—a literary superstar— after his novel, The World According to Garp, exceeded his publisher’s expectations in 1979. Irving’s next novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, earned a stunning advance in 1981 of about $6.5 million in 2022 dollars, but did not come anywhere near earning out; Pocket Books had to write off half the cost of the advance. Irving’s novel had been one of the few literary books to land, albeit briefly, on bestseller lists that year, but its financial failure proved to be the nail in the literary blockbuster’s coffin.95 For comparison, Beloved sold extraordinarily well for a literary novel in 1987 and 1988, peaking at number three on the Publishers Weekly hardcover bestseller list, and, later, at number two in paperback, but didn’t come close to Ragtime’s domination, and it was up against novels by Tom Clancy, Stephen King, and Judith Krantz. By then, Toni Morrison and Danielle Steel were playing utterly different games.

2 Mass Market (II) How the Mass Market Won the World, Lost Its Soul—Then Lost the World

I

n 1978, Bill Grose, editor in chief at Dell, elevated an exciting author out of San Francisco. Grose was a thumper of novelizations from popular film and television, a fan of media tie-ins, a man with his finger in the air to feel the direction of the wind. Dell, which had acquired Dial when Doctorow worked there, had in turn been acquired by Doubleday, which also owned radio and television stations and would in two years buy the New York Mets. Grose and Dell were looking for the next big thing. Romance was booming. And this woman, Grose thought, was it. She had a made-for-marketing name, too. Danielle Steel.

STEEL FACTORY

She wasn’t born with that name, exactly. She cut it from Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel. Her mother was a Catholic Portuguese-American and her father a Jewish German refugee who fled to New York City from Hitler’s Third Reich. They divorced when Steel was eight. She had a lonely childhood living with her father in Manhattan at 45th  and Lexington—a mere ten-minute walk from Pocket Books—“a very adult kind of childhood,” she said, attending dinner parties and watching adults flirt or talk politics.1 She attended the elite Lycée Français De New York, fantasizing about becoming a nun.2 In her teens, Steel attended haute couture shows in Paris and fell for fashion. Her grandmother gave her her “first couture suit” when she was seventeen.3 She married a wealthy French banker when she was eighteen and studied at Parsons

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School of Design and New York University (NYU).4 In 1968, at the age of twenty, Steel gave birth to a daughter, Beatrix, but wanted more than to be a mother. She saw two women on The Tonight Show talking about their PR firm, Supergirls. The next day she called to apply for a job. Steel arrived to work looking like Audrey Hepburn: big eyes, short hair, outfitted in the season’s high fashion. She was quickly named director of public relations and vice president of marketing. She buzzed around the office with incredible energy, chain smoking, making needlepoint kitsch, and typing letters to prospective clients in French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese (if not always with perfect grammar).5 One of her clients, an editor at Ladies Home Journal, saw promise in Steel as a writer and told her so. She took him seriously and wrote her first novel in the summer of 1971. She hired an agent and sold the book to Pocket, which published it in 1973. The protagonist is a woman who works for advertising campaigns and women’s magazines. She is a young divorced single mother who moves to San Francisco from New York to restart her life. There she falls in love with a filmmaker who also works in advertising, a bad boy who gets her pregnant and, when she refuses an abortion, sends her back to New York. But she can’t quit him—until he dies in a freak accident on set. She has the baby, but the baby dies within the day. In the end, our heroine runs off with the art director of the woman’s mag where she now works. It’s a bawdy postfeminist romance, closer to Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, which came out the same year, than Kathleen Woodiwiss’s chaste The Flame and the Flower from the year before, which helped build a massive audience for historical romance. Steel’s debut bears traces of literary ambition, expressed by her avatar-protagonist, who brings a short story anthology with her to set just in case she has time to read and is thrilled by a dinner party where the discussion rushes from “Japanese literature” to “the political implications of American literature vs Russian literature at the turn of the century.”6 But the novel was primly panned in Publishers Weekly—its protagonist, “for all her beauty, sophistication, and use of the proper four-letter words, is not very interesting, and neither is her story,” read the verdict. The book sold modestly.7 Steel, like her protagonist, moved to San Francisco. She had separated from her husband and lived for a spell in a commune with a band of street musicians. She often visited a friend in the hospital who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War but who had negotiated an early release to participate in a medical study for NASA. The patient in the next room, Danny Zugelder, an inveterate bank robber, developed a crush on Steel, and the two began corresponding, which continued after he was sent back to Lompoc

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Correctional Institute. He says that they consummated the relationship in the women’s bathroom at the prison. She rented a flat in Pacific Heights and took a job as a copywriter for an ad agency and wrote fiction at night. Zugelder was released in 1973 but was arrested again and sent to the state penitentiary in Vacaville in 1975 for robbery and sexual assault. He and Steel married in the prison canteen that year. She published her second novel, a romance about a socialite and her ex-con, prison-abolitionist lover, in 1977, and her third, about a man falsely accused of rape, in 1978. Both did decently well for Dell, selling several hundred thousand copies.8 That’s when Bill Grose decided it was time to make her famous. Dell had acquired rights to novelize a screenplay called The Promise, flagrantly derivative of Erich Segal’s Love Story. Segal, a professor of classics at Yale who translated ancient Greek drama, had become a celebrity thanks to the outrageous popularity of his novel about the doomed love between a wealthy Harvard hockey jock and an artsy Radcliffe girl from a modest background. (Segal used two Harvard roommates, whom he met while there on sabbatical, as the basis for the jock: Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones.9) Love Story set a record for largest ever initial mass-market printing when New American Library ran 4,350,000 units in 1970.10 Within three months, the book went through nine more printings and hit a total of 6,750,000 copies.11 Naturally, others caught the scent of lucre—not least in novelization. Segal had penned Love Story as a screenplay first, then wrote it as a novel at Paramount’s prompting. Subsequently, publishing went hard for novelizations.12 Bill Grose had a thin imitation on his hands with The Promise. As in Love Story, a wealthy Harvard boy and an artsy girl—in this case a poor orphan—fall in love but are prohibited from marrying by the boy’s parent. Plots diverge from there, and splendidly. In Love Story, the couple marries anyway but the girl dies of leukemia. In The Promise, the couple flees to elope, getting into a car accident in which the boy ends up in a coma and the girl has her face torn off. The boy’s mother offers the girl a deal: she will leave for San Francisco and never contact her son again; in exchange, she will send the girl to the best plastic surgeon in the country to reconstruct her face. The girl accepts, and leaves, and when the boy wakens from his coma his mother tells him his lover is dead. Nevertheless, they find each other and in the final pages declare their undying love, accomplishing the requirements of the increasingly popular genre of romance. Grose assigned the project to Steel. It was time to make her a brand, a writer readers could trust to be as reliable as Coca-Cola. Grose’s investment grabbed the attention of Ray Walters, publishing industry reporter for the New York Times. Dell would print 1,200,000 copies of The Promise in its first run. “To

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make every American woman aware of Danielle Steel,” wrote Walters, “Dell will spend $300,000” (about $1.4 million in 2022 dollars) “on every promotion gimmick known to the book trade, from television, radio, and newspaper advertising to shopping bags and spectacular bookstore displays.”13 Romance was on its way up. Avon had developed huge audiences for Johanna Lindsey, Rosemary Rogers, and Kathleen Woodiwiss in the 1970s. Harlequin quickly overtook it. Founded in Canada in 1949 as a mass-market publisher, it found its vocation in 1957 when it began reprinting Mills & Boon romances from Great Britain. Harlequin acquired Mills & Boon in 1972. By 1979, Harlequin, which had begun the decade as an obscure Canadian press, was second in sales, behind only Bantam, but with a far greater profit margin. Why? It paid small advances for formulaic genre books with built-in audiences.14 Harlequin’s success was engineered by W. Lawrence Heisey, a Harvard MBA and “selfdescribed ‘soap salesman’ for Proctor and Gamble” who built on marketing practices established by Mills & Boon, such as product sampling (free giveaways with Kotex pads or Ajax cleaners or at McDonald’s on Mother’s Day), direct mail, and “the creation of marketing content that encouraged connection and community,” providing “an intimate aspect to the commercial transaction of buying a book.”15 Other houses would learn from Harlequin—they would have to. Steel was being forged as an emblem of the conglomerate era. What could she do about it? That was the question she brought to The Promise. Nancy, the female protagonist, arrives in San Francisco as a “faceless” aspiring artist. (She literally lacks a face.) Much of the novel revolves around her relationship with her plastic surgeon, Peter, who is going to “remake her.” In their initial conversation, Nancy tells him how she found the nuns in her orphanage “wonderful”— “so much so that,” like Steel, “I wanted to be one.” But Peter makes her promise not to become a nun now because he has ambitious plans for her: he is “going to make her someone very special.”16 He does. She reveals her new face, her new self, at an art opening that showcases photographs she has taken during the eighteen-month reconstruction. It’s a hit. “Your work is going to be very important, darling,” Peter tells her. “You’re a star. . . . You’ll have every photographer’s agent in the country calling you by next week.”17 What we have here is an allegory. Just as Peter takes the effectively parentless, faceless, but artistic and ambitious Nancy, repackages her, and presents her to the world, Bill Grose does the same for Danielle Steel. She came to him after the failure of her first novel, a nobody who had moved from New York to San Francisco. He published her next two, but truly introduced her to the world with The Promise.

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So far so little agency for Steel. How could she prove that she was not her publisher’s shill, that she was the real thing? She needed to weld the old Steel to the new.18 Peter remakes Nancy almost beyond recognition. She has a new face, a new name. But the novel’s desideratum is to bring the star-crossed lovers, separated by a traumatic car crash, back together. Michael, the male protagonist, who had fallen into a coma and was later told Nancy had died, recognizes the signature of her art. He sees her photographs and, despite the fact that she used to paint, knows she is the author: a testimony to her authenticity. Even if Peter transformed her, her heart remains the same. Much of the old Steel remains in The Promise—her breezy style, the cross-coast romance, the middlebrow unity of art and commerce—at the cost of whatever edge she might have had. Her earlier books were adult novels that dealt with abortions and affairs, death and divorce. Here the protagonists are nominally adults, but are infantilized on every page: “kiddos” behaving like “third graders” who want to return to the moral simplicity of childhood.19 Avon and Harlequin had only just begun to cultivate romance’s audience. As Beth Luey reports, “In 1979 romance novels were estimated to represent 10 percent of the US paperback market; by the late 1980s, the figure usually cited was between 40 and 50 percent of paperback unit sales.”20 Danielle Steel would be the greatest beneficiary of the boom, selling, eventually, more than eight hundred million copies, making her one of the bestselling fiction writers of all time.21 Late in her life, something unsettling happened to Steel. For the first decade or two, she published one or two novels most years. From 1997 through 2014, she plateaued at a steady three. In 2015, she ticked up to four. In 2016, to an alarming six. She did six or seven annually through 2022. That’s a novel every fifty days or so for a woman in her seventies. “I’ve reacted with amazement, shock, and outrage when people have asked me in my fan mail, who writes my books,” Steel wrote in a blog post in 2012, when she was working at a much more reasonable pace. “WHO writes my BOOKS??? Are you kidding? Who do you think writes my books, as I hover over my typewriter for weeks at a time, working on a first draft, with unbrushed hair, in an ancient nightgown, with every inch of my body aching after typing 20 or 22 hours a day.” She enumerated the bodily horrors of such a regimen: bleeding fingers, popped veins in her hands, and, of course, an aching back. Nevertheless, she “would never just hand off an outline for someone else to write.”22 More than an insane sleep schedule made her productivity possible. As of 2012, she employed three assistants—Heather, Allee, and Alex—who protected

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her from paparazzi, fielded her phone calls, and talked with “lawyers, bankers, plumbers,” handling all her business. They fed her, too, given that she doesn’t want “to stop and eat anything complicated” when she’s writing. (“I have terrible eating habits, and in my early days for some reason lived on a writing diet of liverwurst and Oreo Cookies, which became the subject of many jokes.”) She kept a researcher on retainer, Nancy Eisenbarth, who supplied specificity, past and present: “I drive her insane, calling her at 3 a.m., or sending her emails, needing to know what floor something is on, how many people died in a famous fire, what is the decor of a certain restaurant, or a detail about a unit of the French Resistance in WW2.”23 One of their most ambitious endeavors resulted in the five-hundred-page historical romance set during the Russian Revolution, Zoya. Steel’s editor, Carole Baron, gave her the standard editorial treatment. “She sends me encouraging comments about what she does like, and then she sends the manuscript back to me, with comments on every page, whole sections torn apart or rejected, things she wants changed.” Steel’s response is relatable: “I have to brace myself and try to be brave about it,” she writes, admitting, “I must say Shit a thousand times” while reading Baron’s notes.24 (Baron had an extraordinary career in publishing. Finding it impossible to land a job as a woman on Wall Street in the 1960s, she started at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, where she copyedited Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. She moved to Dutton, then to Pocket Books, where she became a vice president in 1978. Next was Crown as editor in chief, and then publisher of Dell in 1982, where she met Steel.) This whole operation enabled a robust churn. Still, what happened in 2016? Six, seven novels each year is ludicrous, even for Steel. Could anyone love to write this much? Or was this a Harper Lee situation? Was she being preyed on by her minders? Or had she become cynical, cashing in on the full value of her brand by getting yet a bit more help with the new books? Was her overproduction a matter of passion, the perfervid devotion of one woman? Or was it a matter of profit, leaning into the mechanical reproduction of the Steel factory made possible by a familiar formula?25 These questions take us to the heart of Danielle Steel, or perhaps her industrial core, and illuminate much more beside: the logic of publishing under conglomeration that was activated in part by the invention of Danielle Steel. Her insistence on the myth of the romantic author reveals a certain naïveté, a willed ignorance of the compromises of adulthood, covering her eyes so as not to see the industry of which she is a product. With a childlike seriousness (“WHO writes my BOOKS???”) she wants to be the inspired creator solely responsible for her art, but everything about her art—its formulaic plots, its women’s-mag prose style, its mass production—betrays its mechanicity.

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POWER BREAKFASTS

Five years after The Promise, in 1983, Danielle Steel had become a superstar. Now she wanted a superstar agent. Because she was pregnant, she invited three of the top agents in the business—Morton Janklow, Scott Meredith, and Lynn Nesbit—to come to her in San Francisco from New York. They did. She chose Janklow for his “businesslike approach to publishing.”26 That approach was changing the business of publishing itself, and raising the profile of all literary agents in the process. Morton Janklow, “a tall, intense, friendly man with mildly quizzical eyes behind hornrims,” was not literary.27 He grew up in Queens in the 1930s, “the son of a lawyer who had been overwhelmed by the Depression.”28 He worked his way through Syracuse University and Columbia Law School, then joined the army. When he returned stateside, he set up a legal practice in the Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan; its offices sat behind massive mahogany doors with “ungraspable brass rocks” for doorknobs.29 He worked in corporate securities for years before his friend William Safire—a speechwriter for President Nixon—asked whether Janklow would help him with his book contract for his insider’s account of the Nixon White House. As Watergate became an escalating scandal, Safire’s book, which depicted Nixon positively, hit resistance. The publisher no longer wanted it and declared it “unacceptable” per the terms of the contract. Janklow fought back, which was at the time unheard of. The publisher was able to reject the book but had to let Safire keep the percentage of the advance he had been paid to date, a sign that authors had more power than they knew. Janklow saw an opening and leveraged it, in future negotiations, for all it was worth. After the Safire affair, authors began to seek out Janklow. By 1977, he was spending half his time agenting and the New York Times called him “the new hot agent in the scene.”30 In February of that year, he sold Safire’s first novel to Ballantine for an advance of more than $1 million (more than $5 million in 2022 dollars).31 Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, mentioned in the New York Times that Janklow had staked out a regular table at the Four Seasons, “the most powerful place to eat lunch in town.”32 The restaurant was frequented by, among others, Jason Epstein, editor in chief at Random House; Phyllis Grann, editor in chief at Putnam; and Lynn Nesbit, agent to Donald Barthelme, Michael Crichton, Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, and eventually Joan Didion and Toni Morrison. Janklow spent his mornings at the Regency practicing the “power breakfast,” a term he coined (or so wrote Safire); at night he attended what he called “power parties.”33 He was at a big one in 1978—with California governor Jerry Brown,

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Katharine Graham (who ran the Washington Post), Jackie Kennedy, William Paley (the CBS board chairman), and Barbara Walters—when Norman Mailer threw a glass at Gore Vidal, splitting his lip. Mailer followed the glass with a punch before Janklow could insert himself between the two men and break it up. “Of course,” Linda Wolfe wrote in New York, “afterward, the writers got all the publicity. But that’s the way it always goes for the man in the middle, the broker, the agent. The public hardly knows anything about Janklow.”34 Today, decades later, the anonymity of the agent persists. “No figure is more influential—and less studied by scholars—than the literary agent,” writes Laura McGrath, in an effort to rectify the imbalance.35 Few agents have been as influential as Janklow. Any number of developments in the 1970s provided the conditions for the empowerment of the agent. The conglomeration of publishing led to decreasing editorial power over acquisitions, less time for editors to edit, and the increasing mobility of editors between houses, which meant that agents became important sources of stability and editorial guidance for authors. The expansion of chain bookstores increased the financial opportunities for successful books, incentivizing agent intervention. Whereas previously agents thought of themselves “as intermediaries, mediating between author and publisher,” now, after Janklow, they functioned “more as dedicated advocates of their client’s interest.”36 They claimed control of subsidiary rights for remediation and translation on behalf of authors. Janklow traveled annually to the Frankfurt Book Fair where rights are sold. “I’m a great believer in foreign markets,” he told Publishers Weekly. “I go to Frankfurt. I think that’s important. I see foreign publishers in Europe, and they see me when they’re in New York.”37 He kept records of how his clients did “in every country” and performed a “country-bycountry analysis of the income a book is likely to earn.”38 The empowerment of the agent amounted to a revolution in the industry. “The traditional relations of power between author and publisher were gradually overturned.”39 Janklow was unapologetic about playing hardball with publishers. He gamed out the value of a big advance. “You can judge the degree of a house’s dedication by the number of dollars spent to put that book on the list. People like me, by creating a financial risk on the part of the publishers, force the houses to take a more aggressive posture. Make them pregnant, and they’ll work harder.”40 If his tactics meant some publishers went under, maybe that was for the best. “Frankly, I am not sorry to see certain houses disappear,” he told Publishers Weekly in late 1982. “I believe in free enterprise. Maybe the houses that disappeared were not making the contribution they had to make. We have a Darwinian situation here. It requires adaptation in a changing world.”41

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When he flew to San Francisco to meet Danielle Steel in 1983, Janklow was turning down twenty-five inquiries a week.42 The president of Pocket Books asked, in his Publishers Weekly column, “If Morton Janklow and Henry Kissinger are lunching at adjoining tables at the Four Seasons, which one is at the Power Table?”43 One prolific author wrote, “Talking to Morton Janklow is like drinking champagne: you experience an immediate euphoria, the world is aglow with diamond-studded deals, and the bubbles of his enthusiasm tickle your nose. It’s only the morning after, when the glow has faded and you reflect that none of those deals and not one penny of all that money is yours, that the wine goes flat and the migraine starts.” All to the good for Janklow: an astonishing ten of the twenty-two longest-running fiction bestsellers of 1983 were written by his clients—Steel included.44

SCRUPLES?

Judith Krantz was on that list for her third novel, Mistral’s Daughter, which spent fifteen weeks as a bestseller in 1983. Janklow had scored a major coup with Krantz’s previous novel, Princess Daisy, the paperback rights for which, in 1979, four years after Ragtime’s record $1.85 million, went to Bantam for $3.2 million (more than $13 million in 2022 dollars). Krantz was fifty when she published her first novel, Scruples, in 1978. She was raised on the Upper West Side, the daughter of upwardly mobile Jews. Her father ran an advertising agency that took up “half a floor at 30 Rockefeller Plaza”; her mother was a prominent lawyer. While Janklow was growing up in a struggling family a borough away in Queens, Krantz was enjoying a childhood that involved “nurses, a butler-driver, the ballet, and the Russian Tea Room.”45 But in her early teens, life darkened. For two years, she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a Navy midshipman. After she “wrested her life back,” she “embarked on a life of rigorous self-invention.”46 She attended Wellesley, moved to Paris, and then, back in the United States, wrote for women’s magazines and served as “accessories editor” for Good Housekeeping.47 As she told the New York Times, “I feel great loyalty to Helen Gurley Brown,” the sex-positive feminist icon and founder of Cosmopolitan, who employed Krantz as the magazine’s West Coast correspondent.48 By the time she became a novelist, Krantz lived in Los Angeles with her husband, Steve Krantz, who famously produced the X-rated cartoon film, Fritz the Cat.

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Her big themes were sex and shopping. (Sex and Shopping—the title of her memoir.) “I have lived in Beverly Hills for seven years and there are plenty of compulsive shoppers there,” she told the Times while promoting Scruples, “particularly on Rodeo Drive, which has wall‐to‐wall gorgeous shops.”49 The novel follows its protagonist, Billy, as she sleeps her way to wealth and fame. Billy marries the CEO of the company where she works. He dies and she inherits his wealth and opens a luxury boutique. She marries a film producer and the novel climaxes with her husband’s winning an Oscar. This is Helen Gurley Brown’s sex-positive, postfeminist world—a novelization of Cosmo, women’s mags as fiction, perfect in B. Dalton’s mall window. Like Ragtime, Scruples is a novel preoccupied with the culture industry of which it is an exemplary product. It was published as a mass market title by Warner Books, which was then part of Warner Communications, which owned Warner Bros., Warner Music Group, and DC Comics. But Krantz didn’t share Doctorow’s interest in ironic distancing and radical politics. (Not to say that the Wellesley grad was unsophisticated. “My favorite period is the Victorian,” she told the Times. “I also love Proust and Colette. But I would be pretentious to compare myself with Trollope.”50) She earnestly embraced the glitz of conglomerate life. To promote Scruples, she posed in a bath towel for People.51 She hired Hollywood publicist Henry Rogers out of her own pocket. Rogers had innovated the publicity campaign to garner actors Academy Awards with Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce in 1945.52 He set up radio and television interviews for Krantz. She held a book party at Giorgio’s, a Rodeo Drive boutique that was important for Scruples, “filling it with models, starlets, and celebrities like Charlton Heston.”53 She joked in her journal at the time, “I will do anything to become number one. Oh, probably not murder, but certainly arson.”54 Krantz scored back-to-back-to-back bestsellers with Scruples, Princess Daisy, and Mistral’s Daughter. She peaked in 1986 with her fourth novel, I’ ll Take Manhattan. The book party was a black-tie affair held in the Trump Tower Atrium. Wearing a dress by Dynasty designer Nolan Miller, Krantz “received a gold key to the tower from a beaming Mr. Trump.” By then, Krantz’s novels had all become television miniseries. She bragged, “Donald is going to play himself,” and he did. “Yes, I could write a book about a plain woman,” she told a reporter. “But it would be damned hard.”55 The critics did not love Krantz. Clive James, reviewing Princess Daisy for the London Review of Books, wrote that “as a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks, but as bestsellers go it argues for a reassuringly robust connection between fiction and the reading public. If cheap dreams get no worse than this, there will not be much for the

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cultural analyst to complain about. Princess Daisy is a terrible book only in the sense that it is almost totally inept.”56 For years, reviewers treated Krantz with special contempt, a cruelty we might in retrospect understand as not only gendered but also fueled by resentment about the sudden sales domination, around 1980, of the brand-name novelist whose novels are set in the present. No one flaunted that position more brazenly than Krantz. Doctorow’s protégé, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, reviewed I’ ll Take Manhattan for the Times with dry sarcasm: “Just because Mrs. Krantz hasn’t mastered certain refinements of telling a story doesn’t mean that her novel doesn’t deserve our love just as much as Anna Karenina or The Wings of the Dove. I’ ll Take Manhattan is a novel too. In fact, it deserves more love, because paradoxically, it’s the unlovable who need our affection most.”57 In a second Times review, Laura Shapiro wrote, “One hesitates (well, for a few seconds) to come down very hard on a book with no more literary aspirations than a box of Froot Loops, but I’ ll Take Manhattan isn’t particularly successful even as a beach book; it’s too unpleasant.”58 Helen Gurley Brown defended Krantz against the reviewers. “First, I’d like to pull out their fingernails, one by one,” she told the Los Angeles Times, “then put a bullet through their heads.”59 More recently, when Trump was in the White House, Elizabeth Schambelan wrote about revisiting the novel, which she first read as a tween. “I expected to feel amusement and nostalgia, but what I felt instead was slow, creeping, horrormovie dread, as the conviction dawned that some kind of cackling clairvoyance was at work—that Krantz was an oracle who had offered us a glimpse of our destiny, if only we’d had the acuity to see it.” After a reparative reading of I’ ll Take Manhattan, she wrote, “Krantz appropriates the social topography of dystopian science fiction to show us that the stratified worlds of Metropolis or Blade Runner, with their miasmic streets and glossy Deco aeries, don’t look so dystopian from the top.” It was good to be rich in a vastly unequal world. “Millions of readers liked the view.”60 Krantz incarnated the on-the-nose ideology that only a few years earlier, in a suddenly distant literary era, Doctorow had critiqued through the mouth of Emma Goldman: she deployed mass culture to hoodwink the dispossessed into allying with the elite. If she’d had binoculars, Krantz’s Maxi could have looked down from her Trump Tower penthouse and found Doctorow walking home along 5th Avenue from his post as a professor of creative writing at NYU. Doctorow would win the National Book Award that year—1986—for World’s Fair, another historical novel, declared by Lehmann-Haupt to be “his most accomplished artistic performance to date.”61 Compared with Krantz, though, Doctorow’s books now sold only modestly. One reporter connected the two authors, noting that

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Scruples sold “almost five million copies,” whereas, “today, popular literary fiction authors like E. L. Doctorow are considered successful if they sell 200,000 copies all told.”62 By the end of the 1980s, the divergence James English noted between prizewinning historical novels and bestselling present-day novels had become the status quo. The figures who dominated this new dispensation were unapologetic acolytes of power: Judith Krantz, Morton Janklow. In 1988, Janklow and Lynn Nesbit, one of the few agents of his tier, formed a partnership to “better enable them to deal with giant conglomerate publishers.”63 A New York Times book reporter wrote, “the widespread interest in the merger dramatized as has probably nothing else the importance of the agent—an importance that has been building for almost a decade as the book industry has been transformed by mergers and consolidation.”64 In 1989, Random House, now part of S. I. Newhouse’s media empire, fired its longtime president, Robert Bernstein, and hired in his place the hardheaded Alberto Vitale, a PhD in economics who had cut his teeth at Olivetti and Fiat. Janklow told the Times that it was a “brilliant” decision. “He has all the drive and energy we associate with American entrepreneurship, and the sophistication we associate with Europeans.”65 Three months later, Vitale fired André Schiffrin.

FORMULA

After 1980, brand-name authors such as Steel and Krantz, among others, increasingly dominated bestseller lists. Another change was internal to genre fiction. It was the flip side of the coin to paying big advances for blockbusters. It was the mass-market model pioneered by Harlequin: buy cheap originals that have builtin audiences because they participate in a familiar formula and spawn series. Genre fiction was central to mass-market publishing from the start. Janice Radway writes, “perfect binding and synthetic glues made possible the production of huge quantities of books at a very low cost per unit and contributed to the acceleration and regularization of the acquisition and editorial processes. The consequent emphasis on speed caused the paperback publishers to look with favor on category books that could be written to a fairly rigid formula.” Category books—or genre—“became a useful tool for publishing houses whose success depended on their ability to predict demand so exactly that the product not only sold but sold in the identical quantities projected at the beginning.”66

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Four genres dominated: mystery, romance, science fiction (SF), and the Western. When Pocket Books was founded in 1939, these genres had been developing for decades as dime-store novels in the 1880s and later as stories in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s: H. L. Mencken’s Black Mask for mystery, Street & Smith’s Love Story Magazine for romance, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories for SF, Frank Blackwell’s Western Story Magazine for Westerns. Communities of readers and writers grew around these publications, and others.67 Mass-market publishers piggybacked on the distribution chains used by the pulps. They sent books to airports, drugstores, newsstands, and railroad stations. Thanks to the pulps, they knew what sold and where. Many mass-market publishers started as pulps and expanded into paperbacks. This was true for Dell and Fawcett. Cheap books proved more popular than pulp magazines and, eventually, drove the pulps out of business. Genre fiction nurtured divergent aesthetic tendencies. On the one hand, publishers thrived when publishing predictable, formulaic novels with dependable audiences. On the other, communities of authors and fans grew around genres and argued for creativity and experimentation within them. Genre hacks plied their trade by quickly tossing off book after book. Devoted practitioners argued for the aesthetic value of their chosen genre. Consider Raymond Chandler. He was an executive at an oil company who lost his job early in the Great Depression and turned to fiction writing. He wrote in a new style, which Dashiell Hammett was already building in Black Mask: hard-boiled detective fiction—noir—featuring cynical antiheros and femme fatales. Chandler published his first novel, The Big Sleep, in 1939, the same year that Pocket Books took off. Five years later, having witnessed the vast expansion of the mass-market mystery novel, Chandler penned a cri de coeur. “Even Einstein couldn’t get very far,” he lamented, “if three hundred treatises of the higher physics were published every year, and several thousand others in some form or other were hanging around in excellent condition, and being read too.” An overproduction of books, Chandler thought, made it difficult for good writers to gain recognition: the “production of detective stories on so large a scale, and by writers whose immediate reward is small and whose need of critical praise is almost nil, would not be possible at all if the job took any talent. In that sense the raised eyebrow of the critic and the shoddy merchandizing of the publisher are perfectly logical.” Chandler argued that the audience for mysteries couldn’t tell between good and bad writing, for the most part. Amid the dross, though, Chandler celebrated Hammett: “He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote

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scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”68 It was Hammett’s originality, according to Chandler, that separated him from the formulaic masses. Similar battles were fought over science fiction and the Western. SF editors Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell worked on behalf of innovation and originality, later practiced by such writers as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Samuel Delany. Critics and readers—including my grandfather from his farm in rural Minnesota—ardently defended the quality of Louis L’Amour’s Westerns before Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry staged a comeback for the waning genre. When conglomeration reordered literature in the 1970s, it not only annihilated the literary blockbuster but also intervened in internecine genre wars, lending its overwhelming force to formula. One visible effect was the ubiquity of Star Trek novels, serialized by Pocket Books beginning in 1979. Pocket gave the television-to-book series standardized covers, numbered them, and imposed “increasingly inflexible guidelines upon authors.”69 Few genre editors retained autonomy. Rather, “decisions were dictated by sales figures, the calculations of marketing experts, and the demands of chain bookstores.” In science fiction, Betsy Wollheim held her own at DAW Books, David Hartwell at Tor, and Lou Anders at Pyr Books, but they were outliers. SF writers were urged by editors and agents to “create recurring characters and worlds.”70 The author of a history of mass-market paperbacks that was published in 1984 ended his account with disdain for what the format had become: “product is the only fair term to describe the current output of the paperback industry. The paperback business in the 1980s is characterized by a failure of imagination, crass pandering to lowest-common-denominator tastes, and a slavish adherence to supposedly sound management practices that limit creativity and risk taking.”71

FANTASIES

By 1980, the moment was ripe for science fiction to spin off a new genre and fantasy was perfect. In a dialectical reversal, fantasy writers could transform formula into newly imagined realms populated by creatures from legend and myth. Fantasy’s template, provided by Tolkien—hero, quest, magic—invited baroque embroidery. It turned SF’s future-orientation toward the past. I imagine my story was typical. Because my dad read me The Lord of the Rings when I was six, I was primed to pick up, a few years later, books from the proliferating genre. As a child, I had assumed, because of its preoccupation with the

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distant past, that fantasy was as old as Tolkien’s ancient Tom Bombadil. I was also typical in choosing Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, whose novels, in the 1980s and 1990s, were regularly landing on the New York Times bestseller list. As an undergraduate at Goddard, an experimental college in Vermont, Anthony took up writing. He sent his stories to science fiction magazines, which returned rejections. He settled in Florida and found a job as a technical writer. It took three more years of persistence before he sold his first story and another four before he signed a contract for his first novel, Chthon, published in 1967. Publishers Weekly called it “original and entertaining” and it was nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards.72 After that, Anthony’s career took off. He published three novels in 1968 alone. Anthony was a science fiction writer. Fantasy barely existed in the 1970s. To the degree that it did, it was published by Ballantine, which had started a line of adult fantasy in 1969 in an attempt to capitalize on its success with Tolkien. The line had an immediate win with a reprint of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, first published in hardcover by Viking in 1968. But, for the most part, Ballantine adult fantasy reprinted older works, from “William Morris’s gorgeous medievalism to Evangeline Walton’s literate retellings of Welsh mythology, Clark Ashton Smith’s poetic visions, George MacDonald’s moral allegories, and H. P. Lovecraft’s magnificent darkness.”73 These sold poorly and the line folded. In 1976, Anthony received a brochure in the mail from Ballantine with their current titles and some notes about how the house was expanding. Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey were launching their own fantasy imprint. Intrigued, Anthony reached out. He was, in general, cantankerous and stubborn, and had strong opinions about editors. “The average editor,” he wrote in his memoir, “seems to be an idiot.” But he respected the del Reys and wanted to work with them. He had a contract with Avon for his future science fiction output, but Avon said he could write fantasy for Ballantine. He wrote his first fantasy novel under the guidance of Lester, who, in Anthony’s assessment, demonstrated “unusual competence.”74 A Spell for Chameleon, the first Xanth novel, was published in 1977. Anthony was the right person in the right place at the right time. Here was a prolific science fiction writer who had spent his life immersed in the genre. He believed the best writing was middlebrow: well-crafted and plot-driven. He could, though, also happily churn out hack work. Publicizing the new imprint, Lester told Publishers Weekly that, for fantasy fans, “There’s nothing else out there for them to read. They just have to reread their Tolkien.”75 Anthony cranked out about a title each year, building an audience and a backlist for Del Rey. Meanwhile, he kept writing science fiction. He understood

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his work in the two genres as divided by his aesthetic aspirations. Anthony took himself seriously as a science fiction writer. He believed that hack writing “was full of action without style and characterization” and that prestigious literary writing—typified by New Yorker fiction—was equally lacking: “full of style and characterization without action.” Good science fiction “had the secret of real storytelling!” What he was doing with Xanth for Del Rey was hack work. Nevertheless, he liked it. “It was easier to write than science fiction, and a lot of fun, and it sold well.” He made clear the he “did not regard it as any great literature,” but then again, he didn’t “sneer at entertainment fiction.”76 Meanwhile, he earned a nice write-up in the New York Times in 1977 for a science fiction novel, “a space opera with panache.”77 The Del Rey imprint rode the wave of a much larger transformation in publishing in the late 1970s. It scored big early wins with a novelization of Star Wars and a reprint of The Princess Bride. For the most part, though, its gamble was to adapt the Harlequin model for fantasy: to move away from costly reprints and instead do titles that were cheap to commission, easy to package as series, and predictable to sell. Lester contrived a formula. “The books would be original novels set in invented worlds in which magic works. Each would have  a male central character who triumphed over the forces of evil (usually associated with  technical knowledge of some variety) by innate virtue, and with the help of a tutor or tutelary spirit.”78 This describes Anthony’s Xanth novels precisely. It’s no wonder that Anthony credited Lester’s editing for his success. David Hartwell, an envious editor at Tor Books, later explained to the New York Times: “Mr. del Rey had codified a children’s literature that could be sold as adult. It was nostalgic, conservative, pastoral, and optimistic.” And it worked.

CHAINED

Fantasy and romance benefited from a revolution in bookselling. For most of the twentieth century, the prevailing ethos in bookselling was advisory. Booksellers took it upon themselves to proffer guidance, to shape taste. That changed with the chains. In 1960, chain bookstores barely registered in national sales figures. Twenty years later, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton “accounted for approximately twenty-four percent of all bookstore sales.” The chains eschewed the old model: “they were not interested in ‘elevating’ or otherwise changing consumer tastes through their selections.” They instead put “their emphasis on self-service,

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which allowed customers to bypass the opinions and judgments of the bookseller.” Independent bookstores, in the 1970s and 1980s, might have carried romance “grudgingly, if at all.” But in the chains, “customers could discover a prominently displayed selection.”79 Chains made books more accessible to major audiences for fantasy and romance: suburban women and their tweens. B. Dalton and Waldenbooks rented real estate in the proliferating suburban malls and “set up their stores so that the experience of buying a book in a bookstore seem[ed] no more threatening or out-of-the-ordinary than that of picking up a paperback while waiting for groceries to move down the conveyor at the market.” “Romance’s extraordinary popularity”—its wild expansion in the 1980s—“is a partial function of its increased incidence and accessibility to the audience for which it has been created,” Janice Radway argued.80 The rationalization of bookselling, enabled by computers, reinforced the dominance of formula in the 1980s. “When B. Dalton was launched in 1966”— in Edina, Minnesota—“it was the country’s first bookseller to be fully computerized.”81 By 1979, the chain had implemented point-of-sale cash registers that sent sales figures to its central computer to keep daily track of inventory. Data in hand, managers could “predict both individual outlet and general-category sales with astonishing success,” instituting a feedback loop that “led to a better, although by no means perfect, fit between the romance audience’s desires and the books the audience is given by the industry.”82 The kind of self-reinforcing algorithmic cycle that has become so familiar today through Amazon began much earlier. Laura Miller argued that rationalization eliminated “the unpredictability and the subjective value judgments that can make for a more interesting store.” Instead, we entered a world in which “tomorrow’s bookstore look[ed] like yesterday’s store—only more so.”83 Chain bookstores decided what to buy based on the numbers they were seeing; publishers learned how much they could sell to the chains of each kind of book and recalibrated; editors and agents were forced to respond to a changing market in their acquisition practices; some writers found their fortunes rise, others found theirs dim, and all of them, however unconsciously, absorbed the tacit communications from all parties. This is how bookselling claimed an increasing share of the distributed agency of conglomerate authorship. It might appear that the revolution in bookselling was democratizing. No longer did booksellers impose their tastes on readers. As that model declined, in its place rose “an ideology that acclaims the sovereignty of the consumer.” Service was minimized. Bestsellers were flaunted, “suggesting that the stores were eager to supply customers with the books endorsed by their peers.”84 But behind

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the sparkling displays, many hands were at work, determining which books would be available for customers to—purportedly—freely choose.

THE BOOKBUYER’S BOSS

In 1984, an Ohio retailer attempted a hostile takeover of Carter Hawley Hale (CHH), the parent company of Waldenbooks. To avoid the takeover, CHH sold Waldenbooks, with its 850 outlets, to Kmart. Why would Kmart buy? “It coveted the leases that Walden held for many choice mall locations, spots into which Kmart could strategically shuffle its various subsidiaries. Additionally, the retailer hoped to use Waldenbooks to improve bookselling efforts in Kmart’s own stores.”85 This wasn’t Kmart’s first foray into books. Several years earlier, a staffer at Ingram Book Company persuaded Kmart to open book departments in its stores. Ingram “worked with Kmart to design hundreds of book departments in 1978 and 1979,” the staffer remembered. “We did everything for them, from selecting books to designing shelving.”86 Waldenbooks headhunted Harry Hoffman from Ingram in 1979. One of his first acts was to build a Waldenbooks warehouse next to an Ingram warehouse, for ease of access.87 Hoffman, naturally, felt good about Kmart. He told the New York Times in 1986 that Waldenbooks was beginning to buy books for the “more than 2100 Kmarts.” He predicted that within five years, he could, with the Kmart boost, quadruple Walden’s sales. But when he boasted about “the Kmart opportunity” to publishers, they shrugged. It drove him crazy. “The whole industry is lethargic in trying to reach the customer,” he said, nonplussed. “It’s really kind of eerie.”88 Hoffman was square-jawed and stately in a 1980s television-ready sort of way. He looked like Ted Koppel. He was born in 1927 and grew up in Freeport, New York, just a few miles out of Queens. His mother taught kindergarten and his father sold encyclopedias. He served in the Army in Japan after World War II, earned a degree in history from Colgate University, then worked for the FBI for three years before finding his calling, like his father, in marketing and sales.89 He sold “cleanser and Crisco to retailers in Upper Manhattan” for Procter and Gamble.90 He eventually made his way to Ingram, which he transformed from a modest book supplier for libraries into the largest book wholesaler in the country. That’s when Waldenbooks poached him. He didn’t create growth by selling literary fiction. He did it by trimming backlist holdings and focusing on new, exciting frontlist titles—cookbooks,

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celebrity memoirs—which had mere weeks to prove their worth before being pulled. “People are interested in what’s happening—whether it’s diet or sports,” he told the Times. “I don’t think publishers are taking into account that time is a factor. People want something short that they can read in a night.” He was talking about his own taste, too. “I like light stuff,” he said. He read mystery and suspense, “salted with occasional business titles.”91 Publishers were displeased. “More and more,” an executive at a major house told the Times, about Waldenbooks, “it seems as if we dance to their drummer, even if it’s a sickening tune.” Hoffman wanted to know about “print runs and promotions.” He wanted to know: “What is the publisher going to print? What is it going to put behind the book? Is the author good on talk shows? And is there going to be a tour?” Publishers had to show their investment to get buy-in from Hoffman. That didn’t work for most literary fiction. Waldenbooks almost always took at least two thousand copies if it was buying for all its stores, and it always took at least 10 percent of a print run, so a publisher, in most cases, needed “to print twenty thousand to crack the national list. The preponderance of new books,” reported the Times, “especially literary titles, fall well shy of that level.”92 Worst of all, for publishers, was the institutionalization of a system called co-op—or, cooperative advertising, a euphemism that named the practice of booksellers requiring payment in exchange for prominent real estate in their stores and, consequently, for larger orders: publishing’s payola. Each week, for example, Waldenbooks chose a title to place in a rack at the cash register labeled Waldenbooks Recommends, a choice that was conditional on a $3,000 payment from the publisher ($8,000 in 2022 dollars). In an attempt to fend off criticism over the damage it was doing to the literary midlist, Waldenbooks created a brochure called “Fiction Finds,” promoting “lesser-known novels and collections of short stories.” For a book to be included in the brochure, the publisher had to pay $3,500 (almost $10,000 in 2022 dollars). Books whose print runs were under thirty-five thousand were “rarely considered.”93 The chains, in the 1980s, were great for brand-name authors and formulaic genre fiction. Fantasy, horror, and romance flourished. James Michener continued on the bestseller lists as he had for decades. It was a good time for Jean Auel and Tom Clancy. But, at least at the start of the decade, it was a hopeless time for literary fiction. It was rare for publishers to print enough copies of titles in hardcover such that the chains would pick them up; and when they did, they often sold so poorly they never made it to paperback. And, of course, publishers were facing pressures for economic growth from their conglomerate owners even as agents had made it more expensive to acquire titles up front. Against these conditions, editors—Kathryn Court and Gerald Howard at Penguin, Gary

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Fisketjon at Vintage, and a slew of imitators—focused on paperback originals. That’s how Jay McInerney broke out in 1984 with Bright Lights, Big City, reinvigorating the market for literary fiction. By the end of the 1980s, though, B. Dalton and Waldenbooks were struggling. Suburban malls had reached their saturation point. The costs of leases were rising. Growth slowed—both in terms of number of stores and profits. A new model appeared. In September 1990, Barnes & Noble opened its first superstore in the Har Mar Mall in Roseville, Minnesota. In 1992, Kmart extended its realm by buying Borders, which became the great competitor to Barnes & Noble.94 These superstores were so large, and could carry so much stock, that they changed the calculus of the book business. Suddenly the bookseller had much more space to fill. How best to fill the space was a question for the chain bookbuyer. Harry Hoffman—who retired in 1991—hadn’t been a bookbuyer. He was the bookbuyer’s boss. Under the superstore model, it would be the bookbuyer herself who mattered most. At Barnes & Noble, that was Sessalee Hensley.

THE BOOKBUYER

Sessalee was a southern woman. She grew up in Baton Rouge. As a college student, she worked at B. Dalton, eventually becoming a store manager. From there, she took a job as an assistant bookbuyer for an up-and-coming Texas superstore chain called Bookstop. It was the mid-1980s. Bookstop’s founder was clever. To get discounts, consumers needed to use a Bookstop card, which provided the chain with data that it used to mail newsletters, determine which zip codes were primed for new locations, and track sales.95 Barnes & Noble, preparing its own superstore campaign, bought a controlling share of Bookstop in 1989.96 Sessalee came with it. A decade later, Sessalee Hensley, as Barnes & Noble’s sole literary fiction bookbuyer, became the most important figure in the book business—or second only to Oprah. No one used her last name. Like Madonna, she was just Sessalee. “If you talked to a publisher in the early 2000s,” Keith Gessen wrote, “chances are they would complain to you about the tyranny of Sessalee.”97 Rumors circulated. They said that “she once broke up with a boyfriend who didn’t share her enthusiasm for One Hundred Years of Solitude.” An executive from a major house asked the Wall Street Journal, “Do you have any idea how much power this woman has?”98 Her approval could create a hit; her neglect could condemn

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a book to obscurity.99 So, when she talked, publishers listened—often even changing a book’s cover if Sessalee didn’t like it.100 Her reign generated a paradox. “It is the chain superstore,” argues Laura Miller, “that best exemplifies the technocratic answer to how to reconcile the need to select and recommend with the sovereignty of the consumer.” Automation and rationalization, such as the consumer tracking Bookstop used, were supposed to eliminate any friction from the market, any “interference from cultural elites,” so that the consumer could “freely choose” her books.101 Innovations kept coming. In January 2001, Nielsen launched BookScan, which tracked sales across the industry; it was widely adopted by publishers within several years. These numbers enabled the dominance of comparative titles, or comps: any prospective title would now need a list of similar titles that had sold well for an editor to acquire it.102 The system was tightening. But then there was Sessalee, a single idiosyncratic individual with such reputed power. We might understand her job description as embodying and expressing “corporate taste,” a concept coined by Laura McGrath to explain the aesthetic judgment of literary agents. Like agents, Sessalee needed to “anticipate and respond to the demands of publishers and the market, becoming [an] administrator of the logic of the corporation.” Her taste, then, had to be “at once personal and persuasive, simultaneously subjective and strategic.”103 Sessalee knew that, in the mid-1990s, “hard-edged male-oriented paper originals” by such writers as Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh were in vogue. (They were being published by her husband’s employer, W. W. Norton). Five years later, chick lit by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner was tops in some zip codes, self-published African American street lit in others. She made a hit of Alice Sebold’s debut, The Lovely Bones.104 She threw her weight behind Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which, she said, “completely limns the American psyche.”105 She possessed the range to claim appreciation of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. The Corrections and Middlesex were edited by FSG’s Jonathan Galassi; Sessalee chose, but some petitioners were better at being chosen than others. Sessalee’s favorite was Barbara Kingsolver. Her favorite kind of author, that is, was middlebrow. Middlebrow fiction is the expression of the publishing industry’s technocratic democracy, a product of conglomerate desire, but, unlike formulaic genre fiction, it masks its “machine-tooled uniformity.”106 Think of John Irving, Anita Shreve, Anne Tyler, and Barbara Kingsolver.107 Even The Da Vinci Code obsesses over high art and interpretation, giving the bestseller a middlebrow sheen.

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Sessalee embodied the middlebrow, or the middlebrow embodied Sessalee. Barnes & Noble, in its very architecture, its interior design, masked technicity and mechanical reproduction in the aura of culture—with its earth tones, its embedded Starbucks shops, its big prints of classic books. As a suburban teenager, I rejected my parents’ middlebrow taste, their Follett and Michener. I let myself be seduced, though, by Sessalee’s shelves. In the end, her corporate taste was, by necessity, catholic. The sheer space of the superstore allowed for a capacious selection. I could feel, there, in the fiction aisles of the Barnes & Noble in the Har Mar Mall in Roseville, Minnesota, in 2000, that I might make a discovery, find a book that could change me, make me the kind of person who would be defined in opposition to this very space, though I didn’t note the irony. Armed with a printed list of recommended books for the AP Literature Exam, I wandered, until I found, between Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (until that moment my favorite book), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

LIQUIDATION

The ubiquity of chain superstores and the disappearance of mall stores marked the decline of mass-market paperbacks. “You used to hope for mass-market breakout titles,” said Irwyn Applebaum, president of Bantam, in 1997. “Now you look to hardcovers for the same thing. I always subscribed to Ian Ballantine’s theory that the mass-market sensibility would eventually inherit the earth. It has.”108 Pocket Books created the mass-market format in 1939 to take advantage of widespread, latent demand for books in places where books were hard to find but distribution channels already existed. Sixty years later, Barnes & Noble and Borders were using data to plug locations anywhere there might yet be latent demand. The mass-market sector’s stagnation that started in the 1970s never ended. In 1992, after Bantam spent six years in the red, Bertelsmann appointed Applebaum president, expecting a “new Bantam” with “fewer titles.”109 Applebaum soon “announced a major streamlining of the company, eliminating divisional distinctions between hardcover and paperback publishing, cutting the list in all categories for 1993 and trimming a number of staff positions.”110 Meanwhile, television, video games, and, increasingly, the internet were competing for consumers’ entertainment dollars. In 2004, Publishers Weekly noted that “the mass market paperback segment has long been characterized by slow growth,” adding

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that “some mass market veterans are wondering if the segment is undergoing fundamental changes that will result in nothing but sales declines in the years ahead.” According to the president of Simon & Schuster, “the old philosophy of  affordability, portability, availability, and quality content” was no longer valid.111 Paralleling the rise of high-end grocers and organic food, consumers who still wanted books were more likely to shell out for a trade paperback or hardcover, signs of middlebrow materiality, than for a small, cheap mass-market edition. The Amazon Kindle, launched in 2007, usurped much of whatever mass-market market was left. Genre fiction migrated—and transmogrified— with it. Money had transformed the big old mass-market houses. NAL had long been diminished by Times Mirror. It was sold for parts to a financial chop shop in 1983 and resold to Penguin in 1987. In 1986, Bertelsmann bought Doubleday, which owned Dell, and formed the Bantam Doubleday Dell Group. A German conglomerate bought Random House in 1998. Random House and Penguin merged in 2013. Pocket—which started it all with the books that ended up with Edgar in the hospital—belonged to Simon & Schuster, which went on a shopping spree in the 1980s, spending more than $1 billion in acquisitions.112 Simon & Schuster itself belonged to Gulf + Western, which became Paramount, which was sold to Viacom, which split into Viacom and CBS in 2005. Pocket went with Simon & Schuster to CBS. Penguin Random House owns Bantam, Dell, and NAL, which, with Pocket, were once four of the top five mass-market houses in the United States. CBS liquidated the fifth, Fawcett, in 1981.113

DECLINE

E. L. Doctorow became a prophet of decline. In 2003, he delivered the Massey Lectures at Harvard. He warned, “Our voices are constricted by the censorship of the marketplace. The entertainment behemoths that finance us are finding us a bad investment.”114  In 2014, he told the New York Times, “Conglomeration— the acquisition of houses by large corporations—is the story of how things have changed.”115 Publishing used to be fun, he said. Less so now. He died in 2015. Zadie Smith moved into his office at NYU. Her lyrical, sensual, yet big messy social novels are apt successors to Doctorow’s oeuvre—showing a thread of resilience in literary history.

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Decline is its own fiction, a useful one for literature. Perpetual crisis props up nonprofit publishers, as we’ll see in chapter 5. Tales of a lost golden age are seductive—and dangerous. What we can say with certainty is that conglomeration remade publishing around 1980. The mass-market format boosted brandname authors and formulaic genre fiction. Today the mass-market format is approaching extinction. But you can still find mass-market books here and there. Meanwhile, the genres the format helped make ubiquitous—especially fantasy and romance—have found fertile ground for wild experimentation and massive readerships through Kindle Direct Publishing and other digital ventures. Whereas readers once found such titles in bustling physical spaces like drugstores and train stations, now they find them in bustling virtual ones like Archive of Our Own (AO3), Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad.

3 Trade (I) How Women Resisted Sexism and Reinvented the Novel

E

. L. Doctorow stood at the podium to accept the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award for Fiction. Fifty-nine years old, he had won the NBCC once before for Ragtime, in 1975, and the National Book Award for World’s Fair, in 1986. But now he was not in a celebratory mood.

BETRAYAL

He looked out from his warm eyes set beneath his pronounced male pattern baldness. He wore a salt-and-pepper chinstrap beard. It was Thursday, March 8, 1990. Eleven days earlier, Alberto Vitale, the new president of Random House, had fired the head of Pantheon, André Schiffrin. Doctorow, who had been a Random House author for twenty years, told the assembled guests that the press had “disfigured itself ”; it had been “beheaded.”1 It was a courageous statement to make at such an august event. Then he stepped off the stage with his award— for Billy Bathgate, a literary crime novel. He had dedicated the book to his editor, Jason Epstein. Sitting among the audience, Epstein disagreed with his friend’s assessment. As Doctorow indicted Vitale, Epstein was planning to come to his new boss’s defense. Random House was splitting apart. All five of Pantheon’s senior editors had quit in sympathy with Schiffrin. One had published a vitriolic op-ed in the New York Times. Studs Terkel was maligning Random House around town. James Michener, who had been one of Random House’s top writers for decades,

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was threatening to leave. Meanwhile, Epstein was working with some of his colleagues to draft a statement that would be published four days later.2 Against prevailing sentiment, they threw Schiffrin under the bus. “Like Pantheon,” the statement read, “we all strive to publish books of enduring quality. And, like Pantheon, we would abhor corporate censorship. We have never experienced it, nor do we believe that Pantheon has ever experienced it. We would not tolerate censorship in any form, and we are offended by any suggestion to the contrary. But, unlike Pantheon, we have preserved our independence and the independence of our authors by supporting the integrity of our publishing programs with fiscal responsibility.”3 It was Schiffrin’s fault that he couldn’t keep Pantheon in the black. Random House and Knopf had managed to publish good books and make a profit. Schiffrin dug his own grave. No conglomerate boss was telling him what to or not to publish. No one was censoring him. (Schiffrin, for his part, contested this. In a letter to Doctorow nine months later, he wrote, “Vitale et al have lied so systematically, it’s become difficult to understand how surprisingly political their decision was, rather than economic. Vitale actually told me we should publish more rightwing rather than leftwing books.”4) Censorship is a high bar, though.5 It’s not censorship for conglomerate owners to insist on a certain rate of growth or to ask that every book make a profit. But it changes how editors decide what to acquire and how to edit; it changes what literary agents take on, what they look for from their scouts; and authors, consciously or not, learn how to write what the industry will accept.6 What this meant for literary fiction in the 1990s was a turn toward the techniques of genre fiction. In this, Doctorow, even as he lamented what conglomeration had wrought, was ahead of its curve. Billy Bathgate with its earnest embrace of 1930s pulpy noir is a signature text of conglomeration’s mature phase. It’s about a kid from the Bronx (like Doctorow) who gets caught up with Manhattan gangsters in the business of consolidation: “They used to be a hundred railroad companies cutting each other’s throats. Now how many are there?” his mentor asks him. “Everything nice and quiet, everything streamlined.” They run numbers, though Billy can’t help but desire “to toss all the numbers up in the air and let them fall back into letters, so that a new book would emerge.” The kid’s job is what Henry James ascribed to the writer. James: “Try to be one of the  people on whom nothing is lost.” Billy Bathgate: “My instructions were simple . . . to pay attention, to miss nothing . . . to become the person who would always be watching . . . to lose nothing.” He becomes the gang’s “habitual accomplice.”7 The gangsters are gunned down in the end by rivals but Billy Bathgate escapes, comes out (like Doctorow) on top.

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Epstein did well, allying with Vitale. That summer, the two were in a car, discussing the Gulf War. Vitale said they should do an instant book. Epstein said it would be nearly impossible; he could think of only one person who could do it, New York Times reporter Judith Miller. They called Peter Osnos, their colleague at Random House, who called Miller, who said, “of course she could write an 85,000-word book in twenty-one days.”8 Six weeks later Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf was in bookstores. Three years after that, Epstein and Miller were married. By the end of the decade, Epstein had changed his mind about the fiscal demands imposed by conglomeration—or, in his new retirement, his pen felt freer. He devoted the first chapter of his memoir, Book Business (2001), to decrying the decline of publishing. “Conglomerate budgets require efficiencies and create structures that are incompatible with the notorious vagaries of literary production,” he wrote. Doctorow sent a blurb, calling it “an extremely important literary document.”9 The history of Random House shows what the conglomeration of trade publishing did to fiction. We follow the publisher from its modest size in the 1950s as it goes public, acquires Knopf and Pantheon, is acquired by RCA then Si Newhouse then Bertelsmann, until it merges with Penguin, forming PRH, the world’s largest trade publisher. As chapter 2 notes, 1980 marks a shift when we might say contemporary literature begins. This chapter assesses the literary field before 1980, paying particular attention to women writers. Sexism played an outsize role at Random House, influencing what they decided to publish. In response to the publisher’s culture during the 1960s and 1970s, Random House’s leading women writers forged new novelistic forms to manage gendered expectations. Then, in 1980, Newhouse acquired Random House from RCA. Newhouse shifted Knopf kingmaker Robert Gottlieb to another of his properties, the New Yorker, reinforcing the special relationship between the publisher and the magazine. The move also freed Newhouse to fire Gottlieb’s friend, president Robert L. (“Bob”) Bernstein, who had long buffered Random House from its conglomerate owners. Under the new dispensation, top review-garnering, prizewinning Random House authors practiced earnest multiculturalism (Sandra Cisneros, Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison), adapted genre techniques in literary fiction (Michael Chabon, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, also Morrison), or enjoyed New Yorker sinecures to write New Yorker–style fiction (Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, John Updike). Behind these names stand a slew of others, less known (outside publishing) but equally influential: Jason Epstein, whom we’ve met; Joe Fox and Nan  A.

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Talese, Epstein’s fellow editors; Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf and his college friend, Wall Street maestro Charles Allen; Jane Friedman, a publicist at the forefront of the publicity revolution; Amanda (“Binky”) Urban, a literary agent and protégé to Morton Janklow’s business partner, Lynn Nesbit; and Sonny Mehta, who, when the dust settled after the Schiffrin affair, would find himself the most important person in trade publishing at Random. They, and the forces they channeled, are the conglomerate authors who shaped contemporary literature.

EPSTEIN AT DOUBLEDAY

For fifty years, Jason Epstein was the New York City literary establishment. He grew up during the Great Depression, an only child of upper-middle-class parents in the suburbs of Boston, a Jew among “upwardly mobile Irish-Americans.”10 He started at Columbia in 1945 at seventeen years old, surrounded by GIs “still wearing their flight jackets and Marine Corp tunics.”11 He earned his BA in 1949 and stuck around for an extra year to add an MA in English. Epstein loved books but decided he wasn’t cut out for academia, so he took a job as a trainee at Doubleday. It wasn’t the paradise he’d imagined. Doubleday at midcentury placed its emphasis, to his view, on business over books. It was staffed by “red-faced portly men of the old school in blue suits and polished shoes.” They were “direct-mail marketers who knew how to maximize book club margins but knew nothing about how books were actually conceived, gestated, and born. These men were not readers and could not empathize with people who were.”12 The president’s office was lined with draperies of “raw India silk,” but not many books.13 Epstein was bookish and ambitious. He roamed the offices wearing a bow tie and a mischievous grin, like a schoolboy who was getting away with something. Early on, he recognized that he and his “friends at Columbia on the GI bill couldn’t afford to buy the books they had to read.”14 More than a decade earlier, in 1939, Pocket Books had introduced the modern mass-market paperback to the United States. It was cheap and distributed by the tens of thousands to drugstores and railway stations—but bookstores mostly didn’t carry them. Epstein wanted to shop in New York City’s hip intellectual bookstores and he wanted nice paperbacks, not the crummy pulp shoved in the pockets of the hoi polloi. He pitched a new format, the trade paperback: sturdier and more expensive than mass market and aimed not at large publics but at “a much smaller and more

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specific audience, mainly academic, literary, highbrow”—a tactic to reclaim a space of distinction against the flattening impulse of the mass market.15 It launched in 1953 as Anchor Books, when Epstein was twenty-five, with stylish covers designed by Epstein’s friend, Edward Gorey. The move revolutionized publishing. A few years later, Dwight Macdonald, called upon by Esquire to identify “the bright young men in the arts,” acknowledged that “it may seem odd to include a publisher,” but had to allow that Epstein, “the youthful Father of the Quality Paperback, has had such an influence on our intellectual life that I think he should be in.”16 Epstein’s girlfriend, Barbara Zimmerman, who lived around the corner from Gorey in Greenwich Village, introduced the two men.17 Epstein’s apartment had great windows and exposed brick that was speckled white and a tuba that “had been made into a lamp.”18 He threw parties. Barbara brought the friends she’d made at Harvard and Radcliffe: John Ashbery, Gorey, Donald Hall, Alison Lurie, Frank O’Hara. Ashbery and O’Hara brought W. H. Auden. These parties became the salons of the postwar era, the literary center of gravity, what Gertrude Stein’s home in Paris had been for modernists.

EPSTEIN AT RANDOM

After Thanksgiving one year in the mid-1950s, Edmund Wilson invited Epstein into his study and handed him, by Wilson’s account, a “repulsive” manuscript.19 It was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Nabokov was looking for a publisher. Epstein urged Doubleday to publish it. But Doubleday’s president heard what it was about and said absolutely not. Epstein was already feeling underpaid and underappreciated. The Lolita affair gave him the occasion to quit. Shortly thereafter, he was lured to Random House. The atmosphere at Random House matched that of the bookish, ambitious Epstein. The house had its offices in a magnificent mansion built by a nineteenth-century railroad magnate. Authors would often drop by: Ralph Ellison, Dr. Seuss, Terry Southern, Andy Warhol. It felt, to Epstein, like “an unusually happy, second family.”20 It’s not hard to be happy when one’s fortunes are rapidly on the rise. Epstein arrived in the fall of 1958. The company had been in business for thirty-three years and was still run by its founders, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. They published Ellison’s Invisible Man. They published James Joyce and William Faulkner and Gertrude Stein. They published the Modern Library series, a huge backlist of

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classics. For the moment, the house was still a modest size. Its staff directory fit on a postcard. In late 1958, though, it was on the brink of big business. Before founding Random House, Bennett Cerf worked at a brokerage firm on Wall Street. There he befriended another young employee, Charles Allen. Enchanted by the outside world, Cerf and Allen would play hooky together, wandering down to the Battery to watch the boats or ferrying out to visit the Statue of Liberty. Decades later, in 1959, Cerf consulted Allen about the financial future of Random House. Cerf and Klopfer were getting older and were thinking about their estates and the problem of succession. Their solution was to go public. Allen— eulogized in the New York Times as “the shy Midas of Wall Street”—agreed to issue its stock.21 “Suddenly,” Cerf wrote, “Random House embarked on its financial career and expansion.” Such expansion introduced constraints. “Instead of working for yourself and doing what you damn please, willing to risk loss on something you want to do, if you’re any kind of honest man, you feel a responsibility to your stockholders.”22 Epstein felt the change in the office. Cerf would “chew the corner of his white linen handkerchief whenever the stock fell.”23 Random House was the first large U.S. publisher to go public. Six months later, the firm bought the country’s most respected house, Alfred A. Knopf. In 1961, it added Pantheon, which included on its backlist Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and the works of Carl Jung. In 1962, Pantheon hired André Schiffrin. The economy was booming, universities were expanding, and people wanted books. In early 1963, Publishers Weekly reported that book sales in the United States had increased 150 percent in nine years thanks to the spectacular “growth in the number of educated readers.”24 It was easy to turn a profit. In 1963, Epstein wrote that he only needed to sell “six or seven thousand copies” to put a book in the black. Given the country’s literary infrastructure, any book stood a chance at being big. He ran the numbers: “There are only 1,804 bookstores in America, of which only a few hundred really count. If the book starts to sell in these, the other 1,500 will hear about it soon enough and begin to order it from the jobbers. There is no reason at all that such a book,” he wrote, “cannot become a great bestseller.”25 Reviews helped.26 A review in the New York Times signaled to the bookstores that counted that they ought to pick up a book. But in December 1962, a union strike suspended publication of the Times. Epstein, his wife Barbara, and their friends Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, frustrated with a lackluster culture of reviews, founded the New York Review of Books (NYRB), which immediately became a leading venue for aesthetic debates.27 Barbara Epstein was its editor, alongside Robert Silvers who came over from Harper’s.

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Epstein made it sound as if any book had a chance at being big. Maybe. But the odds were far from egalitarian. What mattered most was who you knew. Authors needed to know editors and editors needed to know reviewers. “How an editor is plugged into various networks is the paramount factor in the flow of projects, ideas, and manuscripts to publishers,” a major sociological study on publishing reported in 1982. Book review editors decided what to review based on “information received through various informal grapevines”; publishers engaged in “a variety of social rituals to propitiate professional reviewers.”28 The Epsteins had moved to the Upper West Side, where they now held their parties29 where literary figures30 of all sorts were propitiated.31 Only a few blocks north, on the other side of Central Park, Roger Straus, of the publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG)—Epstein’s “occasional rival”—did the same, with guests who included John Berryman, T. S. Eliot, Jerzy Kosinski, Bernard Malamud, and the New York intellectuals connected to the Partisan Review, such as Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, and Diana and Lionel Trilling.32 The parties hosted by the Epsteins and the Strauses were strategic hubs of literary influence. In his history of FSG, Boris Kachka writes, “the more critics Roger [Straus] knew intimately, the more inclined they’d be to review his books. This was ‘the whole theory of Letters,’ Straus said: ‘to become involved with the people who were being useful in the literary world.’ ”33 The world was small: “a circle of agents, reviewers, and editors at such trade houses as Viking, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Knopf, who, if they do not interact directly or on a regular basis, see the same third persons.”34 Since 1965, the Book Review Index has been tracking where each title is reviewed from a list of more than three hundred venues. Random House dominated the Index, closely followed by FSG. (John Cheever and John Updike were extraordinary performers for Knopf.) Between 1965 and 1980, nine stood out as top Random House writers by this metric: Renata Adler, E. L. Doctorow, Elizabeth Hardwick, Alison Lurie, James Michener, Philip Roth, William Styron, Gore Vidal, and Robert Penn Warren. Adler shared friends with the Epsteins. Hardwick was a close friend with whom the couple started NYRB, and Lurie was a close friend of Barbara’s from their days at Radcliffe. Michener was friends with editor Saxe Commins. Roth was a regular at the Epstein parties.35 Styron attended Duke University with editor Bob Loomis and was best man at both of Loomis’s weddings. Vidal was close with the Epsteins and became a regular contributor to the NYRB before Jason lured him away from writing for Little, Brown. Warren was a close friend of editor Albert Erskine and the best man at his wedding. Doctorow also owned a house near the Epsteins in Sag Harbor, at the eastern end of Long Island. He also had worked alongside Jim Silberman as an editor at

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New American Library; Silberman was now Random House’s editorial director. In the summer, Sag Harbor was a little literary village. Doctorow and Epstein were joined by Truman Capote, Peter Matthiessen, and James Salter, who all were, or would become, Random House writers. Epstein’s colleague Robert Loomis owned a home there, and would fly in William Styron. Epstein, an epicure, cooked for everyone: “on a typical Saturday night, he’d whip up clams Casino, followed by grilled lamb chops with rosemary or striped bass with fennel, elegant vegetable purées, and fettuccine with black-truffle shavings.”36 They played parlor games and touch football. They drank. They wrote. “I loved it, and I got a lot of work done,” said Matthiessen. “But it was very tough on our wives.”37

THE FIELD

Bob Bernstein guided Random House through the first decades of the conglomerate era. He and Jason Epstein were hired the same day in 1958. Whereas Epstein was fearsome, Bernstein was gentle. He met Toni Morrison on a tour of Random House’s textbook imprint, L. W. Singer, in Syracuse, and hired her down to New York City, first in Random House’s scholastic division. After The Bluest Eye was published, he supported her move from scholastic to trade. She called him “a friend I could rely on,” someone who “cherished knowledge for its own sake, got passionate about it, and who was willing to act on that knowledge and passion in ways not immediately (or even ultimately) beneficial to himself.”38 He invited Morrison to recruit African Americans “and give them real jobs rather than hopeless summer vacations in the stockroom.”39 Bennett Cerf made Bernstein president in 1966, just after Cerf and Donald Klopfer sold Random House to RCA and cashed out. RCA believed Random House would work synergistically with its computer business, providing educational content they could sell to schools.40 It didn’t work out that way.41 In the meantime, Bernstein expended considerable energy acting as a “firewall” between his editors and RCA’s profit demands. He was helped by the fact that Random House “barely constituted a speck on RCA’s organizational chart.”42 Bernstein reported to the same vice president as did the heads of RCA Records and the Global Communications division, each of which contributed small change next to RCA’s serious preoccupations: defense contracting and television.43 (Doctorow described RCA’s unveiling of the television at the 1939 World’s Fair in World’s Fair.44) No one at RCA paid close attention. For the

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moment, new ownership mostly meant that editors had more money to play with. It also maybe introduced a problem for optics. On July 17, 1967, Joe Fox—who edited Renata Adler, Truman Capote, and Philip Roth—wrote to his colleagues to propose a new program: Random House Fellowships. Fox was worried about the house’s reputation. Given its recent growth and success, it could now compete at auction with other big budget houses; Fox singled out Doubleday, Harper, and Simon & Schuster. But “in another, no-less-important arena—where the author seeks a sense of belonging, personal attention and the feeling that he has the backing and enthusiasm of everyone in the house—we are near a low-water mark.” On this latter front, Fox saw as their competitors Atheneum, FSG, and Viking, against which Random House was underperforming. Donald Barthelme, “one of the best and mostpublicized young American writers,” had just left Atheneum for FSG and neither he nor his agent had considered Random House. Fox wrote that he had heard in recent months from all types of players in the literary world “that Random House is ‘too cold,’ ‘too fat,’ ‘has more than its share,’ ‘doesn’t care enough about authors who haven’t written a best seller,’ ‘doesn’t give enough tender loving care to the smaller author,’ and so on.”45 His goal for the fellowship program was to repair the house’s reputation and to acquire and retain literary talent. From what I can tell, the program never got off the ground. Fox’s memo gives us a sense of the publishing field—at least as it was perceived by one editor at Random House. Atheneum was small but threatening because it had been recently founded by the son of the well-respected Alfred A. Knopf.46 Viking had Saul Bellow, already a titan, whose Herzog won the National Book Award in 1964. It had Ken Kesey. It would publish Thomas Pynchon’s next novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, in 1973. It had Wallace Stegner but was about to lose him to Doubleday. Only FSG had a list to rival Random House and Knopf, with Barthelme, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Walker Percy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Susan Sontag, and Tom Wolfe. It would soon add Joan Didion with Play It as It Lays in 1970. Sontag penned the theory for which FSG’s fiction list would be the practice. In the 1960s, John Barth, Frank Kermode, and Philip Roth each wrote about the challenge the novel faced after exhaustive modernist experiments, and the struggle to be adequate to the absurdity and complexity of contemporary U.S. life. Sontag attempted to revitalize the novel by championing the aesthetics of the nouveau roman from France, which she set forth in a series of essays collected in Against Interpretation, published by FSG in 1966. This new fiction would strive “to defy realist techniques, to play with new ‘deployments of form,’

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and to demand a certain erudition, a certain ‘specialization’ in literary ideas in order to be read.”47 By 1965, Sontag was granted unique status at FSG as Roger Straus’s special friend: author, scout, maybe lover, a relationship that lasted the rest of their lives. (Both died in 2004.) Straus’s son later complained, “I really felt that in some ways Susan was editor in chief.”48 Soon, FSG became the house most closely associated with the influential new fiction: Barthelme, Didion, Paley, Percy, and Sontag herself, along with an extensive and growing list of European novelists. Otherwise, literary fiction was spread out. Doubleday had John Barth, some of Philip  K. Dick’s prolific output, Ishmael Reed, James Salter, and Wallace Stegner, though Barth, Reed, and Salter would all go to Random House in the early 1970s. Harper was about to lose John Cheever to Knopf, though it would publish N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), initiating the Native American Renaissance. Simon & Schuster had Richard Brautigan and Charles Portis. Among others whom Fox left unnamed, Doctorow was publishing James Baldwin and Norman Mailer at Dial. Delacorte had Kurt Vonnegut. Harcourt, Brace had Mary McCarthy and John Edgar Wideman. Houghton, Mifflin had Robert Stone and would soon bring out Don DeLillo’s first three novels. Little, Brown had Gore Vidal until Random House snagged him in 1973. McGraw Hill had Vladimir Nabokov. Vanguard had Joyce Carol Oates. Random House’s Albert Erskine alone had a stronger fiction list than most houses, including Ralph Ellison, James Michener, John O’Hara, Robert Penn Warren, and a recent young addition who’d sent a manuscript over the transom, Cormac McCarthy. Joe Fox edited Adler, Capote, Lurie, and Roth. (He accompanied Capote on trips to Kansas to research for In Cold Blood; on the plane back to New York after the murderers were hung, Capote held Fox’s hand and cried.49) Robert Loomis edited Jerzy Kosinski and William Styron. Epstein edited Doctorow and Matthiessen. Knopf, in the same building, had John Updike, William Maxwell, and Anne Tyler. It added Toni Morrison with Sula in 1973 and DeLillo with Ratner’s Star in 1976. In short, Joe Fox misread the scene. When everyone is complaining about you, that makes you the hottest place to be. Random House managed to be both the biggest and the best, attracting big ticket authors (Barth, Cheever, Vidal), young talent (DeLillo, Morrison, Reed), and writers’ writers (Salter). By 1972, it had moved from the Villard mansion to a “sleek modern building” on East 50th Street and, between Random House, Knopf, and Pantheon, was declared in the New York Times “the most powerful book publishing combination in the country today; probably ever.”50

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THE WOMEN

Publishing was a tough place to be a woman. Men held most editorial and managerial positions. Women were secretaries and assistants and staffed publicity and marketing departments.51 When Joe Fox wrote to Mrs. Diggory Venn to ask for recommendations from graduates of her Publishing Procedures Course at Radcliffe, he specified, “The applicant must be able to type well and to take shorthand. Also, I would hope to hire somebody who is serious about wanting a job in publishing, a girl who is not apt to get married three months after I have hired her or, if married, is not apt to start having children immediately.”52 Guild-like norms reigned in which informal mentorship determined who would rise the ranks, fixing the system on behalf of white upper-middle-class men who went to the right schools or had the right connections. When men and women held the same positions, women earned “substantially less.”53 If women were editors, they tended to work in children’s literature or genre fiction.54 Lee Wright, for example, was a well-known editor of mysteries when she came to Random House from Simon & Schuster in 1958. She led a popular line with a large stable, which included Mignon Eberhart, Ellery Queen, and Donald Westlake. In 1959, Random House hired Nan A. Talese, hair in a bob, whose career would break glass ceilings—publishing’s Peggy Olson. Talese started as a copyeditor and, given the landscape, expected to remain one. She was excited for the chance to work on Philip Roth’s Letting Go, the follow-up to his National Book Award– winning debut, Goodbye, Columbus. But her correspondence with him reveals the care she had to take to manage his feelings. On November 21, 1961, she wrote, Dear Mr. Roth, Here are the pulled pages from 207–605. I completely understand your hesitancy about not seeing all the pages, but let me assure you that no changes of meaning, style, or rhythm would ever be made. Joe [Fox] has gone over every mark and those you do not see are simply spelling and punctuation (minor, not interfering with the writing, and no “oh,” or “, too”). I know this is a very gruelling business for you—receiving Joe’s suggestion on the last half and then being confronted with a whole new set of marks—but let me assure you that nothing will go to the printer without your okay. Much of the blue pencil is my going over what you and Joe have already agreed upon, and I have redone it so the printer can read it. The only changes

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I have suggested are marked in the margin. Also—don’t worry about the dashes. There are a lot but they work well and in many cases cannot be replaced with commas. Letting Go is a beautifully written and exciting book, and please be assured that nothing could or would ever be done to interfere with that. Sincerely, Nan A. Talese55

Roth was notoriously sensitive. But Fox didn’t write to him with such deference: he outsourced the most laborious ego management to Talese. Around the same time, in an unusual break, Albert Erskine found himself overextended and handed Talese Robert Penn Warren’s new novel, Flood, and told her to edit it. She did it well and was given more work and soon she was promoted to associate editor. Fox responded by saying, “Well, I suppose you’ll be uppity now.”56 Women were not only underrepresented and underpaid, they were also often seen for their bodies, not their minds.57 Reflecting on the coteries surrounding NYRB and its predecessor, the Partisan Review, which included Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, and his own wife Barbara, Jason Epstein remarked, “With women in that crowd, the first thing you thought about was whether they were good looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was good enough. You wanted a piece, a piece of writing—you’d forget everything else for a good piece. There was no need to be a feminist in that group. Why would they bother?”58 The repetition of “a piece”—which becomes “a good piece”—lets Epstein imply an equivalence between a woman’s writing and her body. Epstein’s sexism might not be surprising to those in the know. Rumormonger and muckraker Michael Wolff called Epstein “a legendarily nasty son of a bitch,” but added that he’s “not, by a long shot, anywhere near the worst I’ve met in the book business.”59 A curtain has long been drawn over such bad behavior, leaving notice of it to the realm of rumor or surreptitious revelation through fiction. Rona Jaffe, who worked at Fawcett in the 1950s, “rising from filing clerk to associate editor,” wrote The Best of Everything, a bestseller, published in 1958—seen now as a proto–Sex and the City or Girls—that depicted some of the seedier, tacit aspects of working in publishing as a woman. She “interviewed fifty women to see if they’d had the same experiences, with the men and the jobs and all the things nobody spoke about in polite company.” She was unusually fortuitous in finding an interested editor and film producer from the outset; when the editor suddenly died, the project went to a very young Robert Gottlieb, who told her to “look back in horror and write.”60 She featured a sexist, predatorial editor,

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Mr. Shalimar, modeled on Fawcett’s William Lengel, who asks intrusive sexual questions, forcibly kisses subordinates, and humiliates himself by crawling under a table when drunk to look at women’s legs.61 Sexism was modeled from the top. Bennett Cerf ’s professional correspondence is rife with references to women’s bodies and what he’d like to do with them. His letters to men often include some reference to their wives, as when he wrote to film producer Armand Deutsch, “Please give your wife a loving potch for me. On second thought, don’t; I’ll wait to do it in person!”62 Replying to the actress Olivia de Havilland, who had inquired, without innuendo, about the finances around a book she had published with Random House, Cerf managed to write, “You are one of this globe’s most toothsome morsels, and I would like to remind you that, though they are aging, my molars are still working perfectly!” In a letter from a few weeks before, when plying her to write another book, and in response to learning that she had injured her ankle, he wrote, “Now, for heaven’s sake, don’t let anything happen to that glorious fanny of yours! Such a disaster would break the hearts of your adoring public—me included!”63 In addition to lasciviousness, Cerf had a fondness for exclamation points. The most outlandish example I found in the Random House archives at Columbia University came in a reply to a benign request. An old acquaintance of Cerf, Snoony Lou Randolph, wrote him to ask whether he might speak to the Women’s Thimble Club in her town, for which she served as president. Here is his bizarre reply in its entirety: June 4, 1965 Miss Snoony Lou Randolph c/o Mrs. Robert Sherwood 29 East 64th Street New York, New York Dear Snoony Lou: My goodness, it was fine hearing from you after all these years! Your note brought back wonderful memories of the days when you were the second-best piece of poon tang in Federalsburg. (Of course, the champ had the God-given advantage of an oversized ass!) Love and kisses, P.S. WHEN did you learn to read and write? bc;mb64

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Women who wanted to write literary fiction faced considerable constraints.65 They were associated with mass culture, whereas “real, authentic culture” was “the prerogative of men.”66 They were expected to produce sentimental fiction, women’s fiction. This was bad insofar as it limited women’s options, determining their genre for them. It was not a genre that garnered much respect from those in or near the industry. In the early years of The New York Times Book Review, Parul Sehgal reports, men carefully defended a border that determined which gender could write what, worrying about practices like women using male pseudonyms and daring to write from a male perspective.67 Women were in retreat. Fewer and fewer were published. Some had gained a foothold in science fiction pulps in the 1920s but they and the next generation were increasingly pushed out in the late 1930s and 1940 by misogynistic editors and readers.68 The policing of gendered borders persisted across the twentieth century. “For years,” notes Sehgal, “the novelist Anthony Burgess, chief fiction reviewer of The Observer in London, was said to decide which women would be permitted to leave the ‘ghetto’ of female writing.”69 Women attempted to free themselves from gendered expectations by writing self-reflexive novels in which they transposed the barriers they faced in the patriarchal world into fictional worlds where they could criticize these barriers and maybe even creatively destroy them. In this, they were inheriting a modernist tradition whose great example was James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the subjugated position to write oneself out of was to be Irish. “The reflexive production of the ‘modernist artist,’ ” argues Mark McGurl, was not an unusual practice, but was so characteristic as to be “a large part of the job.”70 Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf wrote versions with The Autobiography of Alice  B. Toklas and To the Lighthouse. Beginning in the early 1970s, second-wave feminism split open one route—one market—for women novelists who could express and reflect on women’s liberation. Here we find Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends (Random House, 1970), Anne Roiphe’s Up the Sandbox! (Simon & Schuster, 1970), Sandra Hochman’s Walking Papers (Viking, 1971), Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), Ann Birstein’s Dickie’s List (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (Holt, Rinehart, 1973), and Hilma Wolitzer’s Ending (Morrow, 1974).71 Such portraits of the artist were not always, maybe not even often, a tool used to counter systematic barriers. With the midcentury solidification of the prestige of high modernism, it became an option for anyone who wanted to acquire an “aura of intellectual sophistication,” especially when turned up to eleven and morphed into metafiction, as in the work of Barth and Nabokov. McGurl leans on systems theorist Niklas Luhmann to argue that “these acts of authorial

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self-making” are not “the feats of radical individuation they often represent themselves to be,” but instead instances “of a larger cultural system geared for the production of self-expressive originality.”72

AUTOFICTION

In the narrower instance when an author invites readers to identify a character with themself—by giving a character their name or shared biographical details—we have come to call what they have written autofiction. It saw a rapid uptake in the late 1960s and 1970s among men: John Barth, Frederick Exley, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick, Gore Vidal, and Kurt Vonnegut. Marjorie Worthington argues that this sudden flourishing was a “reaction to the diminishing cultural authority of the novel and of authors in general and the white male author in particular.”73 Television, which took up so much of RCA’s attention, leaving Random House happily neglected, was also eating into the leisure time of potential readers. Meanwhile, second-wave feminism attacked the excesses of male authors—most visibly in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970)—which led to emotional responses, such as Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man (1974) (dedicated to Jason Epstein) and Norman Mailer’s memoir The Prisoner of Sex (1971) and his 1971 debate with feminists in what became the film Town Bloody Hall.74 Joe Moran argues that authorship was becoming more and more public in these years through the institutionalization of promotion and publicity such that “many of these works are a necessary working through of the problems of being a public author—perhaps not merely necessary but unavoidable, since authors are inextricably caught up in promotional practices.” Autofiction allowed them to explore “the inescapably public nature of contemporary authorship and the issues surrounding authorial intention and agency which this raises.”75 The act of inserting a version of oneself in  one’s novel reveals a desire for control and recognition and is evidence of anxiety about lacking the same, an anxiety on display—suffused with fears of impotence—in, for example, Barth’s Chimera (1972) and in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973).76 If men, writing from a position of domination, used autofiction to exhibit and counter their fear of losing power, then women, writing from a position of historic powerlessness in the literary field, used it to advertise constraints imposed on them by patriarchy in publishing.77 Autofiction by women at the time included Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Grace Paley’s

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“A Conversation with my Father.” Constraints were uneven across publishing houses; at FSG, for example, women benefited from Sontag’s influence. At Random House, three women provoked with their autofictions as many and as prestigious reviews as its top men (Doctorow, Michener, Roth, Styron, Vidal, Warren): Renata Adler, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Alison Lurie. All were embedded in Jason Epstein’s interpersonal networks and were subject to, and to some degree dependent on, his judgment and that of other men at Random House. All three wrote novels that grappled with and publicized the situation they found themselves in.

LURIE

The obstetrician who delivered Alison Lurie fumbled her forceps birth, leaving her deaf in one ear and with damaged facial muscles. “I was a skinny, plain, offlooking little girl,” she wrote. “I was always the last person chosen for any team.” She believed she would be “an ugly old maid” and gravitated toward writing at an early age because there she could bend reality to her whim.78 Her father was a sociologist; her mother wrote book reviews: positions she would come to satirize. At Harvard and Radcliffe, she befriended John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Barbara Epstein, Edward Gorey, and Frank O’Hara. She graduated in 1947, married in 1948, and lived with her husband in Cambridge and Amherst until he earned his doctorate in English from Harvard in 1956. She followed her husband to Los Angeles in 1957 where he taught at UCLA, then to Ithaca and Cornell in 1961. Throughout the 1950s, she found time to write between the demands of being a faculty wife and a mother of three. But, despite her well-connected friends and her pedigree, she couldn’t find a publisher. It didn’t help that she was far from New York City. Finally, after more than a decade of failed manuscripts, Macmillan picked up her novel Love and Friendship in 1962. She wrote a piece for the second issue of The New York Review of Books in 1963, edited by her old friend Barbara Epstein, and became a steady contributor for the next fifty years. Coward McCann, an imprint of G. P. Putnam, published her next two novels in 1965 and 1967. By then she’d spent time at Yaddo, the writers’ colony, where she began a lifelong friendship with Philip Roth. I spoke with her in Ithaca in 2018 the day after she’d returned from Roth’s funeral. She told me they could be friends because, she believed, she wasn’t good looking enough to be an object of his sexual attention. (She also told me he had, on a plant stand, the hat Saul

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Bellow wore to his Nobel Prize ceremony; Roth believed until the end that he himself would wear it to Stockholm one day.) Roth urged Joe Fox to take on Lurie, which he did for her fourth novel, Real People, about an art colony similar to Yaddo, published in 1969. He had rejected her previous novel, Invisible Friends, when brought to him by Epstein.79 Real People is saturated with the literary climate and blurs fiction with reality. James Baldwin, Robert Creeley, Robert Lowell, Norman Podhoretz, and Roth are mentioned by name. The protagonist, Janet Belle Smith, has an agent named Candida, a reference to Lurie’s real-life agent, Candida Donadio. Lurie meant the cameo as a farewell. Around that time, she and Donadio had separated so Lurie could sign with Donadio’s former assistant, Melanie Jackson.80 In the novel, Smith is thrilled to be away from the New York City scene, which she describes as “ugly, tense, dangerous; full of rubbish and noise; of cultural middlemen and hangers-on. I’ve never been to a New York party where the real artists weren’t outnumbered by reviewers, editors, publishers, collectors, dealers, and agents.”81 At first, Illyria, the idyllic colony to which Smith escapes, feels removed from the grubby politics of New York. But she, like the artists and writers she observes, brings with her the hierarchies of the cultural field. Lurie takes her epigraph from Charlotte Brontë: “I cannot, when I write, think always of myself and of what is elegant and charming in femininity; it is not on those terms, or with such ideas, I ever took pen in hand,” framing Real People with gendered demands on authorship. If she must be read in terms of femininity, insists Brontë, she will “pass away from the public, and trouble it no more.” Janet Belle Smith feels herself in an impossible position. Her husband, an insurance executive, “wants [her] to be a woman, but not a writer;” her closeted friend “wants [her] to be a writer, but not a woman.”82 Worst of all, her writing suffers. The conflict comes to a head when she realizes that she has compromised her aesthetic ideals to play the good housewife. She has censored herself for fear of embarrassing her husband and their friends in polite society. She has put what is elegant and charming in femininity above what is required of art. When Smith hears a man at Illyria talking about women as if she weren’t one, she says “we’re women,” to which he replies, “oh, you don’t count.” Being a woman writer in 1969—when your influential friend’s influential husband felt that “if a woman could write like a man, that was good enough”—was to inhabit a contradictory identity. Smith observes, “people don’t like the idea of a serious woman writer.”83 Serious means literary, like men. Lurie wrote Real People in close correspondence with Roth, who, in their exchanges, endorsed Lurie’s suppression of femininity and pressured her to

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abjure feminism. Roth once wrote to Lurie, sounding like the voice inside Janet Belle Smith’s head, to remind her of “all I have tried to say to you ever since we met about living more and more for your writing.”84 In a different letter, Roth gave Lurie the advice that Smith proved, ultimately, to need. “Pretend you’re never going to publish it—and come clean about yourself. If you like, I’ll hold it till you’re dead, or if that is risky, I’ll give it to Saul Bellow’s newest girl, who will surely outlive us all.”85 Smith, in the novel, struggles to take the advice Roth gives Lurie, to live for her writing, and to come clean about herself, which means writing honestly about Illyria: its egos, its backbiting, its affairs, including Smith’s own—its descent from heaven to an “existentialist hell.”86 To write honestly about Illyria is to invite one’s own exile; Lurie felt the same was true for herself and Yaddo and Real People. Roth wasn’t shy about telling Lurie to be a writer, not a woman. In late 1970, in response to an essay she had recently written for NYRB, he wrote, “I’m surprised to hear you—if I heard you right—announcing yourself as a feminist. I thought you were a writer like the rest of us.”87 Much earlier, in 1964, he took her choice of stamps as an opportunity to criticize her femininity. “I think it is too fucking feminine of you to stamp your letters with such stamps as th[i]s,” he wrote about a stamp she used, emblazoned with the word homemakers, “and herewith I am returning same,” having cut it out and sent it back to her. “As far as you are concerned,” he said, “the only five cent stamp for you is scotch-taped herewith.” It featured Shakespeare. In Roth’s provocation we see, five years before the publication of Real People, a staging of its struggle: to be a woman (homemakers) or a writer (Shakespeare). Based on Roth’s surprise at her presentation as a feminist in 1970, we can suppose that he read Real People as an attempt to resolve the crisis by joining the country of writers, even as she disdains New York City as the home of the publishing industry and its grubby climbing. Lurie was well positioned to disdain the New York literary scene and its “ugly, tense, dangerous” battles for status among reviewers and editors because, unlike most female novelists of the time (excepting Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag), by 1969, she was securely in it. She’d been placing essays in NYRB for six years. Each of her novels was drawing more attention and acclaim than the previous. She and Roth gossiped often about the Epsteins and their circle. In a letter from November  1966 titled “Day After Party,” Roth wrote, “You would have had a good time. Seen frugging together were Barbara Epstein and Lionel Trilling, Joe Fox and Linda Bird Johnson [sic], Mr.  and Mrs. Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote and Eunice Shriver, Mia Sinatra and [Bennett Cerf ’s son] Christopher Cerf, heir to writers such as Philip Roth, et al.” He

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added, “I danced with Beverly Mailer, in the midst of which Norman came up and drunkenly gave me some friendly advice: ‘Never trust a Gentile girl.’ Now he tells me.” But Roth saves the most important news for last. “Jason told me how much he liked your book. I had to ask him to get him to tell me that he liked mine. But I believe he does. He was disappointed that I had to hear it. I was actually going out of my head with impatience, my vanity is all.”88 Lurie enjoyed a privileged position but her power was mediated through men: Epstein, Fox, Roth, who, in this instance, while acting on Lurie’s behalf, extracted for himself Epstein’s approval of When She Was Good. Roth’s anxiety suggests that, even if Fox was his editor and would become Lurie’s, it was Epstein who held the most cultural capital, whose judgment mattered most. Roth would shatter his relationship with Fox by switching to Epstein as his editor for his next novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. The tension had been mounting and manifesting in their correspondence. Roth wrote, in response to Fox’s earlier misspelling of his name, “Philip with two l’s. Come on, baby.” Fox scribbled on the bottom of the letter, “As to the 2 l’s, I have a new secretary who didn’t know any better. I don’t read salutations, so I didn’t notice. This is childish! Why the fuck should I justify myself to you? Who needs this shit! Go screw yourself, baby!”89 When the break finally came, Fox wrote to Roth, “Despite our differences in the past, I considered you one of my closest friends, and if you had come in to see me on that Monday morning and said—sheepishly defensively, angrily, coolly, or whatever—that for various reasons, rational or not, you wanted to change editors, we could have survived the awkwardness and remained friends. But you couldn’t bring yourself to do that, and this indicates to me, rightly or wrongly, that our relationship meant far less to you than it did to me.”90 Janet Belle Smith likewise enjoys a privileged position, mediated by men. They say she can be a woman or a writer. The options for women in the novel—to be “a chick” who chases artists; or a society woman who upholds upper-middleclass mores—receive Smith’s disdain. Chicks turn into hens and are dropped. Society women are dull. But Smith, as a writer, is stuck. She realizes that she has grown comfortable as an executive’s wife. Her husband is willing to leave his position and live a more bohemian life, but she clings to her class. She has become the society women she disdains. What is more, her attachment to uppermiddle-class life has ruined her ability to write. “I censored myself gradually over the years—as the children learned to read, as Clark became more prominent locally, as my stories began to be published in magazines more people read.” A friend calls her out. “What you’re protecting, you see, is the idea of this charming, intelligent, sensitive lady writer who lives in a nice house in the country with her nice family.”91

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Smith resolves the dilemma by rebelling. She has an affair with a vulgar working-class white ethnic pop artist. He is newly famous: “attacked in the Times, bought up by important collectors.”92 Clement Greenberg hates him. He is anathema to established artists, including Smith’s best friend, a figurative painter whose work, like Smith’s, has grown tired. The pop artist forgoes civility for brutal authenticity. He shows her that having less money isn’t the worst thing—it’s much better than being a bad artist. So what if she loses her comfortable life? She gains art. Smith believes in art, in art’s rigor and honesty, its perseverance across time. Real People is the story of art’s vampiric renewal, slaked by the working class. It is a fable about the artist liberating herself from worrying what others will think by attaching herself to the avant-garde. It is a retelling of the tale of the romantic genius, of radical individuation, open to women so long as they disavow femininity. Janet Belle Smith’s liberation, was, by 1969, the image of conventionality. Even the institution could see that. One could date it back, at least, to Charlotte Brontë. Real People sustains conventional ideology: to be a great artist, one must iconoclastically disdain bourgeois mores in pursuit of a singular vision and rigorous authenticity—in this case, iconoclasm against femininity. Singularity, though, is a position achieved by socialization with artistic peers and by internalizing the demands of the industry; authenticity is a sheen, an act, is pasting the right stamps on one’s letters, having the right political stances. Lurie’s novel endorses the woman writer’s mediation by men so long as they’re the right men: young, brash, vulgar, ethnic, not unlike Philip Roth, only endowed by the novel with the artistic virtue of having less money. Real People’s advocacy for women to join male iconoclasm looks anodyne next to contemporaneous feminism, on display in Kate Millett’s indictment of the patriarchy in Sexual Politics. Real People offers little resistance to the page-turning reader. John Leonard, for The New York Times, wrote, it “goes down pleasantly, like a glass of lemonade.”93

ADLER

Renata Adler struggled far more to reconcile her gender with the form of the novel. She was well known in New York in the 1960s and 1970s as a writer of crisp, merciless prose in the New Yorker, and, for one year, as the movie critic at the Times—which didn’t stop Newsweek from running a review of her essay collection, Toward a Radical Middle, in 1970 that praised her in patronizing and

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gendered terms for her “becoming modesty” and for behaving “like any wellbrought up girl at her coming-out party.”94 Hype on the release of her first novel, Speedboat, in 1976, then, was considerable. Contemporary readers might be familiar with the novel in its current New York Review of Books edition, published in 2013 after the members of the National Book Critics Circle voted that it was the book most deserving of a return to print. Speedboat builds as a series of vignettes, character sketches, and overheard bits of dialogue narrated by the globe-trotting writer Jen Fain. Fain, as reviewers note, resembles Adler in her professional details and flat, observational affect. The novel resists plot because it resists the organization of experience, the assignment of pattern to phenomena. “The problem is this. Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in the literature.” There is an ethics of refusal to make sense or impose order. Sections often end with enigmatic cultural critique or mystifying non sequitur. There is an attraction to presence and specificity. A vignette that names a series of disasters and atrocities ends, “I don’t know what it means. I am in this brownstone.” The abdication of plot is countered by stunningly polished prose, which is organization, pattern, and order at the local level. Against chaos, Jen Fain exercises extraordinary control at the scale of syntax. But in the end she loses control, even of her body. “Anyway,” she writes, apropos of nothing, “I seem to be about to have Jim’s child.”95 The novel has no plot beside ending (it seems) with one overdetermined and symbolic thing that men cannot do. Speedboat was criticized for its paucity of emotions and Adler’s “valorization of style” without substance.96 Exceeding the iconoclasm that Lurie invited, Adler wrote like someone who refused to be managed by bending the novel into a new shape through her ethics of refusal and her unfazed gaze, which seduced and upset people. Her refusal extended to her male predecessors and their modernist manifestos. Here is a short section from Speedboat: “ ‘Take off everything except your slip,’ the nurse said. ‘Doctor will be with you in a moment.’ Nobody under forty-five, in twenty years, had worn a slip, but nurses invariably gave this instruction. There they are, however, the great dead men with their injunctions. Make it new. Only connect.”97 Make it new was Ezra Pound. Only connect was E. M. Forster. Fain’s apparent non sequitur—from slip to dead men, joined, typically, by the coercive force of “however”—suggests that what were once living manifestos have become anachronistic slogans, phrases from the past that have nothing to do with contemporary practice. Adler is telling us that she is writing outside the conventions of dead men, in a present for which we don’t yet have adequate language.

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Elizabeth Hardwick proved perceptive on Speedboat in a feature review in The New York Review of Books. (The issue also included an essay about fashion by Alison Lurie.) Randomness, she argued, defying the prevailing view, “itself is a carrier of disturbing emotions.”98 In Adler’s “precocious alertness to incongruity,” Hardwick recognized a sensitivity to contemporary life, “the way experience seizes and lets go.” Titling her piece “Sense of the Present,” Hardwick reckoned that Adler’s incongruous realism illustrated a pattern also visible in the work of prominent men, like that of Adler’s friend Donald Barthelme, as well as that of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. (Hardwick was implicitly engaging with Sontag’s advocacy for the new fiction; the first name Hardwick mentions is Nathalie Sarraute, a leading nouveau roman voice; she blurbed Sontag’s first novel and would later write the introduction to the Susan Sontag Reader and eventually eulogize her in the New York Review of Books.) Echoing her and Adler’s mutual friend Hannah Arendt, Hardwick noted the prevalence of banalities in the fiction of these writers and argued that, in 1976, “banalities are not meant as a narrowing of intention. The contrary. Banalities connect the author with the world around him. They connect the extreme and the whimsical with the common life, with America, with the decade, with the type. They serve, in a sense, as a form of history.”99 Into this banal world comes a baby. Hardwick aligned Fain’s pregnancy with a hysterectomy and the deaths of children in novels by Francine Prose, Joseph Heller, and John Updike. They all read to Hardwick like “a late resurgence of normality or morality,” a warning that “a distraction in the order of things will not go unpunished,” signs of a “lingering puritanism” in the American novel. In Speedboat’s case, Hardwick guesses that Fain is “perhaps worried that her autonomy is out of line” and so “chooses the impediments of nature to act as a brake on the rushing, restless ego.”100 Pregnancy as punishment for a free woman: Fain imagines fetuses as hostages, but, to Hardwick, the hostage is Fain, and she is struck with Stockholm Syndrome. Hardwick makes this suggestion almost as if childbearing were the right thing to do, as if the autonomous, egoistic woman does need a check in the form a pregnancy. Fain’s pregnancy is a riddle, but Hardwick’s answer says more about Hardwick than Fain or Adler. Near the end of Speedboat, Fain tells us that “there are only so many plots. There are insights, prose flights, rhythms, felicities. But only so many plots.”101 She conjectures the possibility of plots that could operate with the randomness of a shuffled deck of cards—something like the art of the aleatory then practiced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham—and the novel feels like it moves this way, but she falls back on a familiar destiny. Her pregnancy is a way to conscript herself into the plot of motherhood, to allow herself, however

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reluctantly, the potentiality of the future, a future she can pursue without, or despite the ignorance of, men.

HARDWICK

Hardwick had a motive to trumpet Speedboat as exemplary of the best contemporary novels: she was writing the strikingly similar Sleepless Nights, published three years later, in 1979. (Hardwick was on the prize committee that awarded Speedboat PEN’s Ernest Hemingway Prize, along with fellow Random House author E. L. Doctorow and Susan Sontag.)102 From 1965 to 1980, Sleepless Nights outperformed all other novels by women in the United States in terms of review coverage. Hardwick was, in the late 1970s, an elder stateswoman of the New York City literary establishment, at least as feared for the force of her criticism, delivered regularly in NYRB (which she helped found), as Adler. Her withering, landmark 1959 essay on the state of American book reviewing prepared the way for NYRB in the first place: “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene: a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory.”103 Joan Didion described her as “the only writer I have ever read whose perception of what it means to be a woman and a writer seems in every way authentic, revelatory, entirely original and yet acutely recognizable.”104 Hilton Als wrote a laudatory profile of her in the New Yorker in 1999. More recently, Merve Emre and Tobi Haslett have celebrated her in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and Harper’s, and Darryl Pinckney in his memoir of their friendship, Come Back in September. Yet Jason Epstein, her neighbor and friend, remembered Hardwick to a literary biographer less for her words than for her looks, calling her “the prettiest and sexiest and the easiest to have a love affair with” among those of the Partisan Review crowd. “She was a cute little kid. Very feminine. There was a Betty Boop quality to her—in those days women could still be feminine in that way.”105 Hardwick’s relationship to feminism changed over time. In 1953, she wrote a critical review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in which she insisted that men are naturally superior to women in terms of physical strength and life experience, putting women writers at a “catastrophic” disadvantage.106 Twenty-one years later, though, she published Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, a collection of essays whose dedicated attention to Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Carlyle testified to

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Hardwick’s change of heart. It was published by Random House. Jason Epstein undercut it in an interview with Publishers Weekly, saying that, though it had been “very successful in trade for such a very austere book,” it was “not selling as  literary criticism.” On the contrary, he said, “its subject—women—is what makes it sell.”107 In Seduction and Betrayal, Hardwick wonders, regarding Woolf and Nathalie Sarraute, whether “there is something feminist” in “testing and confronting the very structure of the novel itself.”108 Hardwick asks, did the conventions of the form entrap women in a man’s world? Regardless of gender, Hardwick, repeating points that Mary McCarthy and Philip Roth had made,109 wrote in 1969 that “it is difficult for fiction to compete with the aesthetic satisfactions of the actual.” She called for “serious writers [to] discard not only the skin but the bone of fiction.”110 Sleepless Nights was the consummation of her efforts to put this theory to practice, an enigmatic work of autofiction refracted through a self-consciously gendered mind. Whereas Real People and Speedboat toy with autofiction, play at its edges, Sleepless Nights is a fully realized example. Like Speedboat, it was republished in a sleek New York Review of Books edition with an introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien. O’Brien writes, “it was a novel without a plot, with a protagonist who shared the name of its author, and whose successive circumstances followed the known contours of Elizabeth Hardwick’s life.” He continues, it was “a novel that seemed to declare the impossibility of separating itself from life, yet admittedly one ‘seeming to be true when all of it is not.’ ”111 The narrator, Elizabeth, is barely a protagonist. She disappears behind the screen of her memories, which unfold as partial portraits of unfortunate men and disappointed women. Two women recently divorced came up to me with inquisitorial and serious frowns. Are you lonely? they asked. Not always. That’s marvelous, the first one said, smiling. The second said, gravely: Terrific.

Moments in the novel feel like a muted reckoning with the compromises entailed in being a woman in those years, a belated offering of context for her dismissal of The Second Sex. “I have always, all my life, been looking for help from a man. It has come many times and many more it has not.” Later, Elizabeth writes skeptically about a woman who had made it as a painter. “Simone was often spoken of as the most independent woman in Amsterdam. She was also the only female painter anyone talked about and it was from her long, nervous struggle to establish herself that the independence had arrived. If indeed it had.”112 It is, as Emre

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writes, “a novel of the unwived, seeking and receiving acknowledgment, assistance, and a sense of dignity.”113 Quietly, Hardwick presses on feminist pieties to show how the accomplishments of artistic women come at a profound, bodily cost. The most memorable passages from the novel depict Billie Holiday in her last, desperate days. Hardwick knew the costs from experience. She spent more than twenty years married to the revered confessional poet Robert Lowell, who was mentally ill and would, especially during manic episodes, have wild affairs with younger women. Hardwick was among the best literary critics in the United States for decades, but was dismissed by influential men. In Sleepless Nights, she sought a fictional form adequate to women’s experience under patriarchy. Early in the novel, she asks her reader to think about the relationship between gender and form, reflecting on her own narrative: “it certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, whitebearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all, ‘I’ am a woman.”114 The demands of verisimilitude limited the plots available to women. There are no women on the Pequod. The demands of the male-dominated publishing industry imposed further constraints in terms of genre and the sexism you faced if defying convention. Women were welcome to write children’s books or romance novels. But you risked condescension, dismissal, and desexing if you tried to write literary fiction. Philip Roth would police your femininity and your gender politics. At Random House, Jason Epstein would expect you to write like a man and Joe Fox might accuse you of becoming uppity. Autofiction allowed Lurie, Adler, and Hardwick to stage the challenges they faced as women in publishing, to grapple with impossible demands, social isolation, physical hardship, and formal limitations—all while claiming the prestige that came with modernist portraits of the artist: what Hardwick named in the opening lines of Sleepless Nights as “this work of transformed and even distorted memory.”115 The work served as veiled testimony when other outlets for such were foreclosed, forbidden, without forgoing the protocols of high art, and, in fact—especially in Speedboat and Sleepless Nights—advancing them. These women built a bridge from Stein and Woolf to and Kathy Acker, who carried the torch for masochistic autofiction at Grove in the 1980s,116 influencing Chris Kraus who wrote autofiction and also published it as an editor of the Native Agents series at Semiotext(e), where her list included Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (1990), Ann Rower’s If You’re a Girl (1990), Lynne Tillman’s The Madame Realism Complex (1992), and Barbara Barg’s The Origin of Species (1994). The line then runs through their more recent descendants, including Eula Biss, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson,

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Jenny Offill, and Kate Zambreno.117 Publishers were, in these decades, going public; women writers were too, in their own way. Paradoxically, Lurie, Adler, and Hardwick were sheltered from conglomeration by the same men whose prejudices they had to negotiate and whose tastes they had to satisfy. Inside Random House, Joe Fox fought for years, across the 1960s and 1970s, to preserve the autonomy of editorial over against marketing, publicity, and sales by trying to have a say about who could attend editorial meetings and what their role could be.118 He wrote a furious memo to the marketing department in 1969, protesting the “gimmickry and bad taste” of its advertisements for Lurie’s Real People. In the same memo, he complained that the sales department had tried to insert editorial commentary into its assessment and plans for Adler’s essay collection Toward a Radical Middle. He cushioned Lurie and Adler from marketing and sales even as he presented himself as protecting these two “nervous, neurotic ladies who watch the papers like a hawk and have a strong sense of their literary position.” The staffer from marketing, for his part, argued that these “nervous, neurotic ladies” would probably want him to do what good editing had previously been unable to do: “to break these books out to reach an audience of larger than 2[000] or 3000 people.”119 Fox could maintain some editorial power within the house because his boss, Bob Bernstein, was warding off the attention of RCA. But such safety wouldn’t last much longer. The conglomeration of publishing, intensifying in the late 1970s, was eroding editorial, and thus authorial, autonomy. This would change the stakes of autofiction. In subsequent decades, houses increasingly conscripted authors into tasks of marketing, pressuring them to act like entrepreneurs.120 Lee Konstantinou argues that autofiction in the twenty-first century has internalized marketing “into literary form” and collapsed “self-promotion” into “the author function,” which explains why so many current works of autofiction are “obsessed with the process of publishing and the mechanics of the writer’s life. It’s not just that they’re writing what they know. It’s that managing their career is central to the content of their being as writers.” Thus the genre remains highly gendered: contrast Sheila Heti’s novelas-failed-feminist play How Should a Person Be? and her inquiries into motherhood and art in Motherhood with Ben Lerner’s trilogy depicting himself (or his avatar Adam) as a troubled artist. Whereas Heti is preoccupied with women’s things, Lerner occupies the general condition of artist—even as he presents himself as a beta intellectual making space for domesticity.121 Conglomeration and its attendant changes exacerbated the erosion of authorial autonomy with the introduction of new figures into the publication process: chain bookbuyers, literary agents, publicists. Success came to depend less on

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simply knowing the right people, hanging out, say, in Sag Harbor, and more on one’s capacity to accommodate in one’s work the demands of the system. Among other consequences, conglomeration entailed the “remodeling of the author as a content creator” whose intellectual property might be monetized across media.122 Autofiction, as Christian Lorentzen points out “restores at least the illusion of autonomy in the hands of an authorial alter ego.”123 What’s the status of Lorentzen’s “at least?” Does autofiction restore the illusion or autonomy itself? Critics are split. Some see autofiction as an earnest grasp toward reality; others contend that the genre demystifies that illusion by placing its construction through words on display.124 The truth is that it’s both at once. In the mature conglomerate era, autofiction became a yelp against the oceanic pull of distributed agency, an attempt to produce and defend the authority of the author whose name is on the book’s cover even while the attempt acknowledges and provides evidence of the opposite.

SECOND WAVES

Life felt easy at Random House in the 1960s and early 1970s. But that was about to change. “This is a very complicated time for all of us,” Jason Epstein told Publishers Weekly in late 1974. We’re affected by all the problems that affect everyone else, tight money, high costs, high prices.” His colleague Anne Freedgood added, “we cannot continue to keep in print a book that’s selling only a few thousand a year the way we used to.”125 The tightening budget came along with RCA’s gradual imposition of management culture and its request for five-year plans. RCA didn’t find it funny when Bob Bernstein said, “In publishing, no five-year plan ever beats straight muddling through.”126 Epstein complained that “by the mid-1970s, Random House had become a big business and felt like one.” Gone were the days of Dr. Seuss reading storyboards and Ralph Ellison explaining Thelonious Monk in the Villard Mansion, having given way to an “increasingly formal atmosphere.”127 What Joe Fox had feared in 1967—that Random House’s reputation would suffer as a commercial house—was finally coming to pass. Gore Vidal gave voice to the new dispensation in a lengthy review essay in the New York Review of Books in 1976, a few months before Hardwick’s “Sense of the Present.” Like Hardwick, Vidal addressed the new fiction—Barthelme, Barth, Gass, Paley, Pynchon—but unlike her, he hated it. He blamed the nouveau roman, appropriated in the United States under Sontag’s bad influence.128

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This work was arid, lifeless, written to be studied. He advocated writing for what he called the “Public”: big social novels with well-drawn characters and compelling plots, what Hardwick would diagnose as usefully absent in the new fiction.129 Vidal argued that the art of the novel did not progress; it was not the new that should be celebrated, but the old. Vidal, by this point, was a marquee Random House writer. Burr hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list in 1973 and 1974 and 1876 hit number one in 1976. While the latter was atop the charts, Vidal and Epstein, close friends, took one of their several gastronomic vacations across Europe;130 Morton Janklow, then an up-and-coming literary agent, arranged for them the personal attention of a famous French chef.131 Random House’s other stars, who wrote its lead titles and captured the attention of its marketers, publicists, and sales staff, were, in these years, Doctorow, Lurie, Matthiessen, Michener, and Styron, writers more closely aligned with Vidal’s old than Sontag’s new. Lurie, Michener, and Vidal, especially, could be aligned with middlebrow commercialism. It was increasingly easy for FSG to stake its claim to being the more sophisticated house—in part because it was independent. The entire chain of events was set in motion by Epstein himself, who, in 1961, rejected Sontag’s first novel and told her that “Giroux at FSG was the only editor in New York who would understand” it.132 Adler and Hardwick now look like outliers, which they were. Their novels were aligned with the aesthetics of FSG, not Random House, despite where they were published. We see this in Sontag’s role as a judge in awarding Speedboat the PEN/Hemingway prize and in Hardwick’s association with Sontag.133 That they were published by Random House shaped their aesthetics of rebellion. Didion with Play It as It Lays, Paley with Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Sontag with Death Kit were writing within a hospitable publishing environment, enabling them to inhabit the Sontagian new fiction without necessarily inscribing their work with the kinds of statements of independence that motivated Speedboat and Sleepless Nights. In 1976, Epstein became editorial director of Random House’s trade division.134 That same year, Ed Griffiths took over as president of RCA. Griffiths had begun as a bill collector and made his way up as an accountant. His nickname, according to Bernstein, was “Bottom Line Ed.”135 He pushed Bernstein, more than anyone had before, for quarterly earnings growth. The same was true across the industry. The late 1970s brought a second wave of conglomeration. The first wave, a decade earlier, had let the industry remain more or less as it was. The second pushed much harder for rationalization, “including electronic

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inventory controls, computerized marketing departments, sharply defined lines of authority and assignments of special tasks, and, above all, close attention to the ‘bottom line.’ ”136 The 1970s was the decade of the chain bookstore. It was the decade of the literary agent. It was the decade of book promotion. It was the decade of the book packager, the blockbuster auction, the brand-name author, the purported death of the midlist. It was the decade of subsidiary rights.137 It was no longer a simple thing, as it was in 1960s, to get a title in the right bookstores with the right reviews, to sell six or seven thousand copies, and stay in the black. It was an utterly changed game. Jason Epstein hated it. He preferred it when agents “were mere peripheral necessities, like dentists.”138 Bob Bernstein began to find it difficult “to do what Bennett and Donald had done so brilliantly, which was to make authors a part of their social life.” This meant it mattered less for an author who wanted to be published well to be linked to the Epsteins and their world. It also meant that a house’s list less and less “reflected their owners’ individual interests” and, more and more, was dictated by market demands.139 The making of a book was less and less the work of a relatively autonomous author-editor duo—making whatever calculations, conscious or unconscious, about how to adapt their proclivities to given possibilities in terms of audience, genre, style—and more and more the work of many hands. “In the conglomerateowned trade house,” wrote a team of sociologists in 1982, “an editor feels like a cog in a large system which begins with agent prescreening, market evaluations, financial considerations, sub-rights negotiations, media tie-ins, and other such matters.”140 Conglomerate ownership, conglomerate authorship. A host of new figures—the chain bookbuyer, the agent, the publicist— eroded the editor’s power. The scale of B. Dalton and Waldenbooks with their hundreds of locations in suburban shopping malls made it easier to manufacture bestsellers, giving power to the chain bookbuyer. Agents could demand more, knowing the scale at which big books would newly sell; they became much more aggressive in defense of authors’ rights and in pursuit of large advances. Publishers could count on Tom Clancy, Stephen King, or Danielle Steel, paid huge advances, to win back enough profits to satisfy CEOs concerned about the bottom line. The buying power of the chains, the infusions of capital from conglomerates, the high-powered auctions made book business, in the words of Owen Laster, agent to James Michener and Gore Vidal, “suddenly glamorous.”141 Glamour favored the marketer, the promoter, the publicist. Glamour favored Jane Friedman.

4 Trade (II) How Literary Writers Embraced Genre

J

ane Friedman was a Long Island girl with a Gatsby twinkle in her eye. She grew up in Hewlett, a suburb of Queens, under the jets taking off and landing at neighboring JFK. Her father was a graphic artist. Her mother had been one of the first of New York City’s Miss Subways. Instead of spending her teenage summers at camp like her peers, she took jobs in Manhattan.1 She studied English at NYU. She graduated in 1967 and found work as a typist at Random House. She wore her hair long and Bennett Cerf would walk past and pull her ponytail.2

PUBLICIT Y POWER

But she was born to be a publicist and was her own best client. Every story about her begins with her readiness to remind her interlocutor, “I am actually credited with inventing the author tour”—though she did most of the crediting.3 The claim is not quite true. Author tours were rare until the late 1960s. In 1966, Esther Margolis, publicity director at Bantam, organized a tour for Shirley Shoonover to promote her novel Mountain of Winter, then continued the practice.4 Several more happened in 1967 and 1968, gathering force in 1969, when at least seventeen titles were listed in Publishers Weekly as entailing author tours. In 1970, Friedman, who had been promoted to publicist, was assigned to Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume  2. Child had a popular cooking show on PBS. Friedman thought Child should do demonstrations on the road. She booked appearances on “public-television stations in the major

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markets.” She booked appearances at department stores. In Minneapolis, a thousand women lined up outside Dayton’s. “It was a Cecil B. DeMille moment,” said Friedman. “We had parted the Red Sea. Julia made mayonnaise in a blender. We sold 500 books.”5 Friedman thrived in the razzle-dazzle of the 1970s. Si Newhouse bought Random House from RCA in 1980. He was prowling for a publishing empire. He already owned twenty-nine newspapers, Condé Nast magazines, and several radio and cable TV stations. The announcement of the sale abutted, on the same page of Publishers Weekly, a story titled “500 Attend Skirmish over Concentration in Book Industry.” It was supposed to be the night before a U.S. Senate hearing about whether to take action against conglomeration in publishing, though the hearing was postponed. Richard Snyder of Simon & Schuster, owned by Gulf + Western, was the only one to make it out of the skirmish “unruffled”—he’d adequately performed “his role as the big, bad, highly successful commercial publisher.”6 At first, Newhouse’s private ownership seemed, to Bernstein, a reprieve from RCA’s demands as Newhouse stood back and “devoted himself to learning about how book publishing worked.” Ominously, though, the infamous Republican fixer Roy Cohn appeared at a “lavish dinner party” Newhouse’s mother threw to celebrate the Random House acquisition.7 Newhouse and Cohn were old friends from prep school (which might help explain Newhouse’s pursuit of Cohn’s protégé, Donald Trump, for a feature in GQ in 1985 before snagging the businessman’s future bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, published by Random House in 1987). Bernstein managed to hold on for nearly a decade until Newhouse fired him in October of 1989, replacing him with the hard-nosed businessman, Alberto Vitale. Only a few months later, Vitale fired André Schiffrin and a crowd gathered to protest outside Random House. Friedman joined Jason Epstein in signing a letter that came to Vitale’s defense. The Newhouse regime was good for Friedman. She rose from associate publisher to senior vice president of publishing and publisher of Vintage—Random House’s trade paperback imprint—before becoming executive vice president in 1992. In each position, she strove to innovate, hoping to recapture the magic of Child in Minneapolis. In 1985, she tried to capitalize on the new ubiquity of video with The Way to Cook by Julia Child, an original series,8 and a videobook version of The Velveteen Rabbit, narrated by Meryl Streep.9 She had more success with Random House AudioBooks, which she launched the same year and for which she held the title of publisher. Her anticipation of the enormous market for audiobooks became a prominent feather in her cap, which she would brandish alongside her claim to having invented the author tour.

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Friedman’s trajectory exemplifies how publicity became a center of power in publishing. Until the 1970s, publicists at many houses “were looked on as social secretaries,” said Doubleday’s publicity director, Marly Rusoff, in 1990. “We would arrange small gatherings on publication dates and make sure the author’s friends were invited.”10 When Esther Margolis arrived at Bantam in 1962, its entire promotion department employed five people. By the time she left in 1980 “as senior vice president in charge of promotion, publicity, advertising and public relations, there were five departments, 35 people and a $3.5 million budget” ($12.5 million in 2022 dollars). The New York Times reported in 1983 that “publicity departments are no longer regarded as mere adjuncts of the book industry but as central to its function.”11 A big part of that function was coordinating the book tours created by Friedman and Margolis, which had become de rigueur. The expansion of wholesalers like Ingram, discussed in chapter 1, made the routinization of tours possible; without wholesalers, it was often difficult for booksellers to replenish stock in coordination with touring authors, which led to abrupt cancellations. The flexibility provided by wholesalers mooted the problem. Soon tours had become so popular that they had led to “author gridlock.”12 Too many authors were competing with each other, and too many lacked the media training to make it worth their publisher’s while. By 1998, Publishers Weekly declared that “the heyday of literary author tours is clearly over.”13 Publicity, nevertheless, continued to grow in influence, and with it the power of women. At first, according to Margolis, “women were allowed to take over publicity because the male management did not consider publicity very important.” By the 1980s, the typical “publicity gal” had become “a corporate officer” with “a very major role in the publishing company.”14 Women such as Jane Friedman and Esther Margolis became vice presidents who determined print runs and often had veto power over major acquisitions, continuing to climb from there to executive positions at the top—for Friedman and Margolis— of HarperCollins and Newmarket, respectively.15

THE AUTHORIAL GAME

To write a novel in the United States in 1985 was a completely different experience than it had been twenty years earlier, before conglomerates swept through the industry. Then, your odds amounted to how easily you could get your book in the right editor’s hands. It helped a lot to have the right friends. Now you faced a gauntlet. Could marketers see a market? What would the chain

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bookbuyers think? Could publicists picture your face on TV, your voice on the radio? Could agents sniff subsidiary rights? Would foreign rights sell at the Frankfurt Book Fair? Might your story be remediated? Would it work in audio? On the big screen? I do not mean that authors kept these questions in mind when writing, or even that they knew to answer them in the first place. Nor did each question exert force on each book that came up for acquisition. Rather, I mean to dramatize the dispersal of power out of the hands of the author and the editor and into a great many hands. The exact formula to determine who held sway differed at each house and with each book. Success depended on recognition by something like a system, so much so that fiction itself, when published by conglomerates,  came to display, seen as a whole, a systematic intelligence, a systematic authorship. To what end? Certainly, some things stayed the same. Knopf ’s relationship with the New Yorker continued to produce huge success for writers who included Ann Beattie, John Cheever, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. It didn’t hurt that Newhouse bought the New Yorker in 1985. For these writers, the New Yorker served as a guarantor, a stamp of legitimacy that allowed them more or less free passage through the system’s gates, and thus provided them a degree of aesthetic freedom from its consequences. Among the consequences, three stand out: autofiction became the performance of the reclamation of authorship against distributed agency; the distance between genre and literary fiction narrowed; and novels began to incorporate conglomeration. Sometimes conglomerate language found its way into fiction; sometimes novels allegorized conglomeration; and sometimes, in the most obvious cases, novels became about conglomeration explicitly. I address these consequences at length in the remainder of this book. For now, take the example of Stephen King.

STEPHEN KING

King was a genre writer from the start, initiating a boom for horror with Carrie, his debut, in 1974. William Thompson, an editor at Doubleday, acquired the title after rejecting two of King’s earlier efforts. Thompson led an especially itinerant career, rarely staying at a house for more than a few years, moving from Doubleday to Everest House and onward to Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Putnam, Arbor House, Prentice Hall, Wynwood Press—where he acquired

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John Grisham’s first novel for $15,000—then Delphinium. King was living in a trailer with his wife and children, working first at a laundry then as a high school teacher on a modest salary. Thompson encouraged him, telling him to keep writing and inviting him to call him collect anytime.16 He signed Carrie for a $2,500 advance, then sold the paperback rights to NAL for $400,000 ($2.5 million in 2022 dollars). When King heard the NAL news, his knees went out. That night he told his wife, who looked at their “shitty little” apartment and “began to cry.”17 The timing was perfect for the industry’s expansion in distribution and promotion. He became a marquee brand. Attempts to endow King with cultural capital have created scandal, as when, in 2003, the National Book Foundation recognized him for his distinguished contribution to American letters, leading Harold Bloom to criticize the decision, calling King “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-bybook basis.”18 King’s participation in the new regime of the big brand novel worried him. On the one hand, he had to think about brand management. Could his brand sustain two books a year, or would the high volume weaken it? On the other, it raised an aesthetic question. Did his incredibly successful brand ensure that his books would be bestsellers regardless of their quality? These questions moved him to publish a series of books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. They sold poorly. The first four were out of print when King was outed in 1985, sending the fifth, Thinner, onto the bestseller list, proving to King, depressingly, his  dependence on his brand. In the second half of the 1980s, several of King’s novels—It (1986), The Tommyknockers (1987), Misery (1987), The Dark Half (1989)—featured brand-name authors as characters. Angela Allan writes, “Constantly reminded that they are not writers of serious literature, King’s popular novelists approach their fiction with casual irreverence.”19 King’s anxiety over the growing divide between serious and popular, for which his oeuvre was partially responsible, and by which he felt trapped, found its purest form in Misery. Bestselling romance novelist Paul Sheldon has completed his series about Misery Chastain, killing her. He is preparing to rebrand as a serious writer with his next novel, Fast Cars, when he gets in an accident from which he is rescued by Annie Wilkes, an obsessive fan. Wilkes keeps him in her guest bedroom. She demands that he write another Misery novel for her alone. As Allan argues, “Annie ironically provides Paul with the opportunity to consider what it means to write fiction outside of the market.” Sheldon has a stark view of writing in the market. He wants to be seen as a John Cheever, a Norman Mailer—peak

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prestige. His captivity forces him to reconsider. He comes to see both his romances and his literary fiction not through the eyes of the field, not as aligned on opposite ends as popular or prestigious, but, from his perspective as an author, as work, labor.20 If Misery demystifies authorship, forgoing the aura of the romantic genius for the quotidian reality of work, then King’s Dark Tower series challenges the idea of the individual author itself. It is a quest narrative, a loose novelization of Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Roland Deschain must find the Dark Tower. Across the first few novels, Roland gathers his companions who form a company or, in the series’ Tolkienesque language, a ka-tet. They come to learn that they are characters created by Stephen King who they must protect from the evil Crimson King if they want to complete their quest. The Crimson King is affiliated with a massive conglomerate whose goal “to be everywhere, own everything, and basically control the universe.”21 Roland’s ka-tet, in response, forms the Tet Corporation to ensure that King finishes the series. The series becomes a contest between a tyrannical conglomerate and a corporation oriented toward the greater good. The Tet Corporation is aligned with genre fiction. Its headquarters in the series is the same building in New York that in real life houses Dell Press, publisher of several genre writers who inspired King.22 The ka-tet saves King, who saves Roland, who arrives at the Dark Tower and defeats the Crimson King. Allan interprets The Dark Tower as allowing King to reimagine his work as an author: rather than a brand producing financial capital for his conglomerate publisher, he can see himself “as a member of a larger, communal organization that produces something other than the empty brand”; he can define himself “in relationship not only to his own novels, but also within a longer lineage of literary production”; he can believe himself “entrusted with a larger institutional project.” I want to push Allan’s insights further. Something more radical is at work in the series. Allan notes that the Tet Corporation makes literal King’s “indebtedness to other writers and filmmakers, and even to his own work.”23 Indeed, King is understood as a member of the ka-tet and his work is subsumed by the collective labor of the Tet Corporation. King is recognizing how many people contribute to any work of literature. Even as his name remains on the cover, a necessary brand, he goes beyond his rejection of the romantic author in Misery to reject individual authorship itself. He romanticizes collective authorship by associating it with the postwar corporation set against an evil conglomerate, illustrating the conglomerate authorship of the conglomerate era. He enacted his resistance to conglomeration by publishing the series with an independent fantasy and science fiction publisher, Donald Grant.

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King grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when the United States was enjoying one of the greatest periods in the history of capitalism, and the large corporation was the organizing structure at its heart. 3M, General Motors, U.S. Steel: they provided good, stable jobs and encouraged a filial sensibility. People spent their lives working for one company. When the postwar boom transitioned into the long downturn in the 1970s, management practices transitioned, too, from loyalty and stability toward flexibility under the aegis of shareholder value. Conglomerates swallowed corporations. King’s oeuvre from the 1970s through the final volume of The Dark Tower in 2004 expresses, in part, a nostalgia for the fair economic winds and paternalistic corporatism of the postwar boom, when, in his fantasy, a writer was not eclipsed by his brand but instead was a worker among workers, with a certain solidarity. Of course, such nostalgia was less useful for—because the boom years were less hospitable to—white women and people of color.

CONGLOMERATE WOMEN

By one measure, the share of fiction by women authors increased over the last third of the century from 25 percent in 1970 to 40 percent by 2000, reversing a hundred-year decline.24 What accounts for the rise? It might seem like an easy question. Around 1970, second-wave feminism began to take hold. It seems reasonable to imagine that the publishing industry became—in parallel to the decentralization of the (usually) male editor—more hospitable toward women. Most of that increase in female authorship, though, at least among mostreviewed titles, was reserved for the growing field of children’s and young adult fiction. It was as difficult for a woman to have a work among the most-reviewed fiction in 2000 as it was in 1970.25 Against this bias, women organized. In 1976, in Omaha, feminists involved in publishing “began to forge a movement.”26 The leaders were proprietors of feminist bookstores. Their enemies were chain bookstores and conglomerate publishing—which they dubbed “the Literary Industrial Corporate Establishment,” or LICE—whose “illegal and damaging practices” they set out to expose.27 These bookstore owners recognized the industry’s sexism, enacted when, for example, in 1977, “Random House refused to distribute the fall list of Berkeley-based Moon Books because,” a representative for RH allegedly said, “ ‘the market for women’s books is over.’ ”

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Feminists learned about the publishing industry to subvert its operations on behalf of women. After Omaha, feminists founded a newsletter—Feminist Bookstore News (FBN)—that would connect more than one hundred feminist bookstores and leverage their power against LICE. Its editor, Carol Seajay, “was regularly in conversation with a range of well-placed feminist informants from the ‘straight press.’ ” In this way, feminists learned that, for LICE, a title’s fate depended on how much prepublication interest it piqued from retail accounts, review editors at Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Times, and in terms of subsidiary rights. Next, a title faced the obstacle of its immediate reception: how it was reviewed and how many copies it sold in the first months. Chain bookstores exerted some control over sales by indicating to publishers how many copies they expected to buy. To feminists in publishing, the symbiotic relationship between publishers and the chains—that is, LICE—suppressed feminist literature and writing by women. They used FBN to develop tactics to sustain “the feminist print ecosystem.” They would bargain directly with publishers, coordinate campaigns to order specific titles in concert, and support small presses. This is how they kept key feminist texts in print, or brought them back, including Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, and, several years after its initial publication, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Kristen Hogan argues that “feminist bookwomen proved (and proved again) to an interminably skeptical mainstream press that readers were looking for” these kinds of books.28 That feminists had to work so hard to maintain the limited presence of women in the literary field throughout the 1980s and 1990s suggests the force with which sexism was embedded in the entire circuit of the field: publishers, chain booksellers, the U.S. public. The expansion of the market for children’s and young adult fiction gave women more opportunities to publish. Opportunities to write literary fiction for adults were constrained, however. Editors lost power, some of which was gained by women publicists, but the system was no less sexist. In the Random House archives at Columbia, I noticed that memos often had two sets of initials at the bottom: the editor, who was usually a man, and the typist, who was usually a woman. I reached out to several women whose initials recurred and received a reply from Beverly Haviland, who worked as Jason Epstein’s assistant from 1982 to 1984 and who agreed to speak with me. She landed at Random House after finishing her PhD in comparative literature at Princeton, where she wrote a dissertation on Henry James and Honoré de Balzac. Her partner was working on Wall Street, so she couldn’t leave New York for

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an academic job. She had a couple loose connections to Epstein that gave her an in. I had found her through the letters she’d typed, but she had “deliberately never become a good typist,” because, she figured, “that way I won’t be made a secretary.” Instead, she copyedited, wrote flap copy, and greased the wheels to make sure Epstein’s books were moving along smoothly.29 Epstein also outsourced the ego management of authors to Haviland, when possible. “It was definitely a male-dominated space,” she said. Epstein had “a number of people in the office who were his paramours at various times.” Joe Fox and Bob Loomis were still there. Haviland’s office friend, Carol Bemis, told me an anecdote about Joe Fox smoking in the elevator during those years, and how when a woman asked him to stop, he told her to get off. Fox and Loomis worked alongside younger men with big futures and bigger egos: Gary Fisketjon, Jonathan Galassi, John Glusman, Errol McDonald. Toni Morrison only came to the office once per week by then. She was publishing important literary fiction by her friend Mary Gordon. Charlotte Mayerson “kept her distance, especially from anybody associated with Jason,” said Haviland, adding that Mayerson, it seemed, “didn’t trust people, probably for good reason.” That left Anne Freedgood, who “was much more of a mentor” to Haviland than Epstein was, showing her how the business worked, also inviting her to her home in Bridgehampton and taking her to George Balanchine’s final ballets, performed by Suzanne Farrell. Haviland had the sense that Freedgood and Epstein “had been very good friends, up to a certain point, and then something happened, and she felt pushed aside, and could no longer take for granted that Jason would accept her judgment.”30 Continued hostility to women in publishing was powerfully expressed by a spate of literary genre fiction out of Random House in the 1980s and 1990s.

TONI MORRISON

Commercial book publishing was (and is) unbearably white. In 1971, when Toni Morrison became a trade editor, about 95 percent of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors. By 2018, that number dropped only to 89 percent.31 One of the only other black women working as an editor, Marie Brown, started the same year at Doubleday.32 Black women faced bias along axes of race and gender, making Morrison’s extraordinary accomplishments all the more astonishing. She began her career in publishing as a textbook editor for L. W. Singer in Syracuse, a Random House subsidiary. On a visit a

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couple years later, Bob Bernstein—observing that “African Americans were not just underrepresented in the business; they were practically nonexistent”— promoted Morrison first to the scholastic division then to trade editor for Random House at the New York City headquarters.33 She pointedly acquired black writers for what was an extremely white list. “I wasn’t marching,” she told Hilton Als. “I didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join anything. But I could make sure there was a published record of those who did march and did put themselves on the line.”34 She was unsentimental and unsparing. For an internal report on a manuscript from Black Panther Huey Newton, she recommended that Random House “delete some of the truly weak essays, edit all” and argued that “the Panthers and their prose should be given the benefit of editing and thus be shown in their best light.”35 Along with Newton, she published nonfiction by Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis; in terms of fiction and poetry, she published Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Leon Forrest, June Jordan, and Gayl Jones. She managed to make a little headway against the whiteness of the house’s list.36 Her situation as a black woman at a very white press, though, was fraught. It was fraught within the house, where she had to contest entrenched white supremacy. It was also fraught outside the house, where her black peers might see her as a sellout. Some did. Morrison published poetry and fiction by Henry Dumas, a black writer who had been murdered by the police in 1968. His poems had circulated in the black press, including Black World, before Morrison published his collection Play Ebony, Play Ivory.37 Her edition didn’t acknowledge the prior publications. Editors at Black World were displeased. The executive editor wrote to Morrison to say that he was “more than a little offended.” A week later, Morrison received a letter from her friend Carole Parks, a Black World editor. She wrote, “it’s not just that you have given people absolutely no inkling that a Black publication gave Dumas his first national exposure. It’s that you have at the same time added to the myth that Black genius would languish unappreciated were it not for some white liberal or far-sighted individual like yourself.” Parks accused Morrison of being interested in herself and her “already prestigious career.” Morrison responded that she had been deeply hurt. She asked, “Perhaps I should leave white publishers to their own devices?”38 She said she would miss her friendship with Parks. In the meantime, Morrison became a star novelist. She published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, with Holt, Rinehart in 1970. When Robert Gottlieb, Knopf editor, learned that the author of The Bluest Eye worked in the same building, he brought her in house and became her editor for the rest of her life. She dedicated her late masterpiece, A Mercy (2008), to him. She published her second novel, Sula, in 1973, writing to her friend James Baldwin for a blurb,

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which he gave. “I love the quote just as you wrote it,” she replied. “Perfect and unad-copyish.” In the same letter, she lamented that she couldn’t be the one to publish his latest novel, If Beale Street Could Talk. “It is so beautiful that I wanted to cover it, touch it, promote it, be knowledgeable about it—you know become an If Beale Street Could Talk groupie.”39 After publishing her third novel, Song of Solomon, in 1977, she felt she needed more time to focus on her writing. She began coming into the office one day per week and doing the rest of her work from home. In her last years as an editor, Morrison helped lead the chorus of those calling to take up arms against conglomeration. In 1981, Morrison delivered the keynote address at the American Writers Congress to an overflow crowd of three thousand. Writers today, she said, “are held in contempt—to be played with when our masters are pleased, to be dismissed when they are not.” She argued that the pomp of the 1970s, the big auctions and the author tours, masked the damage conglomeration had done: “the vitality in the arts which promoters like to talk about is false. Beneath the headlines of blockbusters and bestsellers, underneath the froth of the book fairs, something is terribly wrong.”40 She preached, she declaimed. The audience erupted frequently in cheers and applause. “The life of the writing community is under attack,” she said, sounding not unlike Stephen King in The Dark Tower. “Editors,” she said, turning to her day job, “are now judged by the profitability of what they acquire rather than by what they acquire, or the way they acquire it. Acceptance of the givenness of the marketplace keeps us in ignorance.”41 She closed with revolutionary rhetoric. “We are already at the barricades, and if there is one resolution that emerges from this congress, it is that we choose to remain at the barricades.”42 She resigned from Random House in 1983. “Leaving was a good idea,” she wrote in the preface to her next novel, Beloved (1987), “The books I had edited were not earning scads of money.”43 She quietly blamed colleagues who were less than supportive of her list. “My enthusiasm,” she wrote, “shared by some, was muted by others, reflecting the indifferent sales figures.”44 She threw herself into Beloved, which would become her greatest success. It was based on a news clipping she’d included in The Black Book (1974), a work of experimental collage. Margaret Garner escaped slavery in 1856 by crossing from Kentucky to Ohio with her four children. When slave catchers caught them, Garner killed her two-year-old and tried to kill the others rather than have them returned to slavery. Morrison transposes Garner’s story onto Sethe, her protagonist, and sets Sethe’s story after emancipation in Sethe’s house, which is haunted by the dead child, known as Beloved. It is a novel about the haunting afterlives of slavery. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, helped Morrison

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win the Nobel Prize in 1993, and has become the most widely held U.S. novel in libraries and one of the most written-about U.S. novels in scholarly journals.45 It influenced the priorities of African American literary studies for the coming decades.46 By Morrison’s account, Beloved is also about publishing. This is, on its face, a ludicrous claim. The novel is about chain gangs and slave catchers and trauma. It features no editors, no publishing houses. Yet Morrison confesses that publishing is at its center. In the novel’s preface, she writes, A few days after my last day of work, sitting in front of my house on the pier jutting out into the Hudson River, I began to feel an edginess instead of the calm I had expected. I ran through my index of problem areas and found nothing new or pressing. I couldn’t fathom what was so unexpectedly troubling on a day that was perfect, watching a river that serene. I had no agenda and couldn’t hear the telephone if it rang. I heard my heart, though, stomping away in my chest like a colt. . . . Then it slapped me: I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction, not a surfeit of pleasure or accomplishment. It was a purer delight, a rogue anticipation with certainty. Enter Beloved.47

“I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew my thoughts to what ‘free’ could mean,” she adds. Morrison is saying that leaving Random House enabled her to feel, in her body, a freedom that she could project back onto emancipation from slavery. She describes the first moment of freedom for Sethe’s mother, Baby Suggs, in much the same way. “Something’s the matter,” Baby Suggs thinks. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” She sees her hands as her hands. And she feels “a knocking in her chest, and discover[s] something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing?”48 It was the oddest sensation. Acknowledging the possibility of exaggeration, let’s follow Morrison’s thought. Beloved describes the thrill of freedom, but also insists that freedom is contaminated by the haunting of slavery. Among the degradations that haunt Sethe, she was coerced into complicity with racist writings. A villain named schoolteacher—uncapitalized—dehumanizes Sethe by forcing her to submit to his pupils’ scrutiny as they write down, in parallel, her “human” and “animal” characteristics. Sethe returns to this traumatic event, remembering the observation. She also remembers, and is haunted by, the fact that she made the ink that schoolteacher and his pupils used. “I made the ink,” she says, toward the end of the novel, “He couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t made the ink.”49

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Beloved is an exquisite work of art, terrifying and beautiful. It does everything. One of the things it does is allegorize the publishing industry for a black woman who worked as an editor at a major house for sixteen years, who fought for black writers in a sea of whiteness, who was more or less accused by other black editors of being a race traitor. Morrison, defending herself to Carole Parks, wrote that she didn’t have a career, she just had work.50 It is a story of coercion into white supremacy. I made the ink. But it is also a story about the exhilaration of freedom. Morrison ended her preface to Beloved by emphasizing the connection, making sure readers feel the sensation of a heartbeat that is hers and Baby Suggs’s both: “I husband that moment on the pier, the deceptive river, the  instant awareness of possibility, the loud heart kicking, the solitude, the danger.”51

LITERARY GENRE

Beloved showcased Morrison’s most extensive deployment to date of genre techniques. She had used elements of magical realism in her two previous novels, Song of Solomon and Tar Baby. In the 1940s and 1950s, mass-market publishers institutionalized genres that had coalesced in pulp mags in the earlier decades: mystery, romance, science fiction, Western. Stephen King’s Carrie (1974) and Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (1976) retooled gothic fiction and spurred a craze for horror in the late 1970s and 1980s. Morrison made good on the trend, deploying a ghost, a haunted house, terrifying violence, and trauma in her high modernist neo-slave narrative.52 She was thus at the forefront of an increasingly favored tactic—conscious or not—of literary writers earnestly adopting genre techniques, in what scholars have come to call literary genre fiction.53 The creation of modern mass-market paperbacks in 1939 and trade paperbacks in 1953 established a division between genre fiction (popular, cheap) and literary fiction (niche, less cheap). The divide wasn’t hard, but it was there. It allowed writers to pursue prestige by distancing themselves from genre fiction. Among prestigious writers, literary scholars, and members of the literati was “widespread and persistent prejudice against genre fiction.”54 Genre fiction was cast as formulaic and mass produced when pitted against the bright individual creativity of literary fiction. Literary writers who took up genre ended up producing “meta-genre fiction” in which genre was “instantiated and ironized to the point of becoming dysfunctional in the production of its conventional pleasures.”55 We can point to Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982), David Markson’s

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The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1968), Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair (1978), and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) as quintessential meta-genre fiction. They take up spy fiction, the Western, and mystery to toy with their conventions. The divide shifted in the 1980s. Mass-market houses addressed persistent resistance to growth by doubling down formulaic plots and ongoing series that had predictable, built-in sales. At the same time, the mass-market format suffered because hardcover and trade paperback began to be distributed at mass scale to chain bookstores and superstores like Walmart. Meanwhile, conglomerates rationalized business practices at trade houses, demanding certain rates of growth, demands that reverberated through the industry. The shifting terrain made it more attractive, or less inhibiting, for literary writers to adopt genre techniques, as Morrison did in Beloved. Umberto Eco had early success in this mode with The Name of the Rose (1980). Denis Johnson’s spy novel, The Stars at Noon, came out in 1984. Paul Auster published his New York Trilogy (1987) the same year as Beloved. A. S. Byatt published Possession, a literary romance novel, in 1990. The literati began to rethink its snobbery—the weakened position of the mass market and the use of genre by Auster, Byatt, Eco, Johnson, and Morrison made such snobbery unnecessary, outdated.56 Literary novels engaged genre, but they did not close the divide. Jeremy Rosen argues that even as literary writers “avail themselves of the generative capacity and plasticity of genre,” they “take pains to mark their literariness by deploying recognizable literary techniques and by differentiating themselves from, often by denigrating, the lion’s share of popular culture’s voluminous output.” Their use of genre is tempered by an attempt to “stratify and carve out niches in an immensely crowded cultural marketplace.”57 Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) wants the fun of the zombie apocalypse, but, with its elevated style and criticism of the mindlessness of popular culture, it also wants literary distinction from genre. The line could begin to blur, still. Some literary fiction moved toward genre; some genre moved toward literary fiction. John Irving’s A Widow for a Year (1998), Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), and Gore Vidal’s Edgar Box series—literary novels that feature mysterious murders—borrow from the popular genre of murder mysteries. Random House published thrillers by Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, and Richard Patterson that share a great deal with Cold War CIA spy novels such as Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) and Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost (1991), not to mention similar spy novels on Random House’s list by conservative activist William F. Buckley and, separately, his son, Christopher. We begin to see a promiscuous

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proliferation of categories that makes literary fiction plural and makes genre literary.

JOAN DIDION

Long before she wrote a political thriller, Joan Didion was a precocious child in California. As a teenager in the Sacramento Valley, she typed out Ernest Hemingway’s stories “to learn how the sentences worked.”58 At twenty-one, in 1956, in her senior year at the University of California at Berkeley, she won Vogue’s Prix de Paris essay prize, moved to New York City, and began to work for the magazine, first as a copywriter before climbing onto the masthead as a features editor in 1960. She was by then writing regularly for the conservative National Review, recruited by future fellow thriller writer William Buckley. When an acquaintance recommended Didion to Jason Epstein in 1963, he replied, “What do I want with some little nobody who writes for Buckley?”59 Didion believed in personal responsibility. She believed people ought “to have the courage of their mistakes.” She believed in “toughness, a kind of moral nerve.”60 She disliked Democrats, and J. D. Salinger, and Sarah Lawrence girls who thought only Salinger understood them.61 She disliked “the nihilism and formal laxity of picaresque writers such as Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller.” She hated deception, especially self-deception, and made rigorous honesty core to her developing style. She saw the National Review “as an intelligent alternative to liberal journals and as a venue for developing a new, more rigorous aesthetic than that prevalent in the literary academy and promoted by book publishers.” Sentimental liberalism was, to her, the worst; it infected the popular middlebrow sensibility of someone like James Michener. It let individuals off the hook by displacing blame onto “social problems.”62 She published her first novel, Run River, in 1963, and her first essay collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, in 1968, after which she was famous. She had moved back to California, having written an essay, “Goodbye to All That,” that spawned its own genre, the Leaving New York essay. In an omnibus review of women’s movement literature for the New York Times in 1972, she wrote that its writers were “perfectly capable of crafting didactic revisions of whatever apparently intractable material came to hand.” She wrote that feminism had led to “the coarsening of moral imagination.” She wrote that the women’s movement had “the most tenuous and unfortunate relationship to the actual condition of being a woman.”63

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She gave up on Republicans after Reagan’s rise in California, taking on a pose of superiority and malaise, generated by her lapidary, hardheaded style, which Stephen Schryer has described as reliant on “syntactic repetition and the ironic citation of clichés. These two features work together: Didion’s elaborate parallelism highlights her linguistic control, her constant effort to ‘fight lying,’ while the clichés exemplify the debased material with which she must work.”64 Henry Robbins, an editor at FSG, was a fan. He encouraged her to put together the collection that became Slouching to Bethlehem. She worked with him for the next dozen years, following him, against Roger Straus’s protestations, to Simon & Schuster in 1974. Didion’s second novel, Play It as It Lays, came out in 1970, her third, A Book of Common Prayer, in 1977, and her fourth Democracy—which, because Robbins was dead, S&S’s Michael Korda edited—in 1984. The last two are political novels, about corruption in a fictional Central American country and the end of the Vietnam War, respectively. In the late 1970s, she became a regular at the New York Review of Books, where she first published much of what would become Salvador (1983) and Miami (1987). Elizabeth Hardwick was a friend and mentor. Didion shared an aesthetic with her and other prominent NYRB women, including Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag. Deborah Nelson sees in this set an embrace of “the aesthetic, political, and moral obligation to face painful reality unsentimentally.”65 Hardwick wrote, about Didion, that her novels “are not consoling.”66 Women were not supposed to write this way; they were supposed to write sentimental books for wives and children. “One consequence of this gendering of emotional style,” argues Nelson, “is that these women had to be unusually thoughtful about the choice to be unsentimental, compelled to think it through, test it out, explain it as a choice with specific ends.”67 She could have been writing about Renata Adler, too. Through the transformation of publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, gendered demands on women novelists changed little. Kate Braverman told Publishers Weekly in 1990 that she recognized women only in the work of Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates. “Women have been allowed very little latitude in what they write about and what they think,” Braverman said. “They have yet to validate their experience within the context of American literature. What they write about is degraded and trivialized.”68 Didion published her fifth and final novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, in 1996. It features a woman destroyed by a system. Elena McMahon is a reporter working the election beat in 1984, as Didion did in 1988, writing the essay “Insider Baseball.” McMahon walks off the campaign to visit her father in Miami. From there, she goes to a small, fraying Caribbean island to secure, in

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her father’s place, a shady deal to supply arms on behalf of the U.S. government to the Contras to use against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Her father, unbeknownst to him, was supposed to be the fall guy for an assassination plot to sway U.S. elections. Elena is killed in his place. If The Last Thing He Wanted showed Didion’s mastery of genre techniques, it also marked a new period in her relationship with publishing. She’d long been frustrated with Simon & Schuster. Only two of her books had earned back their advances for the house. Several had gone out of print. In 1991, she wrote “a chilly letter” to Richard Snyder, S&S’s longtime CEO, “suggesting that he did not respect her, that he only wanted to wield power over his authors.”69 She tried to break her contract, but he wouldn’t let her. She published After Henry, a collection of essays titled in homage to Henry Robbins, in 1992, then departed for Random House. She blamed her agent of many years, Lois Wallace, for her turbulence at S&S, and broke with her too, signing with her husband’s agent, the ubiquitous Lynn Nesbit. The Last Thing He Wanted was, then, a fresh start. She used it to unite the vogue for literary genre and the autofictional tactics of Lurie, Adler, and Hardwick. The novel’s narrator is Joan Didion. She clarified in interviews that she did, indeed, mean this to be at once herself and a contrivance. In an address to the reader that opens part 2, Didion remembers telling her daughter, who was assigned to write an autobiographical essay, that although “it was true that the telling of a life tended to falsify it, gave it a form it did not intrinsically possess, this was just a fact of writing things down, something we all accepted”—but, in the act of saying this, she “realized” she no longer accepted it. She disavows any credulousness toward narrative. She has “lost patience” with “the conventions of the craft, with exposition, with transitions, with the development and revelation of ‘character.’ ” She is “increasingly interested only in the technical, in how to lay down the AM-2 aluminum matting for the runway, in whether or not parallel taxiways and high-speed turnoffs must be provided.”70 She envisions something like a technical manual, which, if it had to engage humans, would be pleased with absolute parataxis. Were one to write a novel this way, it might look like David Markson’s late work.71 But this is Didion’s paradox: her hard-nosed, remote narration is at once a rejection of narrative’s seduction and—if it betrays itself—ideal for narrating, as it does, the formulaic conventions of the thriller. Didion’s refusal to make sense is couched in a tidily organized genre. Elena McMahon is a character in a world in which a sadistic order reigns. This is not the world of women’s literature. No domestic space for Elena McMahon, no sentiment. Like the protagonists of

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Crichton, Koontz, and Patterson, she deals in truth, history, life, death, science, guns, and the Cold War. That the novel was a thriller was something reviewers often repeated. Hardwick described The Last Thing He Wanted in the New York Review of Books, as “a creation of high seriousness, a thriller composed with all the resources of a unique gift for imaginative literature.”72 Slate posited that Didion’s use of genre solved her earlier problems with fictional contrivance: “the exhilarating surprise of her new novel is that in it, she masters one of the most contrived forms of all, the thriller.”73 Didion can’t escape the stories required to live or the conventions with which we tell them—but she can remind us that stories are contrived and that women who refuse the scripts—remote women, unsentimental women, women who cluster among this genre of men—are punished, in this case by being killed. Autofiction abets Didion’s disavowal of genre, subjectivity, authorship; genre abets her indictment of patriarchal demands on women’s style. Didion was canny with The Last Thing He Wanted. She wrote a story of a woman writer caught up in a conspiracy of money and men, a conspiracy she fails to understand, but which nevertheless kills her. Adler and Hardwick, two decades earlier, could get away with wonderfully obscurantist, fragmented autobiographical novels, a mode Didion toyed with herself in Democracy in 1984. The industry had changed. Didion rode the prevailing winds and fully embraced genre for the first time in her long career, giving Random House a bestseller. Meanwhile, she smuggled in a rebuke to conglomeration and its men, an allegory for women writing in the conglomerate era. Maybe, like Elena McMahon, she is unable to make sense of the conspiracy (of the state, the conglomerate) in which she is conscripted, but she can publicize her own disposability and the violence of the system.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

In the early 1960s, the unsolicited and “poorly typed” manuscript of Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, “addressed simply to ‘Random House,’ ” landed on the desk of editor Albert Erskine.74 Erskine, who edited William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Penn Warren, liked the book, and Random House published it in 1965. McCarthy’s early style, from The  Orchard Keeper through Suttree (1979), is densely lyrical, difficult, and gothic. Despite Erskine’s best efforts at promotion, his books barely sold.

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Erskine sent advance copies of The Orchard Keeper to Random House writers Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, James Michener, and Robert Penn Warren, and “wrote a separate letter to Saul Bellow, saying that [he] had never ‘solicited [him] like this before’ but that he felt that The Orchard Keeper ‘deserve[d] all the support it could get.’ ” Fighting upstream, Erskine “worked to secure a paperback printing of The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark”—McCarthy’s second novel—in 1969.75 For his slim third novel, Child of God (1973), about a serial killer and necrophiliac, Random House asked whether he had any connections who could help sell it. He replied, “Ed McMahon (of the Tonight Show) is an acquaintance. We went fishing off Bimini together back in the spring and went partying together at Cat Cay (until he fell off the dock and had to be flown to Lauderdale to the hospital). You might try to place a copy in his hands. He does read. (Not like he drinks, of course, but some.)”76 If Random House contacted McMahon, it didn’t help the book. By the mid- to late 1970s, “Erskine was becoming an isolated voice of support for McCarthy” at Random House.77 McCarthy’s novels went out of print. Erskine continued to use his connections to help McCarthy acquire grants to live on, most notably an inaugural 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.”78 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 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 mostly unknown. In early 1989, he wrote to a friend, “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.”79 We hear his pride in the boast. In early interviews, he disdained the idea of writing for money.80 He positioned himself as an artist through his rejection of commercialism, making a virtue of his poor sales, a position legitimated by awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, in addition to the MacArthur and others. Right about then, everything changed—not least McCarthy’s royalty checks. In 1987, Erskine retired. McCarthy, maybe anticipating that he would need help navigating the industry after losing Erskine, wrote a letter to Lynn Nesbit. It read, “Dear Ms. Nesbit, I’ve never had an agent before, but I’m thinking now of getting one, and if you’re interested in talking to me, please call me

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before noon Rocky Mountain time at this phone number.” Nesbit passed the letter to her protégé, Amanda (“Binky”) Urban. As it happened, Urban had read Suttree. “I don’t think anybody reads Suttree and doesn’t think it’s an amazing book,” she said. She called McCarthy and told him she’d work hard for him. He said, “Well, that sounds fine to me.”81 Urban then did her research only to discover that McCarthy had never sold more than 2,500 copies in hardcover. She thought she could do better by him at Knopf. So she called Sonny Mehta. Sonny Mehta loved to drink whiskey and wine and smoke cigarettes. He dressed casually, in black. He was born in India, but, because his father was a diplomat, he grew up in Geneva and New York City and Prague. Zhou Enlai and Ho Chi Minh came to his house.82 He studied English at Cambridge then went into books, making an early name for himself by publishing Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, one of the women’s movement provocations that Didion panned in the Times. He launched Picador, a trade paperback imprint, and published Raymond Carver, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Salman Rushdie. By 1987, Mehta had built a reputation as the Robert Gottlieb of London. When Si Newhouse moved Gottlieb from president and editor in chief of Knopf to editor of the New Yorker, Gottlieb recommended Newhouse hire Mehta in his place. When Mehta picked up Urban’s call, he was trying to find his footing. At first, his appointment was “hailed in publishing circles as inspired.” Random House president Bob Bernstein said he was “deliriously happy.”83 But the honeymoon was short. The New York Times called his arrival “tortuous,” as he learned the house’s “mysterious traditions.” Jane Friedman—who had risen to senior vice president of publishing at Knopf and publisher of Random House AudioBooks—told the Times that the transition was “absolutely, terribly traumatic.” Bernstein and Mehta quickly learned that they didn’t get along.84 Mehta needed wins, big ones. Urban asked whether he would like to publish Cormac McCarthy. “I’d love that,” he said.85 Urban asked the head of Random House whether it was okay. “I can’t believe I’m picking up the phone to talk about an author who’s never sold more than 2,500 copies,” he said, according to Urban. “Of course you can move him over to Knopf.”86 In 1989, Random House fired Bernstein who, by Jason Epstein’s appraisal, had done “his best to sustain the old improvisational Random House style.”87 Newhouse disliked Bernstein from the beginning, but kept him on for nearly a decade not least because he liked Gottlieb and Gottlieb defended Bernstein. After Gottlieb moved to the New Yorker, Newhouse canned Bernstein and

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hired Alberto Vitale in his place. Vitale had spent most of his career running Olivetti (of typewriter fame) and Fiat (the carmaker).88 Reporting on the move, the New York Times 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.”89 Vitale was happy to do the unpleasant work. When he showed up, he told the staff that they “needed to make money.”90 The word was that Vitale’s “new policy was that each book should make money on its own and that one title should no longer be allowed to subsidize another.”91 It had been a tumultuous few years for Mehta. Bernstein, Erskine, and Gottlieb had been steadying forces at Random House for decades. The firing of Schiffrin galvanized much of the literary world against Vitale and Random House. When the dust settled, Mehta found himself at the top. In November 1990, eight months after the Schiffrin kerfuffle, the Times wrote, “Through all the considerable upheaval at Random House over the last year, one man’s star has continued to rise, to the point where some say he has now become the power behind the throne at America’s largest trade publishing company.” That man, of course, was Mehta.92 Mehta made moves. In 1990, he promoted Friedman to Vintage publisher and hired Gary Fisketjon from Atlantic Monthly Press. For Fisketjon, it was a return. He was a protégé of Jason Epstein and had become famous in publishing for his role in a major development of the 1980s, the paperback original: Epstein’s trade paperback revolution, 2.0. Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries in 1984, which vied against Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction series led by Kathryn Court with help from an up-and-coming editor named Gerald Howard. These series made big news out of Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, and Gloria Naylor—many of the same writers Mehta was publishing with Picador in London at the time. Vintage Contemporaries even brought McCarthy’s Suttree back into print. When Fisketjon walked back into Random House on June 1, 1990, he was ready to make Cormac McCarthy a star. An extraordinary foursome assembled, determined to throw their energies behind McCarthy’s next novel, his first since Blood Meridian: Gary Fisketjon, Jane Friedman, Sonny Mehta, and Binky Urban. Fisketjon and Urban impressed on McCarthy “that a little publicity never hurt.”93 Friedman and Mehta devoted themselves, on their end, to “aggressive marketing.”94 They got him to sit down with Marion Ettlinger who snapped an iconic author photo. Knopf ’s famed designer, Chip Kidd, was tasked with creating “a dust jacket that would seduce readers into at least picking up the novel.”95 In 1992, Random House published

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McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. It sold a hundred thousand copies and won the National Book Award. It was turned into a blockbuster movie. McCarthy helped his new minders by writing a much more marketable book than he had before. Stylistically, All the Pretty Horses departs from his earlier difficult prose and his picaresque, arguably shapeless plots, adopting, instead, the popular form of the Western—though not without losing McCarthy’s distinctive voice. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy confronted his readers with a seventy-page false start, scenes of outrageous, sadistic violence (the scalping of Native Americans, the smashing of infant skulls), and an odd cryptic ending in which a giant blindingly white villain dances on a stage in the blood of a bear he’s killed. It’s his best book, a masterpiece, a retelling of Moby-Dick, but it’s hard to love. All the Pretty Horses tells the story of a teenage cowboy who cherishes the old ways, goes to Mexico, falls in love, kills a man, suffers guilt, and returns to the United States to mourn the loss of the West. It’s easy to love. It is model literary genre fiction. Between Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy moved imprints, gained a new editor, and hired a formidable agent. Random House fired a president who defended boutique novelists and hired one who demanded each book support itself. And McCarthy’s style changed. He adopted genre techniques that would persist in his work. We should reimagine McCarthy’s career as divided less by Appalachia and the West than by refuge from, and then participation in, the conglomerate era, culminating with his publication of Pulitzer Prize–winning, Oprah’s Book Club– endorsed, postapocalyptic mega-bestseller The Road in 2007. Conglomeration made McCarthy middlebrow.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Michael Crichton was an odd fit for Knopf. Starting with The Andromeda Strain (1969), he wrote pulpy thrillers for the house with the most prestigious reputation. Gottlieb, his editor for two decades, admits, “what Michael wasn’t was a very good writer.” Crichton and Gottlieb were never close: “although our personal interactions remained cordial,” writes Gottlieb, “I found him—all six feet, nine inches of him—very uncomfortable within his skin and particularly ill at ease with me.” But Gottlieb did learn something from Crichton: “one thing I began to understand more fully from working with Michael was how

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genre works, and how a given writer can become a genre.”96 Crichton was on his way to becoming a brand writer before the idea took off. By the time Gottlieb left Knopf for the New Yorker in 1987, Crichton was Knopf ’s most important writer, commercially. Then came Jurassic Park, which catapulted Crichton to John Grisham–level status. It was destined for the movies from the beginning. He circulated drafts to Sonny Mehta (his new editor), Lynn Nesbit (his literary agent), and Robert (“Bob”) Bookman (his Hollywood agent).97 Once it was ready, but before it was published, Crichton’s team managed to get it to Maria Campbell, scout for Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment.98 With Spielberg on board, Nesbit and Bookman sold the movie rights for $1.5 million.99 Knopf came to pay Crichton eight figures per book.100 In terms of sales, no one did more to keep Random House in the black with his prolific output in the 1990s: Jurassic Park (1990), Rising Sun (1992), Disclosure (1994), The Lost World (1995), Airframe (1996), and Timeline (1999). Mehta was a fan with “a genuine fascination” for his work.101 He told Publishers Weekly that “over 30 years, Michael has got to know almost everybody in the house; he is the house, in some ways.”102 In 1994, Knopf published Crichton’s Disclosure. Nesbit nabbed him a prepublication interview on the front page of the Arts section of the New York Times, where his books were described as “a thinking person’s escapism,” and it was noted that Knopf had sent “an extraordinary 900,000 copies to bookstores.”103 The book had already been adapted into a movie, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, released later that year. In hardback, the novel stayed on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list for twenty weeks, more than half of those in the top two spots.104 Disclosure is about gender and conglomeration—literally. It concerns a sexual harassment case that threatens to interrupt a merger in the publishing industry. Crichton announces on the first page, “DigiCom was being acquired by ConleyWhite, a publishing conglomerate in New York. The merger would allow Conley to acquire technology important to publishing in the next century.” In an inversion of RCA’s purchase of Random House, Conley wants to buy DigiCom to acquire CD-ROMS and electronic databases that will be necessary for its textbooks. In the week before the deal closes, DigiCom faces a sexual harassment scandal that could scare off Conley, “a company obsessed with its public image.”105 The twist? The harasser is a beautiful woman, the victim a hapless man. Sexual harassment was a relatively new term in 1994. Catharine MacKinnon worked to coalesce early efforts with her 1979 book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women. Meanwhile, in the late 1970s and 1980s, the courts codified sexual

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harassment into law. The term, though, was mostly known by activists, academics, and lawyers before Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court hearing in 1991.106 A former colleague of Thomas, Anita Hill, testified that he had said lurid things to her and made unwanted sexual advances. Nevertheless, the Senate confirmed Thomas. Suddenly, everyone in the United States had heard of sexual harassment, and had opinions. Women were coming forward to share their experiences of being harassed. Plenty of others argued that women who claim harassment were manipulative, out for attention, had been asking for it in the first place.107 By 1994, men were leading a backlash to rising accusations of harassment through countersuits.108 Crichton makes Disclosure’s sexual politics clear. The protagonist, Tom Sanders, is trustworthy, “too reasonable for [his] own good.” Regarding language of privilege and patriarchy, Sanders wonders, “where did women come up with this crap?” He worries about being named a predator in a world where women and children allege sexual harassment with impunity. “There were new rules now,” he thinks, “and every man knew them.” Sanders and his colleague, Lewyn, discuss the changes feminism has brought to the company. “When I started in DigiCom,” Lewyn says, “there was only one question. Are you good? If you were good, you got hired.” Now, identity has supplanted ability. “I get so sick of the constant pressure to appoint women,” Lewyn says.109 The villain, Meredith Johnson, is a femme fatale: beautiful, two-faced, manipulative, cutthroat.110 She lures Sanders, her employee, to her office where she tries to have sex with him. He rejects her. She files a sexual harassment claim. He files a counter claim. In the end, justice prevails: Johnson is fired, Sanders climbs the conglomerate ladder, and the merger goes through. “I’ve been screwed by the damn system,” Johnson tells Sanders, to which he replies, “The system didn’t screw you. The system revealed you.” But Johnson insists, “Women in business have to be perfect all the time, or they just get murdered. One little slip and they’re dead.” And, finally, “I was raped by the fucking system.”111 The novel was largely received along party lines, reviled by the Left, embraced by the Right. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, toeing a moderate line in the Times—and extending an appreciation for popular fiction that he refused Judith Krantz—called it “a clever new novel” and “an elaborate provocation of rage” that managed to be “so much fun and so easy to follow.”112 Michael Coren, in the right-wing National Review, praised Crichton’s “grace” and the “clarity of his vision” and hoped it “just might dampen some of the strident howls and emotional spasms that currently dominate.”113 As this and the previous chapter argue, the power imbalance between men and women shaped the form of fiction itself. Alison Lurie, Renata Adler, Elizabeth

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Hardwick, and Joan Didion found in fiction a space to bear refracted witness to patriarchy in publishing. We see how, over time, through conglomeration, interpersonal pressure from individual men, such as Jason Epstein, Joe Fox, and Philip Roth, is displaced and disseminated through publishing as a system. In Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted, women caught in systems beyond their comprehension are raped and murdered. Disclosure is a retort. It is a shoring up of the status quo. In it, a female publishing executive who is expelled by a system she cannot control is figuratively raped and murdered. We are meant to disdain Johnson for her self-pitying hyperbole and hypocrisy, but, reading against Crichton’s grain, she speaks a figurative truth. The system that assaults her—the business that murders women—is the publishing conglomerate. Disclosure tells us to trust the system. And Crichton, says Sonny Mehta, is the house.

BERTELSMANN

In 1998, the German conglomerate Bertelsmann purchased Random House from Si Newhouse. The next year, Jason Epstein retired. He was the last of the old guard who remembered the Villard mansion, hobnobbing with authors in the offices, Bennett Cerf ’s bad jokes. Epstein’s old rival, Roger Straus, who’d managed to remain independent long after most other houses cashed out, sold FSG to a different German conglomerate, Holtzbrinck, in 1994. Epstein and Straus were men from an era in publishing of editorial power and charismatic masculinity. But times had changed. Authors now worked among a network of figures in which the editor was only one. Jane Friedman, who started at Random House right about when it left the Villard mansion, and who symbolized the decline of the editor and the rise of promotion, was promoted by Sonny Mehta to executive vice president in 1992 and left in 1997 to become CEO of HarperCollins where she would revitalize Rupert Murdoch’s tired property. I have largely discussed Beloved, The Last Thing He Wanted, All the Pretty Horses, and Disclosure as the work of Morrison, Didion, McCarthy, and Crichton out of grammatical convenience. On one hand, the idiosyncratic signature of these authors on their works is obvious. Beloved is clearly a novel by Toni Morrison. But not only. Morrison wrested that book from the publishing industry, from conglomeration, and the result is uniquely marked by the struggle: Morrison’s origin story for the novel is that she felt free when she quit the

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industry and she inscribed that as an allegory at the novel’s beating heart. It is a work of horror when horror was the genre du jour. Conglomeration sapped agency from the author—to which authors reacted in any number of ways in their own defense, especially by allegorizing struggle and composing autofiction—such that we ought to recognize distributed authorship as resurgent. I couldn’t, for example, read Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, published by Holt Rinehart & Winston in 1970, through the same logic as Beloved. Despite the relative ascendance of systems over coteries, room remained for charismatic men—men like Sonny Mehta. He crystallized the logic of the system. Observers, seeing him through orientalizing eyes, inevitably described him as savvy yet inscrutable, hip and detached. In the aftermath of the Bertelsmann buyout, one profile declared, “today, the story of trade publishing could be said to be the story of Mr. Mehta writ large. As Sonny goes, so goes a certain tenor of the business.” Mehta, it was said, is “known for not speaking more than he has to. Some say it’s a Brahmin thing, some a Machiavellian one.”114 Random House under Bertelsmann was enormous. It entered the merger with Ballantine, Crown, Knopf, Pantheon, and Vintage. Bertelsmann added Bantam, Dell, and Doubleday. Now Random House had double the annual sales of its nearest rival, Penguin Putnam.115 (It would swallow Penguin Putnam in 2013, and attempt to gulp down Simon & Schuster in 2020.) One prominent editor at a different house called it the “death star.”116 As part of the Bertelsmann merger, Random House’s trade paperback line, Vintage, merged with Doubleday’s Anchor Books—the original trade paperback imprint, launched by Jason Epstein in 1953. Anchor was one young man’s initiative, a scheme to make literary books affordable in bookstores, an option enabled one’s separation from the mass-market books of the hoi polloi. Nearly a half century later, it was another asset in a conglomerate’s portfolio, though an asset that traded on the prestige of its history. “We’re going to be doing Anchor,” Sonny Mehta told his employees. “Let’s hope you don’t fuck it up.”117

5 Nonprofits How Rebels Found Funding and Rejected New York

J

ames Laughlin, a septuagenarian with a tall face and deep-set eyes, took the stage at the National Book Critics Circle award ceremony in 1990. He was receiving recognition for his distinguished contribution to American letters. He looked out at the assembled critics and cracked a few jokes about the early days of his press, New Directions, which he had founded more than fifty years earlier, when he was just twenty-two and still a student at Harvard. Even before New Directions, he had published Henry Miller in a Harvard literary magazine, which, given Miller’s licentiousness, was subsequently banned and burned.1 Laughlin was the heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune. His inheritance funded the press. He published Miller alongside H. D., Ezra Pound, Delmore Schwartz, Tennessee Williams, and William Carlos Williams. New Directions became the premier avant-garde publishing house in the United States. 2 Early on, Laughlin adeptly presented Random House as the commercial foil to New Directions in frequent attacks that he published, such as James  T. Farrell’s “Will the Commercialization of Publishing Destroy Good Writing?” in the house’s annual publication, New Directions 9, in 1946. Laughlin’s strategy was clever. Not only was he filling a market niche for experimental literature prepared by Random House’s publication of books such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Gertrude Stein’s oeuvre, but his attacks themselves were a commercial tactic.3 They made his brand. Laughlin was “disavowing an interest in marketing while constantly trying to think up new marketing techniques.”4 It is a familiar gambit, to claim authenticity by differentiating oneself from a sell-out, then to use that authenticity to profit.

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BURN THIS, WILL YOU?

On stage in 1990, Laughlin, after a few minutes of jesting, made a sharp turn away from humor. Earlier that evening, E. L. Doctorow had called on Random House to rehire Pantheon’s recently fired managing director, André Schiffrin, renowned, like Laughlin, for publishing sophisticated titles. Doctorow said, “Even if no censorship was intended by its application of its own bottom-line criteria to its Pantheon division, the effect is indeed to still a voice, to close a door against part of the American family.” Laughlin called the firing a “disgusting scandal.”5 He extended his lifelong refrain, denouncing big presses as “merchants of canned cod who are ruining our culture.” At least in the past they had made room for genuine literary minds like Robert Giroux, Robert Gottlieb, and Schiffrin. “Where are the successors to Alfred Knopf, Kurt Wolff?” he asked. They were, he answered, at small presses—Coffee House, Graywolf—to which he urged the audience of critics devote their attention.6 To Doctorow and Laughlin, the firing of Schiffrin felt like the latest battle in the decades-long war of attrition that was conglomeration, which they were losing. Days earlier, hundreds had assembled outside Random House headquarters in Manhattan to protest. But senior editors at Random House, including Joni Evans and Sonny Mehta, defended the decision in the New York Times, asking “why Pantheon shouldn’t live by the same fiscal rules as the rest of us at Random House and throughout the industry.”7 The day the defense was published, Robin Desser, a young Random House editor wrote a letter to her friend, Scott Walker, in Minnesota: “It’s very strange here without Pantheon—for at present there really is none.”8 Most of the Pantheon editors had quit. Desser felt ambivalent, caught between respect for her superiors (“how can Joni and Sonny . . . be wrong?”) and her sense that “this whole business is disgusting and that actually they were going to castrate André bit by bit so it is better that he went this way, righteous, with all the foolish and wonderful connotations righteous implies.” The affair was contentious enough that she ended with the request “Burn this, will you?”9

PORT TOWNSEND

From Port Townsend, Washington, you can watch the Puget Sound meet the Salish Sea: the small water turns west toward the open ocean. In 1982, James

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Laughlin spent a week at a writers’ retreat in Port Townsend. He joined a small group that included poet Tess Gallagher, her partner Raymond Carver, and Carver’s notorious editor Gordon Lish.10 Carver had recently published his second short story collection with Lish at Knopf, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The two were a literary power couple, the sine qua non of dirty realism, initiating a vogue for minimalist fiction, though their friendship would not last much longer. Lish was an imperious editor. He changed the titles of ten stories in What We Talk About, “regularly renamed characters,” and replaced “sizeable chunks of prose with entirely new (and invariably shorter) paragraphs,” altering Carver’s style away from human warmth and toward an enigmatic coolness. Carver, newly sober, assessing these edits, “repeatedly begged Lish to arrest the publication of the book,” but Lish went ahead anyway. Shortly after the conference in Port Townsend, Carver, preparing to work with Lish on his next collection, wrote “a long letter in which he pre-emptively asserted his authorial prerogative, noting the differences between his and Lish’s aesthetic approaches.” It wouldn’t be enough. The relationship broke down the next year.11 As significant for literary history, if unheralded, was Laughlin’s encounter with Scott Walker, who was living in Port Townsend and publishing Gallagher, William Bronk, Denis Johnson, Philip Levine, Ray Young Bear, and others from a letterpress in a shed in his backyard under the colophon of Graywolf Press. Laughlin and Walker struck up a friendship. In the ensuing years, Walker vacationed at Laughlin’s ski resort in Utah—Laughlin had been “a subOlympian skier in his youth”12—and Graywolf published Laughlin’s lectures on Pound. Laughlin became a mentor and a model for Walker as Graywolf emerged at the forefront of a movement: nonprofit publishing. In 1982, though, that all lay ahead. Graywolf remained close to its counterculture origins. “Small was beautiful,” Walker later remembered.13 Hundreds of fly-by-night presses had sprouted and vanished since the 1950s thanks to the widespread availability of cheap mimeograph machines, a predecessor to photocopiers. The Mimeo Revolution provided the print technology for the postwar era’s leading poetry movements. Walker was one of several publishers inspired by the Mimeo Revolution and a counterculture arts-and-crafts ethos to learn how to use a letterpress to make beautiful books.14 He got started with the help of Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson, who ran Port Townsend’s Copper Canyon Press. Hamill and Swenson were inspired to enter publishing after hearing stories about James Laughlin and New Directions from Kenneth Rexroth, their professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.15 They themselves were new to town “when a shaggy haired, bearded young man in glasses walked in. Although his appearance was ubiquitously countercultural, his charm and

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charisma were exceptional. His name was Scott Walker and he wanted to buy a letterpress.”16 A third press in Port Townsend was Dragon Gate, run by a wealthy poet named Gwen Head; a fourth was Sagittarius, run by a Quaker poet named Rusty North; a fifth was Lockhart, by Jungians; a sixth was a cooperative letterpress called Empty Bowl. Between the presses, the annual writers’ conference (Centrum), and the local bookstores, which doubled as community centers, Port Townsend—which had a population of only six thousand in 198017—was a thriving literary scene. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, lived in town. Denis Johnson did too, for a time. Margaret Atwood, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, and James Welch often passed through. Ken Kesey, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Alice Walker made appearances. Bob DeWeese, who ran Melville and Co., the used bookstore, told me that people could live in Port Townsend in the 1970s “on just nothing.” They could come to town and essentially squat. “There was a wrecked building down by the water,” DeWeese said, “and a whole bunch of people moved into it and found a nook or cranny and listened to the waves wash up for a while, until they found another place.” Or people might crash at the Town Tavern, where the proprietor, a man named Bill, “would let anybody stay. He would put them to work sweeping up the Tavern, with all of the bikers and hippies and everybody, and they would stay for a while and make a little money and move out.” Literary types would find each other at DeWeese’s store, “swap tales and stuff. Get books, talk about what was going on.”18 Dozens of writers came to Port Townsend. Some stayed for a while. A young man named John Lane arrived in 1978 from South Carolina with a thick beard and a thicker accent. Hamill took him under his wing, made him an apprentice, called him “kid,” printed his poetry, pontificated to him on the virtues of Ezra Pound. Port Townsend was under the sway of modernism. Letterpress was gospel, “the highest achievement for poetry.” Lane would wake up, chop wood and bring it to the press where Hamill would start a fire, then they’d listen to Keith Jarrett and set type all morning. They went to town for lunch and to check whether any new books had arrived at Melville and Co. And for gossip. Given so many writers in one small town, drama ensued. Lane compared it to the sanitarium from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.19 The collective sense was that a “unique kind of thing that was happening.” Many of the writers planted trees or restored salmon habitat for a living. They held readings to protect the spotted owl. The vibe was “Zen, post-hippie literary”; the aesthetic was “Buddhist madcap Bodhisattva kind of stuff,” more

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closely aligned with Asia than Europe. They were West Coast Beats. They called it the Bear Shit in the Woods School.20 David Romtvedt, fresh out of the Peace Corps—unofficially, because he refused to sign the loyalty oath—landed in Port Townsend in 1978 on the recommendation of his University of Iowa master of fine arts (MFA) advisor, Sandra McPherson, a Graywolf poet. She put him in touch with Scott Walker. Romtvedt was a good fit because he’d studied calligraphy as an undergraduate at Reed College and, at Iowa, was an assistant to Kim Merker, founder of the Iowa Center for the Book and a major figure in the letterpress world. Walker told him, “I ain’t got no money, much. But if you want to do this, we could try and work together. You could live in my house. I have space.” Romtvedt moved in and they worked together for years. He saw Walker as powerfully committed, “a fanatical one-person show.” “I just thought it was super beautiful,” Romtvedt told me, “I wanted to be part of that.”21 That’s where Walker was when he met James Laughlin in 1982. Letterpress was what he’d been doing since 1974. He later claimed that he “didn’t make more than $7,000 the first 10 years” and that he “almost gave up.”22 In 1989, he wrote to Laughlin that he “financed the operation” for the first twelve years with his labor and “sacrificed a good deal of personal life,” giving everything he had “for most hours of the day, without break for vacation or personal development.”23 Bob DeWeese remembers Walker in those years as “very intense. Very focused on publishing in a way that was beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, and yet simple.”24 Walker met Laughlin at a pivotal moment. Outside New York, in varied sites across the vast swaths of the rest of the country, belletrists were rejecting the ascendant conglomerates by taking matters into their own hands: Chicagoland, Illinois; Iowa City, Iowa; Houston, Texas; Port Townsend, Washington. They were building their own networks. To them, the insiders who obsessed over a few square blocks in Manhattan were provincial. Port Townsend defined itself against New York publishing, which Hamill, Swenson, and Walker compared with the clearcutting of forests. Hamill wore a tee-shirt that said “Ignore New York.” Desktop computing and improved infrastructure for distribution opened another way, yet nascent in 1982. What if, like dance, opera, and symphony, literary books could be subsidized by state-sponsored grant funding and private philanthropy? Such financial support would, according to this line of reasoning, liberate publishers from the demands of the market. To access it, publishers would need to become nonprofit organizations. To take the fullest advantage, Walker would need to leave his beloved Port Townsend and his letterpress and move to the chilly climes of Minnesota.

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The presses these rebels founded contested the power of conglomeration. They organized as nonprofits, enabling them to publish fiction by writers such as Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita that would be shaped, from topoi to style, less by the market than their missions—though, because these writers resisted serving as examples of a mission, not always as the presses intended.25

HUNGRY JIM

Elsewhere in 1982, the president of Pocket Books told a meeting of publishers, “There is a huge fire burning within the [mass-market] paperback business. And I don’t think that anybody gives a damn.’ ”26 Morton Janklow was conquering the bestseller lists with Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, and Danielle Steel. Laughlin and Walker were communing along the shores of the Puget Sound. And a young man out of North Dakota found himself at dinner at the fanciest restaurant in Minneapolis with Martin and Mickey Friedman—the director and design curator of the Walker Art Center—and Toni Morrison. The young man was Jim Sitter. Morrison had just given a reading at the Walker and Sitter had, for the event, printed ninety broadsides of a vignette from Tar Baby, which Morrison had signed. At the time, Martin Friedman and Morrison sat on the National Council for the Arts, the governing body of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The dinner conversation focused on cultural policy. What should the NEA be doing? How much money should go to this or that? Morrison deplored the publishing industry’s submission to the market.27 This was heaven to Sitter. He listened, “just drinking it in.” Over the past few years, he had become obsessed with cultural policy—specifically, with how to make cultural policy in Minnesota work on behalf of literature. Sitter grew up in Fargo. A high school teacher introduced him to poetry— brought practicing poets into the classroom—which, Sitter says, saved his life. He moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to attend Macalester College and found a job at Hungry Mind, an independent bookstore, a job so important to his future that he remembers the hour he started: 3 p.m. on July  20, 1975. He quickly became the bookbuyer for poetry and overhauled the stock from a modest selection of dead white poets to a sweeping host of contemporaries, the best of any bookstore between New York and San Francisco, by his determination. He claims it turned a profit.28

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As a bookbuyer, he began learning about small presses. In the blasted cold of Minnesota winter, the first days of 1976, Mary Karr, Sitter’s college “chum,” walked into Hungry Mind and asked for a book of poetry, Popham of the New Song by Norman Dubie, published by an unknown outfit called Graywolf Press out of Port Townsend. Sitter figured if Karr wanted it then it was interesting. He tracked down Scott Walker and ordered five copies, which began their correspondence. Sitter met Allan and Cinda Kornblum, who ran Toothpaste Press, at a book fair in St. Paul in the fall of 1976. The Kornblums drove up from their home in Iowa. They looked famished, so Sitter offered to buy them sandwiches. Allan— looking like a shambolic hippie, big smile, long hair, mustache—gestured dramatically, sending his arm down before lifting his index finger into the air, saying, “that’d be great!”29 Meanwhile, Sitter, at Hungry Mind, became the biggest buyer from Truck, the local small press distributor, run by David Wilk.30 Wilk needed a hand but didn’t want to mess with payroll, so he made a deal with Hungry Mind whereby Sitter would work part-time for him off book. At the end of 1978, Wilk was named literature director for the National Endowment of the Arts. Sitter bought the distributor from Wilk over a meal at a Mexican restaurant in early 1979 for $400 (about $1,600 in 2022 dollars) and renamed it Bookslinger.31 In his first months working as a distributor, he made a sales trip to Prairie Lights in Iowa City. He had been offered a place to stay by the Kornblums. He arrived late at night. Cinda, a new mom, was sleeping, but Allan was in the print shop, attached to the house. As Sitter recalled, “Allan’s got the radio just blaring, he is listening to the Chicago Cubs, he has got his C&P platen press going, and  he is printing.”32 Sitter had never seen someone use lead type. Here was Kornblum, a kinetic blur, long curls swinging, printing books in the small hours. Sitter watched, agog. The scene led him to found the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. To get there, he would need money, in pursuit of which he would lay the foundations for nonprofit publishing. That year—1979—Sitter read a story in the local paper that detailed how much money the Mixed Blood Theatre Company had received in grants from Dayton Hudson and General Mills to put on Ntozake Shange’s play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. One of the presses he worked with was Shameless Hussy, which published Shange’s play. He found a copy and searched front and back matter for signs of philanthropy but found none. Sitter knew Jack Reuler, the founder of Mixed Blood, from their college days at Macalester. Sitter figured if this guy he knew from college could get tens

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of thousands of dollars in donations to put on a play, why couldn’t publishers do the same?33

THE TAPS OPEN

Sitter did his research.34 Arts nonprofits originated in the United States in Boston in the late nineteenth century as an institutional lever the wealthy could use to launder their riches into cultural capital, maybe the first mechanism in this country by which high art—in this case, fine art and symphonies—was effectively separated from low.35 But the new nonprofits didn’t fund literature, which, in the early twentieth century, at least in its elite registers, withdrew “from the public sphere,” entering “into a divided world of patronage, investment, and collecting.”36 Private individuals funded the high modernists and Harlem Renaissance writers. Ezra Pound was at the center of this world, cultivating relationships with wealthy donors such as John Quinn and writing fierce polemics in which he insisted that great art needed patronage to escape the market, polemics that would travel from Pound to James Laughlin to Scott Walker and from Laughlin to Kenneth Rexroth to Sam Hamill, serving as justification for the arts nonprofits.37 In 1917, the U.S. government made donations to nonprofits tax deductible for individuals and in 1936 did the same for corporations, though these provisions were only widely exploited after World War II, when nonprofits expanded dramatically thanks to the rise of funding from private foundations (led by the Ford Foundation), the government (beginning in the mid-1960s with the National Endowment for the Arts, alongside state-level programs), and corporations (the most recent development).38 Tax-deductible donations became “the most significant form of arts support in the United States.”39 Sitter was among the first—if not the first—to recognize the nonprofit sector as a new avenue for literary patronage.40 A friend told Sitter about a three-ring binder that sat in an arts organization in downtown St. Paul and held everything he needed. It had “a two-page description of every arts nonprofit in the [Twin Cities] with things like revenue sources, amounts, budget sizes, earned income ratio.” The hitch was that the binder couldn’t leave the building. Sitter memorized it all. He saw patterns. He “figured out there were six primary sources of support for the arts, from corporations, foundations, and the state.” He determined that the arts organizations

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that were flourishing—none of which were in the literary realm—shared “an interesting commonality in terms of boards of directors.”41 Then he went out and made himself known to the people who sat on those boards, forging a plan to make Minnesota the place to be for literary nonprofits. That was how he got to know the Friedmans and ended up at dinner with Toni Morrison. The taps opened. Attracting small presses to the Twin Cities dovetailed with governmental hopes to gentrify downtown neighborhoods that were host to porn shops, residential hotels, sex workers, and transients. “Minneapolis became the first city in the United States to offer donations to nonprofit letterpresses,” writes Elizabeth Schwartz, “under the condition that the press move to town and set up shop in the Warehouse District.”42 The Kornblums shuttered Toothpaste, came up from Iowa, and started Coffee House Press as a nonprofit. Shortly after, Sitter persuaded Walker to come east to visit. Their friendship had accelerated in 1979 because of Tess Gallagher. She called Sitter directly in April in his capacity as a distributor and asked him to get her books in the bookstores where she was reading. It was unheard of then, as now, for a writer to make such a request to a distributor directly. But it worked. Sitter “was selling the hell out of her books.” That led him to buy more from Graywolf, until he became its biggest customer. “On days we get a check from Bookslinger,” Walker told him, “we have vegetables with our rice.”43 In 1982, Walker flew to Minnesota to meet Sitter. They started talking and discovered they could talk and talk. They decided to keep talking while driving down to Iowa, which is how the Kornblums and Walker met. It was on that trip that Sitter and Walker began tossing around the idea of making Graywolf a nonprofit. It took another two years and an NEA Advancement Grant, on which Sitter served as Walker’s consultant, to make it a reality. Walker was charismatic in a way the Kornblums weren’t. In philanthropy lingo, he gave good lunch. Sitter was learning which strings to pull, and how. Walker fit. “There was no rich person that I knew at the time who would want to have dinner with Allan Kornblum,” he told me. “But Scott.” He could win a room. “Scott was on a very short list of people I wanted to be here to do what I wanted to do,” Sitter said.44 In 1984, Walker wrote an announcement letter to his mailing list: “Dear Friends of Graywolf, we are engaged in an exciting experiment. After nearly a decade of learning our craft as publishers, we’re expanding our list to publish 12–16 books a year, publishing novels, launching the Graywolf Short Fiction Series, and reorganizing as a non-profit, tax-exempt foundation. We are among the first publishers of mainstream literary work to become a non-profit foundation and to attempt to prove that individual, foundation, and corporate donors

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will aid literature and literary publishing in the same way they support theater, dance, and the symphony.” As it turned out, Walker had a hard time finding individual, foundation, and corporate donors who wanted to aid literature in the Pacific Northwest. Sitter by then had his fingers on the purse strings. Walker needed access to the purse. He decided to move Graywolf to Minnesota. On St.  Patrick’s Day 1985, Sitter picked up Walker from the airport and brought him to his large apartment, where they would live together. Sitter arranged a surprise party. Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher, along with Kay Sexton, vice president at B. Dalton, were there when they arrived. At the end of the year, Esquire named Walker one of its “Men and Women under Forty Who Are Changing the Nation.” Its note on Walker read, “Most publishers regard Scott Walker the way scientists regard the bumblebee. That is, they look at Walker, or more precisely at his St. Paul–based Graywolf Press, and say, ‘No way that thing can fly.’ ”45 Coffee House, Graywolf, and fellow Twin Cities press Milkweed Editions spent the latter half of the 1980s building their organizational infrastructures while publishing what they could. It wasn’t until the end of the decade, though, that the dam broke. In 1989, Sitter moved to New York City to run the Council of Literary Magazine and Presses with a mission to make nonprofit publishing a national movement. He secured millions in donations from two foundations; among the first recipients were the three Minnesota presses, which would allow them to dramatically scale up their productions.46

T WO PATHS

Over the next twenty years, nonprofit publishing transformed the U.S. literary landscape. Arte Público, Coffee House, Dalkey Archive, Milkweed, and others made space for ethnic literatures, translations, and literary experimentation. Graywolf became the most successful of all. In 2018, Graywolf had a budget of $4 million. Its writers—among them Anna Burns, Geoff Dyer, Paul Kingsnorth, Maggie Nelson, and Claudia Rankine—regularly win large awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and MacArthur grants. State and philanthropic money comes with expectations. As nonprofits published writing that the conglomerates deemed unfit for the market, they chose and shaped that writing according to their needs. What priorities would funders, explicitly or not, want to see expressed in the literature they financed? What

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would have success in nonprofits’ smaller but still consequential markets? Despite the cant of liberation, markets still mattered to nonprofits: the innovation came in that they could balance such success with other priorities. What values, aesthetic and otherwise, were encoded in the missions of government  units and foundations that would guide the editorial practices of the nonprofits? These two ways of structuring publishers’ finances—conglomerate and nonprofit—created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This chapter characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates its significance for the rise of multiculturalism.

BLEAK SCENE

The crisis at Pantheon in 1990 galvanized literary types to look for alternatives to the conglomerates, as when Laughlin petitioned the NBCC to look to Graywolf and its brethren. But the scene was bleak, if less so for poetry, which had migrated to nonprofits, than for fiction, which the nonprofits, by and large, were yet to take up. Predecessors to the nonprofits, presses that positioned themselves as culturally superior to behemoths like Random House, struggled through the 1970s and 1980s. Inflation outpaced wages, books exceeded budgets. New Directions carried on as the publisher of modernism, bringing out new editions of old works by its mainstays, Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams, and William Carlos Williams, along with Jorge Luis Borges and the house’s principal billpayer, Herman Hesse, while also becoming a home for Walter Abish, Frederick Busch, Ronald Firbank, Lars Gustafsson, John Hawkes, Elaine Kraf, and Raymond Queneau. Grove, which burned bright in the 1950s and 1960s, flamed out with the first wave of conglomeration. On April 13, 1970, feminists occupied Grove’s offices to protest its sexism and demand union recognition. The avant-garde publisher used its resistance to conglomeration as justification for rejecting the union, noting “the wave of corporate mergers sweeping over the publishing industry and insist[ing] that, insofar as they ‘have been virtually alone in resisting this trend,’ they should also be exempted from the unionization efforts that were a response to it.” This did not go over well. In the end, Grove had to downsize dramatically and still, to survive, rely on Jason Epstein “to prop up the company.”

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The outsider had to kiss the ring. “Epstein convinced an aging Bennett Cerf that it would be tragic to let Grove go under, so for much of the 1970s Random House distributed Grove’s titles, in return for which it received a portion of the profits.” Yet Grove managed to publish important new works in these decades by Kathy Acker, Gilbert Sorrentino, and John Kennedy Toole while largely living off its backlist. Barney Rosset, who had bought Grove in 1951 but was now in debt and “struggling to keep the company afloat in the new environment of corporate conglomerates,” eventually sold in 1985, to be fired by its new owner, Ann Getty, the next year. Getty spent the next seven years decimating the firm before merging it with Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993 to form Grove Atlantic, under the direction of Morgan Entrekin.47 In 1974, a group of writers—Jonathan Baumbach, Peter Spielberg, Mark Mirsky, Steve Katz, Ronald Sukenick—frustrated by the aesthetic limits imposed by commercial publishing, launched Fiction Collective. They typically published six titles each year, mostly by their own members at first, eventually widening to include Fanny Howe and Clarence Major, among others. By the mid-1980s, its organizational structure had grown unwieldy and, during the Reagan presidency, they struggled to acquire arts funding. In 1989, they relaunched as a nonprofit under the name Fiction Collective 2 (FC2). The scene was especially bleak for those who were not white men. Even with  Toni Morrison’s advocacy for black writers at Random House, the conglomerates—both their staff and their lists—remained overwhelmingly white. New Directions was almost exclusively white.48 Grove, whose list was notoriously male despite some improvement in these years, continued with executive editors and upper management who were exclusively men.49 Fiction Collective, started principally by white men, published mostly white men, at first. The 1960s saw the growth of small presses dedicated to publishing work by black writers, but these rapidly declined in the mid-1970s, and even at their peak they published far more poetry and nonfiction than fiction.50 By 1990, though, the radicalism of ethnic studies had been institutionalized as multiculturalism and the canon wars had been decided largely in favor of expanding the purview of literary history beyond white men. The conglomerates were out of step with higher education and, more broadly, an increasing awareness of underserved readerships. Who would publish the multicultural literature demanded by the moment? On Schiffrin’s firing and elevated anxiety about conglomeration, nonprofits were well situated to take up multicultural fiction and advantage of the industry’s limits and prejudices. FC2 moved quickly with titles from Samuel Delany, Melvin Dixon, Diane Glancy, and Gerald Vizenor. Wesleyan University Press

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also published Delany and Vizenor beginning in the early 1990s. University of Washington Press began publishing Asian American literature. As a panelist at the conference of the American Association of University Professors, Scott Walker predicted, “More and more serious books won’t be published by the big  commercial houses—their publication will fall to university presses and independent publishers, for whom the 1990s will be a time of tremendous opportunity.”51 Walker spoke from self-interest but he was right. Publishers Weekly, covering the American Booksellers Association’s conference the next summer, reported, “It is as if, in 1991, a critical mass has been achieved, with the small press section now crystallized into what in recent years glimmered beneath the bookish surface as a possibility—a sidelines bazaar—with the main floor, this year commodious if not exactly airy, a temple to democracy in book publishing.”52

WE ARE THE DEBATE

Walker had positioned Graywolf at the forefront of the nonprofit boom.53 In a grant proposal submitted in late 1991, Graywolf claimed, “many current funders of literature think that in the way the 1960s were in philanthropy the decade of theater, the 1990s will be the decade of literature.” Graywolf observed that conglomerates were “cutting back their fiction and literary publishing programs.” What fiction the commercial presses were publishing, they treated, increasingly, as Graywolf noted in its proposal, with “a mass market approach,” including for titles “that don’t necessarily call for that kind of treatment.” As a result, Graywolf had been receiving “manuscripts from more established authors; from authors who deliberately choose to be published by a smaller house rather than a more commercial one; and it is now more possible to acquire books that have stronger sales potential.”54 Making good on that sales potential required getting Graywolf books in bookstores. That’s what Sitter had been doing in his role as a small press distributor, driving around the Midwest a decade earlier. In 1980, he didn’t need to drive far to arrive at one seat of power. B. Dalton, one of the two dominant chains, along with Waldenbooks, was headquartered in Minneapolis. But he did have to cut a lot of red tape. “I went through seven layers of bureaucracy,” he told me. “I met with this person and that person.” He managed, eventually, to secure lunch with Kay Sexton, B. Dalton’s vice president of merchandising and

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communication. She held sway. (She would, five years later, attend Walker’s Minnesota welcome party and join Graywolf ’s board.) They met at the restaurant in Le Sofitel, a high-end hotel. She ordered the salmon, so he ordered the salmon. She then turned to him and asked, “What do you have for middlebrow?” He said, “Not much.” But it turned out that B. Dalton was opening a new store in Greenwich Village and wanted to make a splash—and match the stock of other bookstores in the Village. “The Village store will be tailored to the Village life style,” B. Dalton’s senior vice president for real estate told the New York Times the next year, in 1981. “It will have longer hours, probably until about 11 p.m., it will feature more esoteric titles, more extensive philosophical categories, and we’ll probably have more author visits than in our other stores.”55 Sitter told Sexton he could give her 235 small presses. He could provide those esoteric titles.56 He and Allan Kornblum traveled to New York for the grand opening. Kornblum printed broadsides on site. Afterward, they went out to a bar near Washington Square Park. Sitter lifted a bill in the air and said the first round was on Bookslinger. The poet Alice Notley whispered in Kornblum’s ear, “who’s the young businessman with the twenty?” By the end of the decade, B. Dalton was down and Barnes & Noble was up— the latter had in fact acquired the former in 1986. In a buoyant sign for Graywolf in 1990, the first Barnes & Noble superstore opened in Minnesota and aimed to counteract its generalized chain format by spotlighting local authors and publishers. It devoted an entire case to Graywolf.57 Borders, big but not yet humongous, told Graywolf staff that it needed small press books “to distinguish [itself] from the commercial chains.”58 In September 1991, Graywolf strategized how to get their books permanently on chain backlists. They debated the merits of various distributors, noting that “Use of the word stories in promotional, descriptive, or jacket materials is the kiss of death for a book at Ingram, Baker & Taylor, or the chains. The representatives said always call it a novel, no matter what it is.”59 The timing was such that literary nonprofits without explicit commitments to ethnic literature, such as Coffee House and Graywolf, found themselves expanding their fiction lists because ethnic literature was becoming increasingly marketable as well as increasingly desirable for government bureaucracies and the donor class to support. At a long-range planning meeting in 1991, Graywolf staff observed that fiction sales were down in general, but up for ethnic literature.60 One of the “goals and priorities” that year was to “aggressively broaden the range of potential funders to Graywolf, by making special efforts on behalf of books that treat social and educational issues.”61 Above all, this meant marketing Multi-Cultural Literacy, an anthology of essays that intervened in the

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canon wars over what should be taught in high school and college. In August, Graywolf staff brainstormed “some sort of catchy slogan regarding GW’s crucial role in this discussion: (i.e. along the lines of: ‘Way before Dinesh D’Souza there was multiculturalism. Graywolf Press: we are the debate.’)” One staffer proposed printing tee-shirts.62 By the end of the year, Graywolf expanded its mission to note that its “books often help to promote cross-cultural and international understanding.”63 It began to publish more translations and books by writers of color. Walker wrote in a memo to his staff, “The more I think of it, the more I think we ought to put our money where our mouths are and hire a person of color here. Do others share this concern?”64 As far as I can tell, it didn’t happen. In an essay about her internship at Graywolf, Sherry Kempf made the logic plain. “One book on the fall list that highlights the interaction between marketing and funding,” she wrote, “is Little by David Treuer.”65 Treuer is a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe who studied creative writing under Toni Morrison at Princeton. Little, published in 1995, was his first novel. Kempf continued, “This type of project is fairly new for Graywolf, but it does fulfill the community outreach goals that funders are looking for right now. The book is written by a person of color whose own community will be served by the grant.” She summed up, “There seems to be a trade-off: non-profits can afford to take more risks, but in return they are required to comply with funding guidelines.”66 State and philanthropic money freed Graywolf from surviving solely on sales and subsidiary rights but made the publisher beholden to the priorities of its funders—including the Dayton Hudson Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts—which, in the 1990s, meant, in large part, multiculturalism. Allan Kornblum, publisher of Coffee House, was forthright about the shift to multiculturalism. In 1994, he privately acknowledged, “Ironically, Coffee House has developed a reputation as a publisher of Asian American titles without that specific goal in mind. Through our usual process of selecting books that are diverse or adventurous and represent fine writing, we have ‘discovered’ or advanced the careers of a number of critically acclaimed Asian American writers.”67 The next year, Coffee House would present itself in a grant proposal as a press that “takes very seriously its commitment to represent diversity. Over the years we have become known for presenting the voices of under-represented communities and maintaining high literary standards. We are one of the premier presenters of work by Asian American writers in the country.”68

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Coffee House leveraged its multiculturalism to differentiate itself from the conglomerates. “Although commercial presses have published some high-profile books by writers of color, small presses have long championed literary diversity.” This was selectively true. The proposal continues, “One year books by African American writers are the craze in the for-profit sector, another year books by Asian American writers hit the stands, but small presses stick with their commitment, providing the public with the full picture of the many cultures that make up America.”69 This was how an accident became a mission.70 What did publishers’ unstable mix of motives portend for multiculturalism? The meaning of multiculturalism was at stake. Which Asian American, Black, Indian, and Latinx stories would be represented? Whose voices would be elevated? What kind of racial visions would result from the constraints that governed access to the public sphere? Nonprofits advance the narrative that they operate with freedom that conglomerates lack. But patronage matters. Nonprofits need to please their funders because they return again and again to the same well. In these early years, their funders, consciously or not, had a sense of what multiculturalism meant to them. It wasn’t, for example, E. Lynn Harris’s downlow romances or Omar Tyree’s urban fiction, which were finding audiences right then. Ethnic literature is no stable thing. Every new book stakes a definitional claim. The sudden elevation of these literatures by nonprofits in the 1990s meant that white editors, by and large, were creating the categories to which books by writers of color were assigned. What differences are there, if any, between the fiction that writers of color occasionally sold to market-driven publishers and that which they sold to the subsidized nonprofits? How did patronage—whether that of the market, the state, or private foundations—shape these bodies of literature?

THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

The Arts and Humanities Act, which founded the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, named as its aim the reinforcement of U.S. hegemony. “The world leadership which has come to the United States cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the nation’s high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit.”71 In principle, the United States, during the Cold War, claimed to endorse aesthetic freedom as an extension of individual freedom—its

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“high qualities”—against Soviet censorship and state-sponsorship of propagandistic art. Alongside its service as a handmaiden to U.S. global ambitions, the NEA served, according to Ralph Ellison, to shore up democracy at home. Ellison, the famous author of Invisible Man, was an original appointee to the National Council on the Arts. He made his case in the introduction to Buying Time: An Anthology Celebrating 20 Years of the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. The book was edited by Scott Walker and published by Graywolf in 1985, just as the press was transitioning into a nonprofit with primary support from the NEA. Ellison describes the NEA as “a long-deferred answer to questions that had perplexed the nation’s leaders for close to two hundred years: what role should the imaginative arts play in the official affairs of a democratic society?” But the Founding Fathers, in Ellison’s account, weren’t so much perplexed by the question as hostile to the idea that the arts might have any role at all. He writes that the “likes of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin” would see the workings of the NEA as a “drastic reversal” of their sensibilities. “For them,” he writes, “the imaginative arts were an enhancement of monarchic culture that required an educated elite for their proper appreciation,” which was what the Fathers were trying to escape.72 With the GI Bill and the postwar economic boom, the number of college-educated Americans exploded, changing the conditions for the government’s relationship to art: suddenly the subsidization of art could look more democratic and less aristocratic. Ellison argues that art does the crucial work of lubricating the otherwise dangerous friction generated by the differences internal to American society. “By projecting free-wheeling definitions of the diversity and complexity of American experience it allows for a more or less peaceful adjustment between the claims of ‘inferiors’ and ‘superiors’—a function of inestimable value to a society based, as is ours, upon the abstract ideal of social equality.” 73 Ellison celebrates art for its ability to resolve real inequality with symbolic projections. He makes a political argument for what Mark McGurl dubbed “high cultural pluralism,” literature that unites preoccupations with cultural difference and modernist aesthetics, a boon, thinks Ellison, for a nation ostensibly committed to social equality but divided by racism.74 The NEA is subject, in practice, to direct political pressure, which shapes its priorities. Maggie Doherty tracked grants to individual writers over time to argue that, under Reagan, the NEA shifted from “funding formally dense, politically dissident literature—the kind of literature unlikely to find success in  the literary marketplace—to funding formally conventional, thematically

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populist, fundamentally integrative fiction that would appeal to the average reader and achieve commercial success.” Specifically, she argues that minimalism was the principal beneficiary of the new dispensation, work that shared traits with and was often influenced by that of Raymond Carver, associated with names such as Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Tobias Wolff.75 That, though, is only part of the picture. In March 1979, under President Jimmy Carter, the House Appropriations Committee recommended in a report that the NEA increase its support for minority writers. Toni Morrison joined the Literature Program’s advisory panel the next year. Alexander Manshel has shown how, because the NEA used an anonymous selection system, selectors depended “on historical settings as a proxy for race and ethnicity”—a book about the Holocaust might well indicate that an author was Jewish; if it were about antebellum slavery one might gamble that the author was black—leading to the sponsorship of “scores of minoritized authors, but minoritized authors of historical novels” from the 1980s onward. That these novels were historical was, according to Manshel, crucial, “satisfying both conservative desires for the preservation of American history as well as progressive demands for greater diversity,” in the spirit of Ellison’s lofty vision.76 On its founding, the NEA feared that conglomeration threatened literature’s diversity. As the NEA was getting up and running in the late 1960s, the “literary ecosystem,” in the words of the NEA’s official history, “was undergoing significant change.” The Endowment understood that it was dedicating “resources and funds to poets and fiction writers whose works might not survive in this new mass media climate.”77 For most of its first two decades, the NEA offered small grants of up to several thousand dollars to writers and literary organizations, awarding nearly twelve hundred, cumulatively, by 1985. In the 1970s, this was “the only national funding available to nonprofit literary presses,” helping pay for “paper, binding, and operating costs.”78 Beginning in the 1980s, the NEA offered larger “challenge grants,” which underwrote the rapid expansion of the nonprofits.79 The money was important, but even more important was how these grants compelled the improvement of business practices. The founders of the presses were often literary people who loved books but had little business acumen and muddled through with dodgy finances. As late as 1987, Graywolf—as revealed by an external audit—was tracking costs with cards for each book, but “not all job cost cards [had] been accumulating expenses on the same basis.”80 Such chaos was typical. To apply for a challenge grant, a press had to complete an extensive application, detailing how it intended to allocate the funds. If awarded, the press had to maintain an account of how, in fact, the funds were spent and to what end,

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which instilled discipline. Coffee House’s Allan Kornblum had had to ask, when applying in 1988, “What is our optimum size . . . in terms of staff, and number of books to print, and number of copies of each book? What percent of our budget can we afford for rent, for marketing?”81 Jim Sitter was the grants master for Kornblum, Walker, and Milkweed’s Emilie Buchwald. He was watching the NEA closely, learning the rules of the game. He was at dinner with Martin Friedman and Toni Morrison, listening to table talk about the NEA’s decision-making. It was no accident that Carver was one of Graywolf ’s initial board members. Sitter helped the Minnesota presses win challenge grants that launched them as nonprofits. To expand further, though, to a degree that might make them a viable alternative to the conglomerates for more writers, especially fiction writers, they would need to learn to play another game, this time with private foundations.

PRIVATE FOUNDATIONS

Jim Sitter remained in the middle of things. He moved to New York City in 1989 to overhaul the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). His ambition was to leverage his position to do for the country what he’d done for Minnesota. At its “most grandiose,” he hoped to lay the groundwork for “dozens of nonprofit literary presses in at least two dozen states, publishing a diverse range of literature and poetry, including, poetry in translation, and getting financial support from not just the NEA but from state arts agencies, from local arts agencies, from private philanthropy, from corporate philanthropy.” To do so, he needed money, a lot more than he found in Minnesota. Part of that meant defending and expanding the work of the NEA Literature Program, which entailed spending time in the offices of U.S. senators. But he also set his sights on two foundations: an old one, Andrew W. Mellon, with a new director, Rachel Newton Bellow, daughter-in-law of Saul Bellow; and a new one called Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund. Foundations dispense the money of the wealthy and the wealthy exchange their money for cultural capital—and tax breaks. What exactly that means depends on the structure of a given foundation and the people involved. Charisma tends to be important. Usually, this is implicit: everyone knows that having a charismatic artist in one’s pocket loosens purse strings. In an address to the Mellon Foundation in 1992, Bellow made it explicit by describing charisma as fundamental for the success of arts enterprises: “We view institutions not as

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anonymous or monolithic entities,” she said, “but as changeable enterprises in which individual leadership and talent are of paramount importance.”82 She might have been thinking of Scott Walker. Walker “was the one person who really charmed Rachel,” Sitter told me. “Scott became her partner.”83 She adopted Sitter’s and Walker’s mission and packaged it for Mellon. She told Sitter it would be unfair to ask him to write material for her, but asked if they could have conversations where she wrote down everything he said, the “Diane Sawyer to your Marla Maples.”84 Until recently, the literary field had failed “to develop a nonprofit infrastructure comparable to that existing in other art forms,” she said. But now, with the boost from the NEA, “publishing seems well positioned to benefit from the kind of assistance the Foundation can provide.” She hoped that Mellon’s investment would prove the basis for “an increasingly important sector within the publishing industry: fully professional, smallscale companies whose ends are aesthetic and cultural, and whose profits (if any) are reinvested fully in the enterprise.”85 Whereas Mellon was an old foundation with a new face in Bellow, Lila Wallace was simply new, an unknown entity, and thus an opportunity for Sitter. Wallace had been, with her husband DeWitt, who died in 1981, cofounder and co-owner of Reader’s Digest. During her life, she used her wealth to restore Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny, France, and gave generously to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including “funds to provide fresh flowers every day inside the entrance.”86 Her lawyer told the New York Times that “She was interested in beautification. It’s a tacky word, but she was fascinated with making things look better, restoring things that were once beautiful and bringing them back. She was not at all interested in social issues.”87 Such philanthropic activity fit with the image of Reader’s Digest as a conservative, middlebrow magazine. Lila Wallace died in 1984. She had no children and left her money to the foundation bearing her name. The Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund spent five years on its infrastructure, which meant it was about to start spending in 1989, as Sitter arrived in New York City to lead the CLMP. Within the next few years, it became “the leading private provider of funds for the arts in the United States.”88 To the surprise of everyone paying attention, its mission diverged dramatically from that of its namesake. It asked recipients “to build ethnic diversity into their futures through the hiring of minority artists and administrators and the shaping of programs that will attract nonwhite audiences.”89 It also funded “multicultural programming and experimental art forms with a political edge.”90 It gave a grant of $66,300, for example, to an adjunct professor at Union College to put on a performance by Bread and Puppet Theater, a small, politically radical troupe about as far from Reader’s Digest in the cultural field as

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possible. They used the money to stage the anticolonial production, “Christopher Columbus: The New World Order.” Sitter began plying Mellon and Wallace at the end of 1989. He was in the thick of it, then, when Alberto Vitale fired André Schiffrin in February 1990. Sitter attended the protests outside Random House, where he found himself marching behind, and fielding questions from, Studs Terkel. The Schiffrin fiasco was good for Sitter: “it caught the attention of some people who might have been reluctant to support or even listen to my message.” The dangers of conglomeration felt suddenly very real, more than just the rhetoric of idealists. Someone like Rachel Newton Bellow would be talking about it with her husband over dinner. After that, Sitter said, “they would look at me and what I had to say a little differently.” By 1991, Sitter secured $6 million ($13 million in 2022 dollars) for nonprofit presses between the two foundations, a stunning amount for that sector. Mellon supported building “organization capacity” and Wallace helped “presses market more effectively.”91 Repeated across the archives is the same gratitude Emilie Buchwald, founder of Milkweed Editions, expressed: “Funders didn’t give us just money, which was important; they gave us expertise and they left us with infrastructure.”92 They also left them with multicultural missions. Lila Wallace’s interest in racial diversity dovetailed with that of the NEA and Mellon. Bellow noted, “the Foundation does not consider the issue of pluralism in the arts or the development of minority institutions to be separate from its other programs. In the process of defining all our programs, we assess whether institutions are adapting realistically to the changing society.”93 Sitter’s ambition was that Mellon and Wallace would jumpstart literary philanthropy, marking the beginning of a vast expansion, “the way Ford [Foundation] and NEA money in the 60s did for theater.” But that didn’t happen. The NEA faced elimination after Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House in 1996. In 1997, Lila Wallace took “a breather” and Mellon had “suspended its programs” for nonprofit publishers “indefinitely.”94 Sitter’s project hit considerable turbulence very quickly when Scott Walker, who was meant to be the golden boy of the movement, fell apart. Or, in Sitter’s words, “what happened was, Scott blew up.”95

SUCCESSION

Between 1984 and 1993, Graywolf expanded dramatically, but not without turmoil. It won a challenge grant in 1984 with the backing of the director of the

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NEA’s Literature Program, Frank Conroy (who would leave the NEA in 1987 to lead the Iowa Writers’ Workshop). Conroy wrote Walker a letter of recommendation in which he called Graywolf “a model press, a paradigm” and insisted that “Graywolf must expand. Over the next decade the very best of the independent presses must publish the literary writers whom the conglomeratedominated commercial publishers can no longer support.”96 He closed, “Graywolf is the future.”97 Graywolf became a nonprofit and moved to Saint Paul. Walker established “a minimal board of directors”—a requirement for nonprofits—with two members: Raymond Carver, who by then was widely considered the country’s best short story writer; and Jonathan Galassi, an editor at Random House who went on to become the president of FSG.98 Graywolf ’s list grew and so did its budget. It won Mellon and Wallace grants. From the outside, it appeared to be thriving, but Walker was increasingly unhappy. For years, he’d been asking James Laughlin how he’d managed to have success while spending so much time away from New Directions. (Laughlin was independently wealthy.) In early May, 1991, at the end of another long Minnesota winter, Walker wrote Laughlin, “I want very much to leave Minnesota, to move into the Rockies, I need to be nearer mountains. But I don’t want to hurt the press, and a lot of people close to it are skeptical that I’ll be able to live away from Graywolf and for things to keep working well. I point to ND as an example of how it can work.”99 But even as it was, things were not working. By the early 1990s, Walker’s relationship with Jim Sitter was in a bad place. A few years earlier, Sitter had given a tour of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA)—his baby—to an elderly philanthropist, after which Sitter realized that there had been a “hidden agenda.” The philanthropist needed to see MCBA in person before contributing because Walker was criticizing it to him behind Sitter’s back, saying that what the center did was obsolete because of computers, akin to making “belts at the Renaissance Faire”: a relic.100 Walker’s words felt to Sitter like a betrayal. Sitter had spent years building the infrastructure for Graywolf to become what it was becoming. The two were living together in Sitter’s apartment. But they couldn’t break, because they needed each other. Walker played a major role in Sitter’s design. He knew no better exemplar for literary nonprofits. “Scott Walker was the most complete book publisher in terms of talent and ability that ever was in the small press world,” Sitter told me. “He could design beautiful books, print beautiful books, he was a good editor, could acquire well, manage writer relations well, understand the rights market, marketing, he could handle all of that. A number of good people were on his staff, and he could keep

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them happy, at least for a few years. And he could elicit support in ways that very few literary nonprofit people could.”101 When Sitter began wooing Mellon and Wallace, he wanted Graywolf as his showcase but had trouble stomaching the idea of working with Walker. The next time Walker came to Manhattan, Sitter took him to breakfast to let him know how much money might well come his way: breakfast, where Sitter only ordered coffee, because he wasn’t sure he could eat in front of Walker. But sure enough, Walker enchanted Rachel Newton Bellow at Mellon and helped seal a deal worth, when spread across nine small presses, millions. The same was true with Lila Wallace. In January 1993, in the first big payout, Mellon cut Graywolf a check for $265,000.102 A few months later, in May, at the American Booksellers Association in Miami, at a rooftop hotel pool, Chris Faatz, the marketing director at Graywolf, sidled up to Sitter. The two didn’t know each other. Faatz said, “Jim, I want to talk to you about something I’m worried about.” They were both looking out at the scene: publishers, writers, a “Morgan Entrekin party, an Atlantic Monthly party, because it’s at the pool, and you can’t see the cocaine, but it’s there.” Faatz told Sitter, “you know how we have a line in the budget for remainders,” or books that don’t sell the first time around. Faatz continued, “the most we’ve ever sold of remainders in a year was 9,000. But this year he put down 50,000.”103 That figure was impossible. “Shit hit the fan,” as Sitter put it, “in September.”104 The Graywolf board learned that the press was running a $200,000 deficit.105 Walker had tried to grow the press too much and too fast. In March 1994, the board asked Walker to resign, which he readily did, acknowledging his managerial struggles. Page Cowles, the president of the board, became the interim publisher of Graywolf. She fired half the staff. She canceled contracts with writers. When the news spread, it threatened the burgeoning literary nonprofit movement. Walker’s failure “set off alarm bells” across the field, including for Sitter, who asked himself, “if it could happen to Graywolf, what was I doing? What was going to happen?” Was there a limit to small press growth? Sitter imagined philanthropists thinking, “these friendly nice poets who love literature can’t add and subtract and once they hit a certain six figure or seven figure number they explode.” Meanwhile, said Sitter, who was still, as the executive director of CLMP, facilitating millions in foundation funds, “other presses and magazines didn’t want Graywolf to fuck things up for them. And they wanted me to do something about it. But people didn’t understand that Scott and I weren’t friends.”106

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Sitter and Cowles decided that one immediate action they could take was to acquire, in the middle of the Walker mess, a new philanthropic commitment. They aimed for the Lannan Foundation. Sitter knew enough about Patrick Lannan to know that what he wanted was to meet writers. So he and Cowles asked Tess Gallagher to write a letter—“a two-page letter, not two full pages, but not just one page; you don’t send Patrick a note, but you also don’t send him too many words”—where she says the next time she’s in Los Angeles she wants to have dinner with him. And she asks him for $25,000 for Graywolf. “And, bang,” said Sitter, “$25,000 comes that month.” Each party had a play for power in the deal: “a sign to everyone that Lannan’s still in it, and Tess is still in it, too. And Graywolf isn’t Scott.”107 After an extensive search, the board hired Fiona McCrae. She was a perfect choice. She had experience at Faber and Faber, a literary commercial publisher, but had grown disillusioned with the for-profit scene and had left her position with the thought of maybe becoming an agent. She brought not only business sense but invaluable professional networks from east coast and UK publishing. She also came in, thanks to the austerity imposed by Page Cowles, with “no debt, no apologies to make to funders locally or nationally, and with the freedom to build her own staff.”108 One of her first acts was to meet the important players in the nonprofit world, including Gigi Bradford, the current director of the NEA’s Literature Program. In McCrae’s first letter to the Graywolf community, she reported that, at her meeting with Bradford, “the mood was high, with an optimism that the field was recognizing itself and therefore finally able to become stronger.”109 Succession is a thorny problem for a small press because the founder’s vision, even his identity, is profoundly embedded. Graywolf set an early example for how to make it work.

LITERARY AND DIVERSE

Nonprofit presses, in 1994, after a decade of incubation, comprised a new formation to resist the alleged homogenization brought on by conglomeration. It included counterculture figures like Coffee House’s Allan Kornblum, Copper Canyon’s Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson, and Milkweed’s Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with letterpress; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público’s Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press’s Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive’s John O’Brien; and refugees from conglomeration like McCrae and

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André Schiffrin (who had by then started his own nonprofit, The New Press). John Lane, who interned with Copper Canyon in Port Townsend in 1978, founded Hub City Press in South Carolina in 1995. The power of the editorpublisher, which conglomeration eroded, was back in a new sector. Two keywords defined their self-understanding: literary and diverse. Nonprofits used these words to differentiate themselves from commercial presses in an endless temporality of crisis. Literature was in crisis because of the homogenizing force of conglomeration. This narrative, these terms, were habituated and institutionalized through the perpetual documentation required by state and philanthropic funding. For nonprofits, it was always good for literature to be in crisis because that made their mission—to sustain literature’s otherwise endangered diversity and literariness—urgent. From Ralph Ellison’s perspective, no less than American democracy was at stake. Although he might have hoped that diverse literature would repair social inequality, more often literature reconciled the populace to inequality by providing the outlet of the imagination. An emphasis on multiculturalism in the 1990s, for instance, gave the impression that the literary world was more diverse, equal, and democratic than it was. The celebration of Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, and Amy Tan masked the profound whiteness of the trade publishing industry.110 What did this narrative of crisis mean for the nonprofits in practice? It offered an aesthetic agenda with regard to content (multiculturalism) and form (literary style), language they used not only to win grants but, then, to justify editorial decisions. But this ideology opens up further questions because its terms are vague. What did it look like when the nonprofits translated the cant from their grant applications into published literature? What did it mean to be literary and diverse? What differentiated nonprofit fiction from that of the conglomerates?

A WIDER VIEW

As previous chapters explain, by the 1980s conglomeration had led to conglomerate authorship. We saw how Stephen King and Danielle Steel became brands and how being a brand constrained their aesthetic choices even as they fought to express limited artistic freedom, sometimes in explicit rebellion. What we read when we read their fiction is best understood as attributable to collective forces. We saw how literary authors under conglomeration adopted genre techniques, a response to the inchoate wills of everyone from literary agents to booksellers to  editors to executives to publicists. Among the emergent properties was a

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tendency to make novels about conglomeration itself, sometimes allegorically, sometimes by bringing the business of publishing into the fiction. Nonprofit novels did not face the same set of pressures, but they faced pressures nonetheless. These came less from marketing departments and chain booksellers than from the NEA, philanthropists, and a self-aware drive to be unlike New York publishing. What did these pressures mean for the novels themselves? For a study published elsewhere, Edwin Roland and I performed computational analyses of novels published by nonprofit publishers and compared them with those published by Random House in the same period.111 We found that nonprofit novels tend to privilege embodiment, craft, and localism. They give more attention to what it feels like to live in a body, describing perception, sensations. They draw on the language of artistic practice and the world of craft: forms, colors, shapes, surface. They tend toward rural settings. By contrast, Random House novels tend to privilege language of law and power, bureaucracy, and dispositions. They give more attention to the results-driven world of ambition, the linguistic formalism of administration, and the manners and mores of polite correspondence. Let’s put these results in conversation with other scholarship that studies the language of fiction at scale over time. Ted Underwood has shown that across a timespan of several hundred years fiction differed from biography by its use of “action verbs,” “body parts,” and “verbs of sensory perception.”112 Andrew Piper, in a separate study, showed that the “particular nature” of fiction is its commitment to our “perceptual” engagement with the world, “grounded in an appeal to an embodied encounter.”113 The divergence has grown over time. In the 1700s— the early days of the English-language novel—fiction was closer to biography, but across the centuries they have grown further apart. What we see, then—painting with broad strokes—is that, beginning in the 1980s, nonprofits took responsibility for literature of embodiment, providing continuity with this several-century trend. Embodiment goes together with pastoral neighborliness (a world of simple things close to hand) and concern for craft (the foundation of art and experience: forms, color, shapes, surface) corroborating continuity with the past. This is fiction that emphasizes what distinguishes it as fictional, whereas conglomerates distinguish themselves by expressing conglomeration. Bureaucratic formalism voices rationalization, the intensification of rules and systems, in an attempt to make order from the chaos of the book market. Ambition channels the prioritization of the bottom line and the increasing infusions of capital that conglomeration introduced into the book business, negotiated in deals that reached into the millions thanks to power brokers at the Manhattan Four Seasons. The language of correspondence, is the language of banal everyday life in publishing—acquisition, rejection—characterized above all by the rise of the agent.

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How might this study help us interpret novels? Let’s return to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Although it was published by Knopf, a Random House imprint, Roland and my model mistakenly thinks it was published by a nonprofit. Anyone who has read the novel knows it is suffused with the language of embodiment, craft, and localism. Sethe, from being whipped as a slave, has a scar on her back that looks like a “chokecherry tree.” Escaping slavery on foot, Sethe wears out her pregnant body: “Her leg shaft ended in a loaf of flesh scalloped by five toenails.”114 Her nipples leak milk, her head clangs. Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, is obsessed with color. It is a novel of dancing and singing, of colors and shapes, of roots and trees and neighbors—and horrific brutality. In chapter  4, I argue that Beloved is an allegory of publishing. Morrison began to write it—got the idea to write it—on quitting her position as an editor at Random House and feeling a strange feeling, an “edginess” she couldn’t place, “a rogue anticipation,” that turned out to be the happiness of freedom. She gives that feeling to Baby Suggs when she first crosses into the free state of Ohio. “Something’s the matter,” Baby Suggs thinks. It’s her hands. “These hands belong to me. These my hands.” The novel’s villain, who goes by “schoolteacher,” takes the embodiment of black people and abstracts it into institutional knowledge. He teaches his pupils to observe Sethe and to draw up a list, “to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right.”115 In writing the novel, Morrison staged an encounter between the language typically used in conglomerate and nonprofit novels. By placing black women and their embodied experience at the center of her account, she overwhelms the arid institutionalism and racist epistemology of schoolteacher, and thus of conglomeration, leading the model to recognize her novel as nonprofit.

FRENZY

The fiction lists of Coffee House, Graywolf, and Milkweed are more diverse than those of the conglomerates in terms of race and gender. Collectively, 70 percent of these nonprofit authors are white. About 93 percent of Random House authors across the same timespan are white. Moreover, white men account for more than half of authors at Random House, but make up less than a third at the nonprofits. But the nonprofit lists are small enough that one or two prolific writers can account for a big share of the diversity. As I write, Percival Everett has published twelve novels with Graywolf from its list of one hundred. Karen Tei Yamashita has published six novels (plus one short story collection and a “memory book of performances”) with Coffee House from its list of 121.

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As we’ll see, introducing Everett and Yamashita in terms of diversity is misleading. The writers represented by these statistics—who serve these presses in part as statistics—resist them through their work. As of 2022, Percival Everett had written twenty-three novels across his fortyyear career. They are a varied lot, including Westerns, satires, reconstructed Greek myths, and a thriller featuring a brilliant baby named Ralph with a knack for poststructuralism. Everett moved from publisher to publisher for his first five novels, until with the sixth, God’s Country, he met Fiona McCrae, who acquired and edited it for Faber and Faber in 1994, just as she was leaving for Graywolf. He followed her there and, except for a brief hiatus in the early aughts, stayed until McCrae’s retirement in 2022, when he moved to Doubleday with a more than $500,000 advance for his next novel, a rewriting of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective. He has been increasingly celebrated by critics and prize committees in the twenty-first century, culminating in the shortlisting of his novel The Trees for the 2022 Booker Prize. To draw attention to Everett’s Frenzy, published in 1997, McCrae took the rare step of praising it in an essay for Callaloo, where she declared herself convinced that Everett is a genius. Frenzy is an interesting example because it is, according to Roland and my model, a borderline case, hovering in its language between the poles of conglomerates and nonprofits. The novel is a riff on Greek myths. It begins with the king of Thebes facing a crisis. Dionysus, god of wine, has wooed the women of Thebes to abandon the city for the frenzy of the wilderness. The blind prophet Tiresias tells the king, “They have gone to beat the loose-skinned drum of life and power, leaving your city, shall we say, male.” Or, as Dionysus explains, “These men in power, their eyes see too far and their hands are too large for close work. Their hands are numb from the counting of money. That is why these women come to my call. These women have nothing to count but their fingers.”116 Everett genders language of embodiment: whereas men are alienated from their eyes and hands, women attend to their fingers; women beat drums. Power tends to signal conglomeration by the model; here it is what is contested. Meanwhile, the king’s mentor teaches him Nietzschean philosophy. “Power is preliminary to all things and preontological”; “you will thank me for a hardness”; “there is no such thing as misrule as long as you rule.”117 If the wilderness is a site of feminism, embodiment, and frenzy, then the city is the site of patriarchy, wealth, and absolute rule. The italicized words are influential according to Roland’s and my computational model, indicating nonprofit if only italicized and conglomerate if also boldface. Everett has staged a struggle between city and wilderness, patriarchy and feminism, form and frenzy, wealth and embodiment, conglomerate and

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nonprofit. Everett enacts the division of the model itself, the division of the contemporary publishing industry. The novel bears this out. The binary terms accumulate and expand. The king thinks, with regard to Dionysus, “this she-boy-god who dances so lightly is only as old as me, but he will live forever; so much to envy.” The king’s mentor complains that, in the city, “there is no production” and “trade has ceased.” He declares, “Reason is required for the derivation of actions from laws. Out there in that wild, away from my city, where our women frolic and make sick love, reason has no residence, the rabble move irrationally, forgetting rules, axioms, and precepts.” The city is host to economics and reason, “untidy and cold,” the narrator tells us, “vacuous and full of echoes and promises and ambitions and prevarications.”118 Away from the city, in the wilderness, rhythm holds sway: “breathing and song, rhythmed by the drum”; “the distant drum that fed the rhythm”; “the rhythm of the drums”; “the endless swaying—I continue to feel the rhythm of it”; “drummers among them keeping rhythm.”119 The wilderness is a world of heightened embodiment, of drunkenness, sex, and violence, of naked dancing, of killing and eating deer raw. Everett encourages us to side with Dionysus. The stakes are freedom. Freedom from money and order and the dispositions of polite society. Freedom to live in one’s body. Freedom of speech. The king’s mentor brags, “I gave these Greeks their letters.” But so long as the women were bound by the city, they could not properly speak. By leaving for the wilderness, Tiresias says, they “will rend their tethers and seek their own voice.”120 Frenzy is an allegory for the plight of the writer in the conglomerate era. To speak in the city is to be subject to the rationality and instrumentality of capital. To speak in the wilderness is to submit oneself to the embodiment of frenzy. But the binary, in Everett’s vision, cannot hold. The leader of the women is tricked into believing that, in the chaos of drunkenness, she has killed her own son, which convinces her and the women to quit the frenzy and undergo “a morose, sullen procession back into the city, a sullen defeat.”121 Embodiment as resistance to capital, Everett concludes, is futile; nonprofits, too, must submit to capital. The author must skillfully navigate between rhythm and reason, embodiment and bureaucracy.

ERASURE

Frenzy is, among other things, an allegory for the patriarchy of publishing. But this was the 1990s and multiculturalism was dominant and Everett was a black writer at Graywolf.

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Everett addressed race with Erasure, published in 2001 (with the University Press of New England and, in later editions, with Graywolf)—a direct outgrowth from how booksellers treated Frenzy. Fiona McCrae writes, “that a major chain chose to display [Frenzy] only in the African American studies section surely sowed the seeds of anger that gave rise [to] Erasure.”122 Everett was furious that booksellers pigeonholed him as a black writer with a book that, in his estimation, had nothing to do with race. Erasure features Thelonious Ellison, who, like Everett, is a fiction writer and an English professor in southern California. Ellison describes an encounter with a literary agent at a party in New York. The agent tells Ellison that he “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.”123 Ellison considers dropping his agent because of the agent’s unhappiness with the fact that Ellison’s work is “not commercial enough to make any real money.” “The line is, you’re not black enough,” his agent tells him.124 In need of money to support his ailing mother, Ellison writes a hyperbolic parody of Richard Wright’s Native Son and calls it My Pafology, though he later retitles it Fuck. Fuck, written under a pseudonym, becomes a commercial success, and Erasure concludes with Fuck winning a major literary award, granted by a committee on which Ellison is a member, horrified by the depth of his colleagues’ gullibility. Erasure extends Everett’s critique of authors’ complicity with markets under conglomeration. In Frenzy, he allegorizes authors as navigating between the literariness of embodiment and the allegories of conglomeration. In Erasure, the Scylla and Charybdis are the expectations placed on writers of color in a time of multiculturalism to represent their race. One can play the game and submit to stereotypes or refuse and be conscripted against one’s will. Erasure argues that conglomerates publish books by black authors that confirm prejudices that readers bring to books by black authors. It argues that the industry wants books by black authors that already read as black. Everett portrays a publishing industry in which agents, editors, booksellers, reviewers, academics, and writers are all complicit in conflating fiction with the authentic experience of race. Literary markets in the era of conglomeration shaped what the public understood as blackness according to a liberal multicultural fantasy of authenticity that sold. He complained about this situation to McCrae a few months after Frenzy came out, several years before the publication of Erasure. “Sadly, it seems that the publication of black writers is confined to that material which deals with what the culture wants to understand as ‘being black.’ It being the case that black writers can only know, and further only comment on, what it is to be black

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or non-white. As you know, my work does not tend toward this.” “To hell with markets,” he adds, squarely placing blame and, he imagines, signaling his solidarity with the nonprofit world. But, as the end of Frenzy suggests, he makes the more sophisticated observation in his fiction that he must abide by certain market demands, even with nonprofits. “I do not want to feed complacent expectations, but I do want to be entertaining enough to lure a reader into something new—if not a new way of thinking, then a new way of reading.”125 Frenzy and Erasure end in defeat at the hands of markets. But Everett hopes for a negative  dialectic: that, in their negation, the novels awaken readers into a new consciousness. Close reading Percival Everett reveals a struggle—embedded in his sentences, his characters, his plots—between author and institution. Ironically, Everett, in his essays, interviews, and personal correspondence, fails to recognize that Graywolf and its fellow nonprofits operate according to a parallel racial logic as the conglomerates, one the image of the other in a funhouse mirror. He praises Graywolf as exempt because it publishes him, when, for Graywolf, he serves as a vessel for its mission of liberal multiculturalism, a prized commodity for its niche markets. Although it contradicts his stated motives, Everett’s literary project could be read not to condemn markets, but to condemn those markets that propagate inauthentic and constraining racial fantasies; his novels, that is, espouse one more liberal multicultural vision.

MULTICULTURALISM AND THE MARKET

How has conglomeration shaped multiculturalism? How does the conglomeratenonprofit divide—the tendencies toward the mechanical, the embodied— influence representation? Everett gives us one possible, if cynical, answer: that conglomerates, in submission to the market, publish writers of color who reproduced popular stereotypes. These writers, Everett argues, are purveyors of internalized racism. In Erasure, this position belongs to Juanita Mae Jenkins, a young middle-class woman who graduated from Oberlin before publishing a celebrated novel in black dialect. Everett has Alice Walker in mind. “I have never in my life heard someone say, ‘Where fo’ you be going?,’ ” he said in an interview. “So Alice Walker can kiss my ass.”126 He blames Oprah. In Erasure, an Oprah figure launches Jenkins to fame. In the same interview, he says, “Oprah should stay the fuck out of literature and stop pretending she knows anything about it.”127

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Nonprofits provide the requisite condition for true art. Everett wrote to McCrae, “What you and Graywolf have done is allowed me the freedom to write as an artist. To my mind there is nothing more politically significant than for a press to actually free itself, and therefore the artists it shelters, from the noxious political traps this culture lays for its ‘writers of color.’ ”128 Everett’s account rings false. Consider the range of conglomerate multiculturalism, which includes Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Toni Morrison. The politics of market-friendly representations of people of color cannot be reduced to internalized racism. In a more charitable moment, Everett acknowledges that Morrison “could write anything down and get it published because she is going to make somebody some money. It’s also obvious that she doesn’t do that.”129 Conglomerates compel books to make profits, demanding market-friendly representations of race— welcoming, especially, narratives about the traumatic legacies of colonization and racism, which masochistically soothe the liberal soul: reading as penance— but writers develop strategies to create compelling visions of race within those constraints. Conglomerate multiculturalism especially favors historical fiction. Alexander Manshel measured this favoritism by a range of metrics, all revealing historical fiction’s dominance among literary writers of color at conglomerate publishers, a paradigm established above all by Beloved. Since the 1980s, about 80  percent of the “most-taught and shortlisted novels by minoritized writers are works of historical fiction.” Manshel attributes the trend to various institutional actors, such as the directive within the NEA to increase the diversity of its grant recipients. Universities and book clubs find multigenerational family sagas pedagogically and politically useful. Prizes honor multicultural historical fiction. Such institutional support secured the marketability of this work, but as Manshel observes, “this program of inclusion has become so successful that it may now work to circumscribe minoritized writers even as it consecrates them.”130 Conglomerate multicultural authors perform their ethnicity differently from  their nonprofit peers. At conglomerates, these authors negotiate ethical and market demands, constructing what Elena Machado Sáez deems “market aesthetics.”131 Such fiction tends to depict historical trauma and quasianthropological performances of authenticity. Elaine Castillo, expressing frustration with these aesthetics as a novelist, complains that readers come to writers of color for, “the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma.”132 On the one hand, these books cater to a certain kind of white

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reader’s desire to empathize and self-educate. On the other, the authors of these books strive to divert or preempt readerly evasions to sustain their ethical commitments, as Sáez demonstrates through the work of Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, and Marlon James, among others. Unlike conglomerates, nonprofits have explicit social missions that guide acquisition. Thus writers of color make up a higher percentage of their lists, but, because they are much smaller than conglomerates, this amounts to relatively few books. They tend to be critical of mainstream representations of race, in two senses: they criticize them and they explore the conditions of their possibility, asking, as Everett does in Erasure, how is it that we see race as we do? Graywolf published novelist David Treuer’s book of essays, Native American Fiction, which argues, along similar lines as Everett, against essentialism and stereotypes in American Indian literature. In his author questionnaire that he submitted to Graywolf to help the publication of Little, Treuer wrote, “I see myself as writing and responding to two different audiences: for non-Native readers I hope to unhinge their literary and conceptual pre-conceivances of Natives, while for Native readers I attempt to create a breach in the barriers of the American literary and cultural landscape, a breach into which we can fling ourselves, being transformed from grossly mis-imagined to imaginers in our own right.”133 This dual approach—unmake stereotypes and present an ethnic group as capable of its own imaginative acts—describes the ethos of some explicitly ethnic publishers, such as the short-lived but influential Quinto Sol.134 Some nonprofit novels depict people of color who evade stereotypes because they are middle class or culturally refined, such as those of David Haynes, published by Milkweed, or Clifford’s Blues by John Williams, reprinted as part of Coffee House’s Black Arts Movement series. The title of that series is ironic, in that its books include some that because they veered away from an essentialism central to the Black Arts Movement, fit uneasily within it. Other books in the series, including William Melvin Kelley’s dem and Kristin Lattany’s The Lakestown Rebellion, similarly embrace nonessentialist depictions of race.135

CULTURAL DIVERSIT Y

Karen Tei Yamashita’s work exemplifies the critical tendencies of nonprofit multicultural fiction. She sent Through the Arc of the Rainforest to Coffee House in 1989. Allan Kornblum reported, “I couldn’t believe I had a novel that exciting

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sitting on my lap in manuscript.”136 It became Coffee House’s first hugely successful novel (by nonprofit standards), selling out a first run of four thousand copies in three weeks. Coffee House sent Yamashita on the press’s first major author tour. She has gone on to publish eight books with Coffee House, including the National Book Award finalist, I Hotel. Yamashita’s first two novels, Arc and Brazil-Maru, are set in Brazil with Japanese protagonists. “The centrality of Brazil to Yamashita’s creative work,” Kandice Chuh writes, “immediately marks its eccentricity to the usual regimes of U.S. American literature.” By the mid-1990s, “Asian Americanist literary discourse ha[d] only loosely become a home for Yamashita’s work.”137 Critic Rachel Lee felt the need to attempt a “rapprochement” between Yamashita’s early novels and Asian American literary studies.138 Arc was published in 1990 and BrazilMaru in 1992 as the nonprofit movement was attaining lift-off and multiculturalism was the way forward. Coffee House wrote to one of its funders, “we have been encouraging Ms. Yamashita to take up the subject of Asian/Black relations in Los Angeles. We look forward to publishing this yet-to-be-written reenvisioning of the city of dreams.”139 Such a book would free Yamashita from the eccentricity of her geographical predilections and situate her securely among multiculturalism. In 1997, Coffee House published that book, Tropic of Orange. It is, as promised, an LA novel. It has seven sections, one for each day of the week beginning on the summer solstice. Each section has seven chapters, one for each protagonist. The cast includes Asian American, black, and Latinx characters. Yamashita self-consciously embraces Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism and LA’s noir tradition from Raymond Chandler to Walter Mosley. Literary critics have classified the novel as environmental, hemispheric, infrastructural, global, planetary, postmodern, science fiction, slipstream, technomodernist, and Asian American. It is also satire. It pays homage to Nathanael West’s acerbic LA satires by name-dropping Day of the Locust. One of the principal objects of Yamashita’s satire is multiculturalism. Emi, an ambitious and irreverent Japanese-American television producer and loose avatar for Yamashita, is the character through which this satire flows. Yamashita introduces Emi by noting that she’s dating her lover “because he was Latino, part of that hot colorful race,” only to discover that “he wasn’t what you call the stereotype.” As for herself, Emi is “so distant from the Asian female stereotype—it was questionable if she even had an identity.” In case she hasn’t announced her position clearly enough, Yamashita adds that Emi “liked trying to be anti-multicultural” around her lover. “Right in the

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middle of some public place, she might burst out, ‘Oh you’re so Chicano!’ ” The third section, “WEDNESDAY,” is subtitled “Cultural Diversity.” In Emi’s chapter, she makes a scene in a sushi restaurant. Surveying the diners, she tells her lover, “Here we all are, your multicultural mosaic.” After speculating about the provenance of those in this mosaic, she declares, “Cultural diversity is bullshit.” She asks the sushi chef, “Don’t you hate being multicultural?” adding, “I hate being multicultural.” With this, Emi provokes the presumably white woman next to her who primly queries, “Whatever is your problem?” and goes on to defend herself against Emi’s accusations. “I happen to adore Japanese culture. What can I say? I adore different cultures. I’ve traveled all over the world. I love living in L.A. because I can find anything in the world to eat, right here. . . . A true celebration of an international world.”140 In a novel solicited by Coffee House to satisfy the hunger for multiculturalism, Yamashita proffers an explicit critique of multiculturalism as—in anticipation of Everett’s Erasure—reinforcing and profiting from stereotypes packaged as cultural commodities that appeal to white consumers.141 She rejects liberal multiculturalism to endorse leftist, antiglobalization politics and radical hospitality toward the homeless. The novel culminates in a lucha libre fight on the U.S.-Mexico border between SUPERNAFTA and the novel’s hero, Arcangel, in the guise of El Gran Mojado, which translates to the Great Wetback. Arcangel declares, “I do not defend my title for the / rainbow children of the world. / This is not a benefit for UNESCO. / We are not the world. / This is not a rock concert.” Arcangel is not on the side of attempts to mollify the inequities of global capitalism through the culture industry (UNESCO, USA for Africa). Even still, Arcangel’s spectacle of lucha libre is complicit with the culture industry: “The audience, like life, would go on. . . . Somewhere the profits from the ticket sales were being divided.”142 Yamashita deflates triumphalism about the political good of cultural protest. She indicts Coffee House’s embrace of liberal multiculturalism at the same time that she knowingly acknowledges that her novel will advance that cause.

I HOTEL

Over the next decade, Yamashita went from criticizing multiculturalism to pursuing its conditions of possibility, the sources from which it came, researching the rise of ethnic studies and the Yellow Power movement. This entailed a tonal

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shift toward earnestness and culminated, in 2010, in the publication of I Hotel, a novel comprising ten linked novellas, one for each year between 1968 and 1977. How she understood her identity changed. “For a while I thought I’d better be a Japanese American writer, or even a Nikkei writer since that would be the most accurate description of my background,” she said in 2018, “but now I think of Asian American as being more appropriate.143 In the afterword to I Hotel, she presents the novel as an “offering,” a deeply researched attempt to understand her predecessors, “the literary and political movements” that made her career possible.144 She attempts to reconcile a rift between two of the most prominent of those predecessors, Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, which is also a rift between conglomerates and nonprofits. The title of I Hotel’s 1971 novella is Aiiieeeee! Hotel, which refers to the groundbreaking Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, edited by, among others, Frank Chin. For the expanded 1991 edition, Chin wrote an introduction that indicted Kingston, a Random House author and one of the most acclaimed and widely read Asian American novelists, for pandering to white audiences with her alleged internalized racism and stereotyped representations. We might note that Everett attacked Alice Walker for similar reasons. We might note, too, that, though Everett and Chin found success with limited audiences of critics and academics, Walker and Kingston were celebrated in the New York Times and sold in far greater numbers. The first wave of multicultural fiction, generally, was dominated by women. Part of what we see when Everett and Chin accuse Walker and Kingston pandering to audiences through internalized racism is an attempt to shore up their own positions by making a virtue of their small readerships, expressed at times in gendered ressentiment.145 Chin’s landmark novel Donald Duk was published in 1991 with Coffee House. Chin and Yamashita together propelled Coffee House’s reputation in the early 1990s as a premier purveyor of Asian American literature—the accident that Allan Kornblum seized as an opportunity. Chapter 4 of Aiiieeeee! Hotel, “War and Peace,” is a series of sketches by Sina Grace of Chin and Kingston. Each of the chapter’s seven pages displays a sketch of him next to a sketch of her. The only text in the chapter is a string of brief captions. These are described progressively as “Son / Daughter,” “Sister / Brother,” “Chinaman / Chinawoman,” “Dragon / Dragon,” and “Patriarch / Matriarch.”146 Yamashita positions Chin and Kingston’s dispute as familial (son, daughter, sister, brother) and the two of them as equals who, together, have shaped Asian American literature and ought to be treated with the respect owed to elders (patriarch, matriarch). Amid these portraits, Yamashita and Grace insert

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sketches of the pair as characters from the other’s books. Chin is depicted as Wittman Ah Sing, a character from Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, possibly based on Chin; and Kingston is portrayed as Pandora Toy, a character from Chin’s Gunga Din Highway, possibly based on Kingston as retaliation. Both were thinly veiled attacks. Yamashita captions these sketches “Fake.” On the opposite page, Kingston and Chin are depicted as autobiographical characters from their own books, Fa Mulan from Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Kwan Kung from Chin’s Donald Duk. These are captioned “Real.”147 Yamashita asks the two to put down their arms, to stop using caricatures of each other in their acts of position-taking, attempting to broker peace between these major figures of Asian American literature. Yamashita rejects Chin’s accusation that popular Asian American literature panders to whites and is racist. But she also embraces Chin, her fellow Coffee House author. She hopes to move beyond a politics of representation trapped in the terms of multiculturalism—the politics she had engaged and critiqued in Tropic of Orange. She settles disputes internal to Asian American literary identity to advance a new position, which she presents through her depiction of an Asian American Marxist reading group. The discussants historicize Asian American identity, observing that they became Asian Americans in 1966 through a process of racialization that they embraced as a “political designation.” The discussion leader says, “you are organizing around this designation, and that’s useful, but you are going to have to scrutinize it through a Marxist analysis that includes class.”148 Yamashita’s ambitious vision in I Hotel is to perform, in the tradition of Marxist dialectics, various syntheses: Kingston and Chin, popular and virtuous, conglomerate and nonprofit, race and class. She was rewarded by becoming a finalist for the National Book Award.

T WO PATHS, REDUX

In 2008, Zadie Smith imagined “Two Paths for the Novel”: lyrical realism in the long tradition of Balzac and Flaubert, exemplified by Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland; or the avant-garde, along the more recent model of Barthelme, Gaddis, Pynchon, and Wallace, exemplified by Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. She voted for the latter. The next year, Mark McGurl published The Program Era, about how creative writing programs changed American literature. The editors of n+1 responded by proposing that the two paths for the novel were creative writing programs or

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New York publishing. MFA: Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, Denis Johnson. NYC: Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss, Gary Shteyngart. Both Smith and n+1 tell partial truths. By missing conglomeration, they miss the whole. The two paths paved by the period—which subsume and reorient realism or avant-garde, MFA or NYC—were commercial or nonprofit. Framing the literary field in this way exposes a misunderstanding of contemporary fiction in the wake of The Program Era: the idea that we can explain many of its qualities as developments of relatively autonomous creative writing programs. What if, for a moment, we let all the discourse fall away and could see only money, people, institutions, and the flows between them. We would see that universities function as “the world’s largest nonprofit refuge for literary fiction writers.”149 Most creative writing faculty earn far more from their university salaries than from publishers. Much of the literary fiction published by conglomerates is generously subsidized by creative writing programs, which sustain what publishing people call the midlist; these are the books that do not provide a livable wage for their authors yet are the majority of published fiction.150 Creative writing programs perform another service for publishers: they professionalize and hierarchically sort authors. “The proliferation of creative writing programs has made possible ab ovo a career-management approach to literature,” wrote editor Gerald Howard in 1989.151 It was only then that such proliferation was accelerating. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, using Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (or IPEDS) data, show that “at the end of the 1980s, a little more than 1,000 degrees in creative writing were awarded each year. By 2013, close to 6,500 thousand were awarded.”152 As important as the aesthetic training MFA students receive is the letterhead. Graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are forty-nine times more likely to win a major prize than graduates of any other program; other programs are further scaled by status.153 Between program and prize are a series of gates kept by agents, editors, marketers, booksellers—all the figures this book is dedicated to crediting. MFA students learn how to query agents and are offered entrées to the publishing industry by way of introductions, invitations, and letters of recommendation.154 Creative writing programs alleviate publishing’s “problems of abundance”: the overwhelming amount of writing it needs to sift through.155 In short, the two spheres—creative writing and publishing—cannot be understood separately. They are fundamentally entangled through the extensive subsidization of NYC writers by nonprofit MFA programs. Unlike nonprofit publishers, which arose to reject conglomerate publishing, MFA programs grew largely for reasons having to do with university finances and evolved to function

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symbiotically with conglomeration. We need to understand better, as one anonymous reviewer of this book put it, “how the literary subfield that depends on universities fits into the scheme of for-profit vs. nonprofit literary production.” A dialectical relationship is evident between market and program aesthetics for conglomerate novelists such as Junot Díaz (MIT), Lorrie Moore (Vanderbilt), and George Saunders (Syracuse), just as between nonprofit and program aesthetics for nonprofit novelists such as Everett (USC), J. Robert Lennon (Cornell), and Yamashita (UC Santa Cruz). This chapter reveals some of the ramifications of the literary nonprofit movement as an alternative to conglomeration, each ineluctably bound to the other as its obverse. The early 1980s marked the start of this era. Under tremendous financial pressure, commercial and nonprofit publishers split their approach to literature, placing certain expectations on writers. If we zoom in to the scale of a single book, though, the view changes, returning to the author some of her agency. An author has leeway in leveraging the discourse acceptable to her press. This negotiation between an author and the institution is often (but not always)  subliminal, happening at the level of intuition, each player playing her role.156 Under the conglomerate regime, writers of color respond to their sector’s relationship with diversity. In the 1990s and 2000s, Everett and Yamashita, writing for presses with multicultural missions, deployed irony to satirize multiculturalism itself. Meanwhile, at conglomerate imprints, writers of color tended to perform the authentication of identity while sometimes searching for strategies to evade the quietist reading practices of white liberals. As often happens in the dynamic between conglomerate and nonprofit publishers, what succeeds in the latter becomes material for the former. In the twenty-first century, multicultural satire became a marketable conglomerate mode, managed with aplomb by Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Colson Whitehead, and many others.157

NONPROFITS NOW

Ambitions had been so big in the 1990s. Jim Sitter had a vision of nonprofits sprouting up in every state, fostering milieux out of which would come an extraordinary flourishing of literature in the twenty-first century, an aesthetic movement against conglomeration. “Fuck New York,” as they said in Port Townsend. That didn’t happen: Newt Gingrich savaged the NEA; philanthropists got cold feet. Sitter’s project plateaued. Looking back, he considers it a disappointment.

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But it would be wrong to call it a failure. Even though the nonprofit sector is small when measured against the conglomerates, it is vibrant. It is a counterforce. It has secured a space in the literary field for many writers who, at the time of writing, the conglomerates do not publish (Lucy Corin, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, Wayétu Moore) and it has launched careers for others who the conglomerates published after seeing them succeed with nonprofits (Ben Lerner, Valeria Luiselli, Carmen Maria Machado). Archipelago, Arte Público, Coffee House, Deep Vellum, Feminist Press, Hub City, Kaya, Milkweed, New Press, and Sarabande are among the most dynamic in the 2020s. In the twenty-first century, some university presses—also nonprofits—have developed robust fiction lines, often with a focus on regional literature, including Cornell, Ohio, West Virginia, University of Washington, Wayne State, and Wisconsin. Diversity remains a priority for nonprofits, but now more globally. Coffee House has built a line of Latin American fiction, publishing writers from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Uruguay, many young Gen Xers or elder Millennials. It continues to publish Yamashita, now alongside Asian American writer Eugene Lim, British Chinese writer May-Lan Tan, and Asian Australian writer Jamie Marina Lau. Graywolf remains Percival Everett’s house and also publishes black men such as Jeffery Renard Allen and Jamel Brinkley. But it also acquired African writers A. Igoni Barrett, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, and Moore. It is a major publisher of Scandinavian fiction in the United States. It has published Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga, Sri Lankan writers Ru Freeman and Shehan Karunatilaka, and Tiphanie Yanique from the U.S. Virgin Islands. New nonprofits have formed in the twenty-first century, often with a focus on translation, such as Archipelago—which found explosive success with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle—Deep Vellum, and Open Letter. Deep Vellum also acquired Dalkey Archive and its extensive backlist in 2020, relaunching the imprint in 2022 with beautifully redesigned reissues of “Dalkey Archive Essentials,” including Jon Fosse’s Trilogy, Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio BrokeDown, Nathalie Sarraute’s Planetarium, and Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling. Even as these presses push the aesthetic and geographical boundaries of what is publishable in the United States, they usually also balance their lists with writers closer to home. Coffee House, Graywolf, and Milkweed, for example, publish Midwestern writers such as Kathryn Davis, Jim Heynen, Patrick Nathan, David Rhodes, Martin Riker, Mary Rockcastle, Sam Savage, Danielle Sosin, Diane Wilson, and Brad Zellar. A commitment to the local and the global has become a reliable recipe for sustainable nonprofit funding in the twenty-first century.

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For thousands of writers and many more readers, nonprofits, scattered across the United States, are where literary life is happening.

THE EMPT Y GAP

In 2003, Graywolf broke from the indie distributor that connects small presses across the United States to work with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “It is a step away from the band of ‘small presses’ and into that virtually empty gap between us and the substantial independent/literary presses,” McCrae told her staff.158 The move gave Graywolf more visibility and clout at the cost of resentment from the small press world. It now occupies that “empty gap.” McCrae was optimistic to use the plural in naming “substantial independent/literary presses.” By 2003, arguably only one remained. It is the subject of my final chapter—W. W. Norton.

6 Independents How W. W. Norton Stayed Free and Housed the Misfits

D

onald Lamm made André Schiffrin a promise. The two were old school literary gentlemen. They graduated from Yale four years apart in the 1950s and both went on to Oxbridge for further study. Lamm then joined W. W. Norton and never left, climbing from traveling salesman to president and chairman. Schiffrin’s father cofounded Pantheon and was an editor there until he died in 1950. Young Schiffrin followed in his footsteps, becoming Pantheon’s editor in chief in 1963. Norton and Pantheon, New York houses, were well regarded for their sophisticated lists: Norton published Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the Norton Anthology of  English Literature; Pantheon published Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault.

LAMM’S PROMISE

Lamm and Schiffrin witnessed the conglomeration of publishing from its beginnings in 1960, when Random House bought Knopf. The following year Random House bought Pantheon. But Schiffrin retained editorial independence. When, in 1990, the merger finally came for Schiffrin—he was fired for alleged budgetary failures—Lamm reached out. He pledged that if Schiffrin started his own press, Norton would “back him through distribution,” selling the books to bookstores.1 Two years later, Lamm made good on his pledge. Schiffrin launched The New Press, a nonprofit publisher with distribution by Norton. It was a moment

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when nonprofit publishers were cohering as a field—as chapter 5 recounts—and multiculturalism was a keyword. Publishers were recognizing that there was an audience for more books by nonwhite authors. Scholars were discovering or rediscovering Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer. After being controversially denied the National Book Award in 1987, Toni Morrison’s Beloved won the Pulitzer in 1988. She wrote Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, a pathbreaking study about the Africanist presence in canonical white U.S. literature, published in 1992. In 1993, she won the Nobel Prize, showing that African American literature is world literature. Opportunities even appeared within conglomerate publishers: black women at Ballantine launched One World, dedicated to multicultural literature, in 1992. Nevertheless, the publishing industry remained extremely white. Schiffrin aimed to counter this overwhelming whiteness through his lists and his staff. His first books included Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession by Studs Terkel and Early Black Photographers 1840–1940, a postcard book in partnership with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Lamm distanced himself from Schiffrin’s multicultural initiatives, saying that they were “out of our hands” and calling them “adventurous,” signaling that he had no control over what Schiffrin chose to publish.2 Norton was a notorious WASP stronghold and Lamm rejected the suggestion that it could be different, telling the Washington Post in 1997, “Many of the minority students who would be naturals for book publishing gravitate to higher-paying or more splashy fields. Economics is at the base of this.”3 At that point, Norton’s most important title, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, was under significant threat from a forthcoming competitor that was taking advantage of frustration among professors with the Norton Anthology’s stodgy demographic conservatism. Yet, despite Lamm’s hesitance about multiculturalism, Norton in the 1990s echoed Schiffrin’s agenda, bringing out as much or more fiction by writers of color in that decade than vastly larger conglomerate houses. How was it that two well-connected, Oxbridge-trained white men came to oversee a slight but significant erosion of white-dominated lists in publishing? Let’s step back for perspective. It is 1990. Conglomerate publishers dominate the field. Editors at the big trade houses have been losing power to the marketers, publicists, and subsidiary rights directors favored by managers and stakeholders as boosters of the bottom line. Fiction has come to contain not just the imagination of the individual whose name emblazons the cover but also something like the unified endeavor

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of the conglomerate mind. Series sell well and reliably. Bestselling authors beget bestsellers. To literary types, conglomeration feels apocalyptic. Rebels are building another way: nonprofit publishing, using government funds and philanthropy to bypass the strictures of the market and continue to publish fiction that’s literary. The industry is congealing into a system with a clear logic. On one side, a vast machine of conglomeration built to maximize profits by rationalization is expanding in size and accelerating. On the other, an earnest attempt at organizing around literary and social missions is taking shape in opposition—if constrained by the very missions and the bureaucratic exigencies legally required to maintain nonprofit status, guiding the acquisition of books. At scale, each side behaves with loose predictability. An industry long famous for its imperviousness to calculation is being tamed by the logics of shareholder value and the nonprofit complex. Conglomerates and nonprofits form an organic whole: lash and backlash. Their business plans and literary aesthetics resist yet feed off each other symbiotically. They are each other’s obverse. Both sectors are evolving toward something like homeostasis, an externally stable but internally dynamic whole. Each is governed by its own sense of consensus among partisans, defined by the existence the other. By an accident of history, Norton fell out of this system. It is neither a conglomerate nor a nonprofit but that rarest of birds: a large independent house that publishes literary fiction and poetry. It is, in fact, the only one left. Several small independents survive, most notably Grove Atlantic, run by Morgan Entrekin, who acquired Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero for Simon & Schuster before leaving for a position at Atlantic Monthly Press (AMP), newly acquired by Carl Navarre Jr., who, like Entrekin, came from wealth in Tennessee. Five years later, in 1991, Entrekin acquired AMP from Navarre; in 1993, merged it with Grove, which had been wrecked by Ann Getty after she acquired it from Barney Rosset in 1985.4 This chapter is about independent, for-profit publishers. It’s about how Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a late holdout—only giving in to conglomeration in 1994—transformed under new ownership from the house of Roger Straus and Susan Sontag to that of Jonathan Galassi and Jonathan Franzen. Mostly, though, it is about W. W. Norton: how it pulled it off its independence and what it has meant for recent U.S. literary history. How did Norton manage to do what no one else could? For one reason, above all: it is employee owned. Participatory governance fostered a fiercely loyal staff loathe to give up what control it held. And so, as turnover churned across

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conglomerate houses, Norton’s workers stayed forever. Lamm writes, “To wouldbe outside investors, the answer has always been the same: neither this company nor its holdings are for sale. (One Wall Street broker, thwarted when attempting to buy Norton stock, asked what he might tell his client, reputedly a world-class doctor. The response from Norton’s controller: ‘Tell him to take two aspirins and call you in the morning.’)”5 Employee ownership on its own wouldn’t have been enough but Norton had a stable financial cushion thanks to its college division. Its anthologies, critical editions, and textbooks became mainstays on syllabi, buttressed by robust relationships between university faculty and Norton staff at every level, from its traveling salespeople to Lamm himself. As the publishing industry transformed, Norton remained an obstinate anachronism, a home for misfits on its staff and its lists. After visiting a Norton sales meeting, André Schiffrin wrote, “It was as if we were in a time machine going back thirty years to a publishing world that was far simpler, more straightforward, and honest.”6 In 1990, as the system of conglomerates and nonprofits settled into its logics, Norton’s untimeliness enabled it to intervene in the field of fiction, an area where to date it had been a nonentity. It revived authors from another time who had fallen out of print or had never had much success in the United States: Paula Fox, Patricia Highsmith, Primo Levi, Patrick O’Brian. It wrote the masculinity of my adolescence with its lad lit: Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Further, despite Donald Lamm’s misgivings, it published writers of color whose titles weren’t picked up elsewhere: work by Ana Castillo, Leon Forrest, Walter Mosley, Ishmael Reed, James Welch, and black pulp by Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, among others. It is a chaotic and weird list united by its eccentricity. One lesson is that assisted by a counterfactual: if Polly Norton hadn’t given the company to its employees in 1945, then, decades later, these writers might never have made it, suggesting what exceeds conglomerate taste, what was nearly lost when the practices of the conglomerate era locked into place, and what works of fiction might have come into the world but didn’t because they exceeded Norton’s vision, too.

NORTON’S IDEA

Norton was close to academia from its founding. In the 1920s, William Warder Norton sat on boards for the People’s Institute at Cooper Union and the New School for Social Research in New York City. He was especially engaged in

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adult education. As part of one such initiative, Cooper hosted public lectures. Norton felt the lectures should travel—by print—so he started the People’s Institute Publishing Company to turn out the lectures as pamphlets. From there the initiative grew and he gave it a name, his own: W. W. Norton. Norton and his wife Polly, whom Lamm described as “a bluestocking, a woman of great intellectual power,” published Franz Boas, John Dewey, Max Planck, and Bertrand Russell. Their biggest coup was acquiring much of what would become The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, beginning in the early 1930s. When Norton died—at just fifty-four, in 1945—the New York Times wrote, “He believed that serious modern subjects should be presented in well-written, well-designed, and good-looking books written especially for the average person who wished to acquire exact knowledge ‘without too many trappings of the academic.’ ”7 With Norton dead, though, it was unclear how the publisher would carry on. As Lamm tells it, Polly went to the directors and said, “ ‘Boys,’—and all the directors were boys—‘how do we keep this firm going?’ And the answer . . . boiled down to: we would like to feel we have a stake in the future of this company, a financial stake. And she gave it to them.”8

BROCKWAY ’S ANTHOLOGY

The decade after Norton’s death was rough on the firm. When Lamm arrived in 1956, it “was poised on the knife-edge between success and dissolution.”9 Two years later, George Brockway ascended to the presidency and, in time, led Norton to financial security. He published Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and Robert  F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days in 1969. His most important proposition, though, was The Norton Anthology of English Literature, first published in 1962, which would forever alter Norton’s trajectory. At the time, two Harcourt Brace anthologies dominated the college literature classroom: one took a shotgun approach with a “broad but thin” selection;10 the other focused on very few canonical figures. Brockway aimed to “drive a wedge between the two approaches” with a judicious selection of major and minor.11 He found an ideal partner in Cornell professor M. H. Abrams who became general editor of the Norton Anthology. Abrams introduced elegant headnotes, annotated reading lists, and the scholarly infrastructure of footnotes and marginal glosses. They used Bible paper to pack more in less. It was a hit. Decades of students have become familiar with the extended family of Norton

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Anthologies and Norton Critical Editions. The series “single-handedly saved the company. The anthology was the tide that lifted all of W. W. Norton and Company’s boats in the 1960s.”12 Norton’s survival was threatened, briefly, at the end of the next decade by Chase Manhattan and the Volcker Shock. Because Norton depended on college adoptions, it annually borrowed money to print textbooks in summer and paid the loans back after the opening weeks of the semester, in the fall. In October 1979, in an attempt to bring inflation under control, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, shocked the money system by raising interest rates above 20 percent. Norton had to take out its annual loans at those rates; but this year the printers failed to put out one of their key textbooks on time. Norton was out millions. As Gerald Howard heard it, “Chase Manhattan made a move on Norton.”13 The New Leader, where Brockway soon became a columnist, noted that, “despite discovering that he didn’t really have a friend at Chase Manhattan, [Brockway] somehow managed to overcome the crisis.”14 The crisis left its mark. Howard heard that Brockway “would go around at night turning off lights in the office to keep the electric bill down because they were so close to being taken over.”15

HOWARD’S AMBITION

When Lamm made his promise to Schiffrin in 1990, he was pessimistic about publishing. A few weeks before Schiffrin was canned, Lamm told Publishers Weekly, “Reading hasn’t been the main indoor activity in the US since the 1930s, and yet we pretend there is a steadily increasing interest in books.”16 He worried that publishers had neglected libraries and that libraries, in turn, had given their attention and their budgets to new technology. “Most at risk,” Lamm wrote, “is literary fiction by authors without an established following,” for which “reviews in Library Journal and recommendations from book wholesalers plus the taste of library staffs may prompt just enough orders to raise income from a novel to the publisher’s break-even point.”17 He was concerned about conglomeration and its “disastrous results.”18 Given all the distressing negatives, Lamm said he would “ask somebody who came in bright eyed and eager and intoxicated with the thought of publishing, ‘Have you considered coal mining?’ ”19 But Lamm had a new young editor with a brighter outlook who was determined to make Norton a force in fiction. Gerald Howard came to Norton from Penguin in 1988. At Penguin, he’d watched Kathryn Court transform the house

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from a “sleepy publisher of classics and academic nonfiction” into one of the premier presses for current fiction.20 She did it by inaugurating the renaissance of the trade paperback, the biggest splash for the format since Jason Epstein debuted it at Doubleday in the 1950s. Court branded her series Contemporary American Fiction and created buzz for novels by Thomas McGuane and Edmund White.21 It wasn’t long before a precocious editor at Random House took the idea of the trade paperback series and made it flashier by publishing originals and giving his series a uniform design—even a similar name to Court’s: Vintage Contemporaries. Gary Fisketjon—who’d come a long way from the mink farm where he grew up in Oregon—wore a charismatic smile, big 1980s glasses, and thick wavy blond hair to his shoulders. At Random House, he became Jason Epstein’s protégé. Unlike his fellow young editor, Jonathan Galassi, who had a fondness for poetry and translation and struggled at Random House, Fisketjon had the knack for marketing and publicity. (Galassi, as we’ll discover later in this chapter, learned to play the game eventually.) In the fall of 1984, Fisketjon launched Contemporaries with seven titles, only one of them an original: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Fisketjon and McInerney were close friends from their college days at Williams. In the early 1980s, when McInerney was on summer vacation from his MFA in Syracuse where he studied under Raymond Carver—his and Fisketjon’s idol—he crashed at Fisketjon’s loft in the East Village. They threw parties; novelists Harold Brodkey, Mona Simpson, and Richard Price would hang out; there was lots of coke; Carver might swing through if in town on publishing business; their neighbor and art world star Jean-Michel Basquiat might drop in.22 It was there, in that loft, where McInerney wrote the first page of Bright Lights.23 When it came time to publish, though, Fisketjon had to convince McInerney that paperback was the way to go. It wasn’t done at the time, not for new titles. It felt like a slight. Then again, the prospects for literary fiction had, in the last decade, fallen precipitously from the vertiginous heights of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime with its seven-figure advance and imperial bestsellerdom. Fisketjon told an interviewer, “when I came into the business in the late [19]70s, [literary writers] couldn’t even get published because they sold so poorly in hardcover they never even went into paperback. There was a backlog of very good writers who were wildly under-published for a period of years. It was a good time for a kid to come into it because you had a lot of very accomplished writers to choose from.”24 Publishers Weekly reported, “First novels and books by authors without a large readership were bought by hardcover publishers for low (four-figure) advances, low print runs were set, and virtually no promotion

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or publicity, beyond reviews, was planned.”25 You had writers like Richard Ford and Cormac McCarthy selling only a few thousand copies in hardcover, not doing paperback, and going out of print. Fisketjon was frustrated at his inability to publish good books well, to garner them the readership they deserved. He saw the success Kathryn Court and Gerald Howard were having with reprints of literary fiction at Penguin and got the idea to one-up them, hoping that paperback originals might “break this logjam” of good writers failing to sell their books.26 Because paperbacks are cheaper, he could start with a run of twenty-five thousand rather than five thousand, giving an author more exposure. Readers, he figured, especially younger readers, would be more likely to take a chance on a paperback than a hardcover. He also leaned into his feel for marketing. He asked his art director to make the books “look like album covers.”27 He explained all this to McInerney and told him he’d be on a list—that first Vintage Contemporaries list—with their idols, Raymond Carver and Thomas McGuane, as well as Peter Matthiessen, an old legend who’d been lured to Random House by Joe Fox more than twenty years earlier. “Those people will give you a boost,” he told McInerney. Fisketjon, feeding the hype machine, slipped to Publishers Weekly that in Hollywood his friend’s book was being called “a new Catcher in the Rye.”28 Bright Lights, Big City was a smash. In a reversal, it was McInerney who gave Carver, McGuane, and Matthiessen a boost. The debut went through fourteen printings and sold more than two hundred thousand copies in the first eighteen months.29 Now everyone wanted a trade paperback series. Looking back from early 1987, Publishers Weekly wrote, “Suddenly, the trade paperback series became the way to market and sell quality fiction.”30 Howard and Fisketjon became rivals, leading spokesmen for the trend. If Vintage Contemporaries took its name and idea from Penguin, Penguin in turn took from Vintage the idea of uniform design and of doing originals. Lorraine Louie was responsible for the Vintage look: the typefaces, the “De Stijl layout,”31 the “iconic grid with the dots and the square graphic” that often held surreal images of levitating boats or flying cars or doors opening onto a landscape.32 Howard brought Court the then-unknown David Foster Wallace and his debut, a postmodern detective novel, Broom of the System, Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction’s first original, its response to Bright Lights, Big City. Before long, Scribner launched its Signature trade paperback series. John Glusman, who had worked with Fisketjon at Vintage, moved to Macmillan, where he built a trade paperback fiction series at its Collier imprint. Books in these series came from Richard Ford, Amy Hempel, Denis

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Johnson, Gloria Naylor, Norman Rush, Richard Russo, Joy Williams, and many others. Howard rose to executive editor at Penguin and series editor of Contemporary American Fiction. It “raised a few eyebrows,” then, as the Washington Post reported, “when he left his prestigious post” for the much less flashy Norton in 1988.33 Norton had something Penguin didn’t: independence. Howard bailed after Penguin bought New American Library from Times Mirror.34 To Howard, this wasn’t just another scene from the conglomerate drama; it was personal. He’d worked for NAL from 1978 to 1980 and had seen the wrath conglomeration had wrought. NAL was conglomeration’s first cautionary tale. Times Mirror’s acquisition of NAL in 1960 led to its decline, described in chapter 1. Its editors, including E. L. Doctorow, fled. When Howard arrived, it was two decades beyond its glory days as one of the best mass-market houses in the country. He told me, “it was a terrible, terrible place run by monsters and idiots.” He quit after two years “on principle.” When, at the end of the 1980s, Penguin bought NAL, Howard “found that the same monsters that [he] had run away from screaming were showing up in [his] life again.” He told me he “just couldn’t stand it.” He talked with a friend at Norton, a house he admired, and learned they were hiring. As Howard put it at the time, “On the bad days, the days when another venerable American house is neutron-bombed by the mindless conglomerate that enfolded it, or a Big Name in the Lit Biz has deserted his longtime publisher for a big fat check from Long Green and Gotrocks, or an agent has slammed the wind out of me with a punishing demand for money on a book my soul cries out to publish, on those days I decide that literature is the very last thing that publishing is about.”35 He came to Norton ready to do what Court had done at Penguin. In 1988, Norton was esteemed for its anthologies, critical editions, and trade nonfiction, but not for its fiction. That was about to change. Howard would enact what he described as the “fictionification of WWN.”

SMITH’S BLOSSOMING

When Howard arrived in 1988, president and chairman Donald Lamm was, as noted, pessimistic about the industry; the trauma from the end of the Brockway years and almost being taken over still marked mindsets; and fiction had never been a priority. Norton had published some important fiction, but such titles

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were few and far between. Its list included Anthony Burgess, Ernest Gaines, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Michael Ondaatje, Anthony Powell, and May Sarton. (“It drove us nuts,” one longtime Norton editor told me, “that May Sarton published twenty-five books about her cats.”36) With Howard’s arrival, though, editorial meetings became a confluence of energies. Quietly, Carol Houck Smith had been trying to push fiction for years. She started at Norton in 1948 as a secretary when she was twenty-five. Like so many who came to Norton, she never left: a sixty-year career. Norton’s head of publicity, Louise Brockett, wrote Smith’s obituary in 2008: “Her determined progress out of the secretarial pool represented a breakthrough for women as editors and eased the way for others who followed, both at Norton and in the industry at large, including a number of women whom she went on to hire.”37 She became an editor in the 1960s and a vice president in 1980. For years, Smith fought Norton’s habit of dismissing both fiction and women. “Norton wasn’t the best place for women to work,” Gerald Howard told me. “I would say that the last time anybody in American publishing said, ‘have your girl call my girl,’ it was probably somebody at Norton.” In the 1960s and early 1970s, when Smith began editing, the older men who ran the place felt that “publishing fiction was not what we thought we were put on Earth to do.” A fellow editor who worked alongside her for decades said that if the management had been smart, “they would’ve published everything that Carol brought in. They didn’t because they were big strong guys and she was just a weak little woman.” The biggest and strongest was George Brockway. He was staunchly opposed to publishing first novels. He thought there was no money in it.38 The old boys club began to loosen its hold when Brockway retired as president in 1976 and Donald Lamm took his place. Brockway became chairman, a position he held until 1984. Lamm wasn’t any more sanguine about fiction—“he used to talk about everybody having one ticket a year to back a novel with,” an editor said—but he was softer, which allowed Smith and her colleague Starling (“Star”) Lawrence an opening. They “pecked away” at doing more fiction.39 Twice in the next two years, Smith was recognized in the New York Times for first novels she had acquired, including Foreigner by Iranian-American Nahid Rachlin. It was a start. Smith told the Times that she had “a special interest in discovering new writers,” and she became a fixture at writers’ conferences such as AWP (the Association of Writers & Writing Programs) and Bread Loaf.40 Her friend, the poet Ellan Bryant Voigt, remembered how Smith “loved—loved— the hunt, the discovery, the electrical charge of something or someone just emerging from the chrysalis.”41 She was picking up momentum in the late 1980s, working with Charles Baxter, Rick Bass, and Pam Houston, among others. By

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this point, she was in her mid-sixties, but she was really just getting started. She went on to work with a slew of writers who would win major prizes, such as Andrea Barrett, Joan Silber, poets Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, and many others. She won a Klein Foundation award for Distinguished Editorial Achievement in 1997.42 The hiring of Gerald Howard back in 1988 was a sign that she, in her long battle to bring fiction to Norton, was winning. Nevertheless, it took a breakthrough hit to truly change the culture around fiction at Norton. That happened two years later, when Star Lawrence revived Patrick O’Brian.

LAWRENCE’S GAMBLE

Patrick O’Brian launched a “sea change in the fiction department.”43 Star Lawrence was out for a drink with a cousin in 1986 who asked him, “How can you call yourself a publisher? Here is this genius Patrick O’Brian and you’re not publishing him. Nobody in the United States is.”44 It wasn’t for lack of trying. Harcourt, Brace published the English author’s first novel, Testimonies, in 1952. Delmore Schwartz raved about it in Partisan Review, but it went out of print. Starting in 1969, Lippincott published the first five of O’Brian’s seafaring novels, beginning with Master and Commander, but they failed to sell and, like Testimonies, went out of print. In 1989—just months before Random House announced, however hyperbolically, that every book would have to pay for itself—conglomerate houses would’ve had little time for a pitch on behalf of O’Brian’s third try in the States. But that, said Lawrence, was “one of the nice things about working at a place like Norton.”45 The editorial board wasn’t exactly enthusiastic, but they let Lawrence take a shot. O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin sailing series began its Norton run in 1990, and on January 6, 1991, it received front-page treatment in the New York Times Book Review: “the best historical novels ever written.”46 The loot rolled in. Why did O’Brian succeed this time? Across twenty-one novels, he meticulously restored the naval world of the Napoleonic Wars. The opening sentence of the third chapter of the first volume will give you a feel. The protagonists, seamen in the British Royal Navy, have set sail for the first time. “Two bells in the morning watch found the Sophie sailing steadily eastward along the thirtyninth parallel with the wind just abaft her beam; she was heeling no more than two strakes under her topgallantsails, and she could have set her royals, if the amorphous heap of merchantmen under her lee had not determined to travel

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very slowly until full daylight, no doubt for fear of tripping over the lines of longitude.”47 O’Brian clearly loves words. He loves alliteration and rhythm: the Sophie sailing steadily, the wind abaft her beam. He loves wordplay: the merchantmen might trip over the halyard or mainsheet but not literally over imaginary lines of longitude. Most of all, he loves technical precision. His prose is suffused with maritime argot: heeling? strakes? And it’s period specific. Here was a man who considered himself firmly planted in the long eighteenth century. His favorite writer was Jane Austen, then Samuel Richardson. “I was soaked in [Samuel] Johnson,” he said, “and for lighter things, Smollett and Fielding; and, of course, Defoe and Swift.” He wrote a biography of Joseph Banks, a naturalist from the period. He relied often on his 1810 Encyclopedia Britannica. “You have the smell of the binding in your nostrils. It makes the era palpable and helps its apprehension.”48 When he needed to make money, he did translations of the transgressive French writers Colette and Simone de Beauvoir. This last fact tells us something about his sensibility that illuminates a surprising facet of his success: his books did almost as well with women as with men.49 “O’Brian’s humor,” suggested Star Lawrence, “and the emotional depth of his characters and romantic subplots have been key in attracting female readers to what had long been a largely male bastion.”50 It also helped that the books formed a series and read, to many—because of O’Brian’s immersion in his beloved long eighteenth century and his punctilious historical research—like fantasy.51 The bounty of naval details and period precision invited escape as if into another world. “Many O’Brian fans,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “see the series as a cross between Jane Austen’s well-ordered 19th-century novels and Star Trek.” The president of the New York Public Library told the Journal that O’Brian is “the thinking man’s Tom Clancy.”52 “There is certainly an element of wish-fulfillment in the world that he creates,” Lawrence told the Times, “and, even if there are all sorts of cruel things within it, you still end up in a place where the sails are white and the air is clean and there is an endless possibility of things that don’t happen in our world.”53 Star Trek, Clancy, and fantasy are not incidental comparisons. They are exemplary of the epochal consequences of conglomeration. With the consolidation of conglomerate control over publishing around 1980, mass-market houses made series a priority because they ensured a built-in audience for new books. Pocket Books’ Star Trek series became especially ubiquitous. It was only in the 1980s that fantasy emerged as its own genre, thanks to its suitability for series and the success, in the 1970s, of Tolkien’s books. It was also around 1980 that bestseller lists became dominated by brand-name blockbusters such as the

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novels of Tom Clancy. None of this was in place when O’Brian was previously published in the United States. Adults who had read Lord of the Rings in college or who wanted higher-brow Clancy made a ready audience for O’Brian. That it was higher-brow made it work for Norton. O’Brian’s Britishness and bookishness gave him the shine he needed for Star Lawrence and for Donald Lamm’s editorial board, enabling Norton “to model a new way for houses to publish big, mass-appealing, series fiction respectably.”54 Norton made the most of O’Brian mania and its “possessed creatures.”55 The publisher created the popular Patrick O’Brian Newsletter “to clarify and illustrate such things as the deck plans of a frigate or the workings of shipboard armaments.”56 Norton put out an O’Brian calendar and sold rights for what quickly became popular audiobooks. More unusually, Norton rented the H.M.S. Rose, “a 30-gun frigate” and “replica of a 1750’s British ship” on which to host a launch party for O’Brian’s latest, The Commodore, in 1995. O’Brian wrote in the newsletter about how he “was allowed to fire the evening gun.”57 Each summer, Norton sold tickets for voyages aboard the Rose, during which it would sail “up and down the Eastern seaboard” “with its amateur hands standing watch, furling sails and emulating life on Mr. O’Brian’s ships.”58 By the end of the decade, O’Brian had more than three million books in print. He and Norton had started a trend. The New York Times reported, “there is enough money in seafaring literature these days to prompt a host of trade publishers to cash in.” “Like an armada of tall ships,” the Times wrote, “tales of the sea are sailing onto bookshelves.”59 Penguin paid a million dollars for the book that inspired Moby-Dick. New imprints appeared from Merritt Communications and Henry Holt dedicated to oceanic lit. Francisco Goldman had big success for Grove Atlantic with The Ordinary Seaman. Norton itself scored a massive blockbuster with Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm in 1997. In 1998, Norton’s Andrea Barrett published her well-received The Voyage of the Narwhal, her last novel before winning a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Like a rising tide, Norton’s success briefly lifted all shipping literature—thanks to Star Lawrence’s disgruntled cousin and Norton’s freedom, as an employee-owned house, to flout industry consensus.

HOWARD’S WRITERS

When Gerald Howard stepped into his first Norton editorial meeting in 1988, Star Lawrence and Carol Houck Smith had already begun the work that would

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make the house a force in trade fiction. At first, coming from Viking Penguin, Howard found the meetings “pretty brutal because it was a thrifty company.” The fact that the money was all communally held—and thus to bet on a book was to gamble with one’s colleagues’ incomes—was always in the back of one’s mind. “There was a phrase that I heard Star Lawrence use more than once,” Howard told me: “ ‘I’d like to spend some of your money.’ ” What made Norton different from any other major house was that “when any editor would say, I’d like to spend $50,000 for a book, you were asking for $50,000 of the money of the shareholders of W. W. Norton.”60 Howard showed up with two important writers in tow: David Foster Wallace and James Welch. Wallace’s follow-up to his debut novel, the short story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, came out in 1989. (Norton botched the roll out; a few years later the house hired a new publicist, Louise Brockett, who gained admiration from authors and editors for her facility with messaging.) Welch is recognized, alongside N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, as a key figure in the flourishing of Native American literature that began with Momaday’s House Made of Dawn in 1968. Howard was at Penguin when he saw Welch’s first two novels go out of print. He brought them back through Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction series and took on Welch as an author, working with him on his masterpiece, Fools Crow. Welch followed Howard to Norton where they published his novel The Indian Lawyer in 1990.

PUBLISHING’S WHITENESS

Howard’s taste for experimentalism and ethnic literatures made him an odd fit at his new employer. His early impression was that “it was a very WASPy place. Even Don Lamm, who’s a German Jew from Texas, was a WASP.”61 Eric Swenson, who’d been at Norton since 1951 and famously acquired A Clockwork Orange, would take him to the exclusive New York Yacht Club and the Century Club. Norton was an especially white publisher in a world of white publishers. The whiteness of publishing was no secret. In 1994, Calvin Reid, a black journalist, wrote a feature for Publishers Weekly in which he asked, “Will an overwhelmingly white publishing industry remain a metaphorical house without doors, attracting neither minority workers to their employ nor minority audiences to their products?”62 The black editors Reid spoke to described a “hostile climate for minorities.” One said, “It’s the whitest industry in America. City Ballet has more black dancers than most trade houses have black editors.”63

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Reid found one exception. He pointed to André Schiffrin’s The New Press as “a model for the future of minority hiring in the publishing industry. . . . The unusually diverse staff at the young nonprofit house dovetails nicely with a publishing list that focuses on minority issues.” Schiffrin argued that the whiteness of publishing had entailed implicit assumptions about the whiteness of audiences, hence the whiteness of lists. He called the result “intellectual redlining.”64 In Redlining Culture (2020), Richard Jean So shows that “between 1950 and 2000, 97 percent of novels published by Random House were written by authors who are white.” He chose to focus on Random House because of its reputation as a relatively hospitable place for black authors: “this is the house that published [Ralph] Ellison, Stokely Carmichael, and Toni Cade Bambara; brought out The Black Book; and hired the industry’s most prominent black editor, [Toni] Morrison.”65 The numbers weren’t better at other conglomerate houses. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a number of black publishing houses appeared, though few of these published much fiction. By 1975, most of them had folded, doomed by the assumption on the part of banks that African Americans did not constitute enough of a readership to sustain these houses. As Kinohi Nishikawa remarks, “Centuries-old racism baked into the system itself: that is what rushed Black Arts to its demise.”66 Maybe a dozen black senior editors were in trade publishing in the early 1970s; a decade later, that number had halved to six, three of whom worked in paperback romance.67 Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was founded by Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and others in 1981 and published transformational work, but closed shortly after Lorde died in 1992. One writer, Terry McMillan, managed to break through conglomeration’s white ceiling in 1992 with her third novel, Waiting to Exhale, published by Viking Penguin. It tells the story of four middle-class black women looking for love—and its success revealed a market for black romance. E. Lynn Harris, an openly gay black man, was selling countless copies of his self-published debut when Waiting to Exhale became a bestseller. Doubleday scooped him up and made his down-low romances ten-time bestsellers on The New York Times list. Penguin picked up Eric Jerome Dickey. In 1993, Omar Tyree founded a hugely popular spinoff genre, street lit or urban fiction, with his self-published Flyy Girl. Simon & Schuster published it in 1996, and launched Tyree’s rival, Sister Souljah, with The Coldest Winter Ever in 1999. (Tyree included an interview with Souljah as an appendix to Flyy Girl; but after she published Coldest Winter, he found himself losing readers who disliked his respectability politics when compared with Souljah’s refusal to moralize.) Tyree and Souljah extended McMillan’s middle-class romance to the black underclass. They were followed by Vickie Stringer and Teri Woods, who, after repeated

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rejections from conglomerate publishers, found extraordinary success in the genre through self-publishing.68 Black romance and street lit created a problem for the cultural elites, white and black, fighting—and winning—the canon wars: they wanted more African American literature, but trashy “smut” wasn’t what they had in mind.69 They wanted more books like Beloved, not Low Down and Dirty. Did the two books have anything in common beyond the race of their author? What did it mean for the meaning of African American literature as a category if the two were placed beside each other under that heading on the bookstore shelf?70 One black author wrote in the New York Times that he was “embarrassed and disgusted” by the evidence of “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction” that he found in the African American section of his local Borders.71 Elites feared that street lit would undermine their argument for the edifying function of African American literature. Rather than resolve the problem, elites eventually settled into ignoring street lit.72 Black romance writers internalized this bias, one of them saying, “Wealth is a requirement most of the time. No drug use, no cursing, the sex has to be romantic. It feels like they’re trying so hard to be opposite to street lit. It’s like White Harlequin in blackface.”73 In 1996, Norton published a monumental work that staked a claim to the category just as the debate over its criteria of inclusion was heating up: the long delayed, much anticipated Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay. It had been conceived many years earlier by Gates when he was “an obscure Cornell professor,” a junior colleague of the general editor for the series, M. H. Abrams. At that time, Norton wondered whether such an anthology would even reach “the 5,000 copies it needed to break even.”74 Now it was marketed to a general audience. With its selections, it definitively portrayed African American literature as respectable rather than street. Nonprofit publishers saw an opportunity to meet the demand, from readers and, more important, from those who funded them, for highbrow multicultural literature. They published Frank Chin, Percival Everett, David Haynes, David Treuer, and Karen Tei Yamashita, writers who inevitably understood the game they were playing, in which, by way of the nonprofits, they served establishment multiculturalism, and they often expressed their recognition and distaste through their writing, building in critiques of their usefulness to white liberals. Publishing’s logic, then, in the 1990s offered limited opportunities for fiction writers of color. On the one hand, conglomerates published very few books by nonwhite writers, and when they did, they tended to be romances. Very few literary writers of color were in the ranks of conglomerates. The market “can only receive

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one or two” Toni Morrison said toward the end of her career as an editor.75 She and Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, and Amy Tan, at no fault of their own, made it appear as if multicultural literary fiction were expanding at conglomerates.76 On the other hand, nonprofits wanted fiction that represented a highbrow vision of multiculturalism. Writers of color with different plans were typically out of luck. Here is where Norton was primed to play a role: it would house the misfits.

HOWARD’S INTEGRATION

Norton, in 1990, was at the start of what would be a dynamic decade for writers of color. From 1990 to 1996, Howard started bringing diversity to the house’s list: in addition to Welch, he would acquire books by Ana Castillo, Leon Forrest, Walter Mosley, the Before Columbus Foundation fiction and poetry anthologies, and reprints of classic black pulp by Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim. Bear in mind that across the same number of years, 1984 and 1990, the vastly larger Random House, including its prestigious Knopf imprint, published only two novels by black authors, one of which was Morrison’s Beloved. Howard insists, though, “I wasn’t trying to integrate the Norton list in any way.” Or, more colorfully, “It wasn’t some program on my part to get this honky publishing company, where everybody, including me, wore Brooks Brothers sports coats, to get down with the brothers.”77 Howard told me he “grew up in the 60s and race was a big part of growing up in the 60s.” That hardly ensured that he would become antiracist, however. A Thomas Pynchon fan, Howard developed a sensibility like that expressed in the author’s 1964 short story, “The Secret Integration,” where children reject their parents’ racism, or in his 1966 essay, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” where he reports on the abject conditions that resulted in the 1965 Watts riots. Howard’s secret integration, intended or not, was also a matter of business sense. In the 1970s, working in Harcourt Brace’s textbook department, he “got tired of typing the following sentence, Revised for greater accessibility and with fuller coverage of blacks, women, and other minorities.” He had long internalized the changing demographics of U.S. readership, even if such awareness hadn’t made the institutional migration from textbooks to trade. “I’d been inculcated from the start,” he said, “that this was happening in the academic world, that it was being opened up. And so that fed into my instincts about what might sell in the long run.”78 When literary agent Susan Bergholz knocked on his door with Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), he was a ready audience; he saw how the novel—though

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he tended to gravitate toward male authors—might tap into the energy propelling Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Sandra Cisneros’s then-current follow-up to The House on Mango Street (1983): Woman Hollering Creek (1991)—both also, as it happened, represented by Bergholz.79 Howard was receptive, too, when he learned about the plight of Leon Forrest. Forrest was among the black writers Toni Morrison edited and published at Random House; his three well-regarded novels sold poorly. “Random House saw this as yet another affirmative action thing,” Forrest later told a group of students. “There was no idea of investing in my talent by Random House, though Morrison believed in it.”80 To persuade Jason Epstein to let her acquire his third novel, she wrote of his previous two, “Neither book earned out but we all felt and I still feel that Forrest is an important literary writer who must be supported.”81 Then he wrote Divine Days, an 1,138-page opus, Black Chicago’s Ulysses. By that time Morrison had left Random House. Forrest published the book with Another Chicago Press in 1992. Stanley Crouch reviewed it for the New York Times, calling it “an adventurous masterwork.”82 Henry Louis Gates called it the “War and Peace of the African American Novel.”83 But almost immediately Another Chicago Press’s distributor went bankrupt and its warehouse sustained a fire that destroyed five hundred copies from the full run of 1,500. It basically became impossible to find a copy. Forrest’s agent, Faith Childs, and Another Chicago Press publisher Lee Webster searched for an opportunity to republish. Conglomerates weren’t interested but Howard was. He heard PEN Midwest president Gerald Murray talk up the book and lament its obstacles and he decided to reach out. Norton and Another Chicago Press put out Divine Days in 1994 “as virtually a new publication . . . , fully supported as a major title, with Norton reps selling the book and the publicity department taking an aggressive approach to reviews and interviews.”84 Unfortunately, it didn’t sell. Norton wasn’t able to pull off a black Ulysses, maybe for the same reason it wasn’t able to succeed, as we’ll see shortly, with black pulp: it was, in the end, too white. Howard, at least, got a first edition in the deal. “I still have somewhere in a storage facility in Mahwah, New Jersey,” he told me, “a very smoky smelling original edition of Divine Days.”

GERALD’S OBSESSION

If Leon Forrest—head of African American Studies at Northwestern—is the highest of highbrow, Iceberg Slim is the quintessence of lowbrow. Reputedly a

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former pimp, he wrote a series of black pulp fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, starting with Pimp, published by Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. Holloway made its name with Pimp and quickly picked up a Slim protégé, Donald Goines, who churned out his own series of popular pulp. By the 1990s, however, these books were out of print. That’s when Marc Gerald called Howard. Gerald was a producer on America’s Most Wanted and, before that, had been managing editor of True Detective, a pulp mag begun in the 1920s that lived long past its prime. The cover of a 1994 issue blared headlines like “LESBIAN KILLER OF BABY LOLLIPOPS.”85 Unfortunately, said Gerald, “our readership of blue hairs, shut-ins, Greyhound bus riders, cops, and ax murderers was old and dying fast.”86 It went defunct in 1995. “I don’t know how he got to me,” Howard said, “this kid from Cleveland who just knew more about black culture and literature than anybody I’ve ever met. He started telling me about these fabulous books, black crime novels, that had fallen into obscurity.” Gerald had become obsessed with what he called “a lost legacy of AfricanAmerican noir,” which, to him, meant first and foremost the oeuvre of Donald Goines, but also novels by Clarence Cooper Jr., Chester Himes, Herbert Simmons, and John  A. Williams. Writing for Salon in 1997, Gerald claimed, “I scoured crawl spaces, garage sales, lending libraries in far-off places, used book shops on three continents. I even hired a private eye. Two years after my search began, I had rounded up about 50 books.”87 He cleared the rights to the best of these. That’s when he went to Howard. The books weren’t all new to Howard. He was fascinated by Holloway House. He remembered seeing books by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines in drugstores in downtown Brooklyn when he was growing up and thinking, “this isn’t for white people.” When Gerald made his pitch to run a series of black noir, Howard “just connected with it.”88 They called it Old School. It ought to have been an auspicious moment, in 1996, for Howard to take Marc Gerald’s pitch and reprint Slim and Goines. Just two years later, Teri Woods would begin to blow up with her street lit debut, True to the Game. The year after that, Simon & Schuster would score a hit with Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever. These books were descendants of Slim’s Pimp and Goines’s Dopefiend. Readers were ready. But they didn’t work. Why not? Part of it might have been about gender. Maybe the masculine perspectives of Slim and Goines didn’t appeal to would-be readers of Woods and Soulja. But we can also point to Norton’s whiteness. Howard told me they got the covers wrong. He also said, when accounting for why the series was “a noble failure,” that he doesn’t “like rap”: “I don’t think in

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those terms. And anyway, the idea of trying to explain rap to a Norton editorial meeting is very amusing.”89 He pointed to Jamie Byng’s Scottish Canongate Books, which took up Gerald’s series in the UK as Payback Books, got the covers right, got Irvine Welsh to introduce Pimp, and hooked up the series with hip hop culture—and did very well. Norton had neither the reputation nor the know-how to sell to an emergent black readership. But then why did Gerald go to, of all houses, W. W. Norton in the first place? Because, said Gerald, they were publishing the most successful contemporary practitioner of black noir, if in a more middlebrow register: Walter Mosley.

MOSLEY ’S PROGRAM

Literary agent Gloria Loomis brought Mosley to Norton. Mosley was a computer programmer living in Manhattan when he took a writing class at City College where he showed his professor his completed manuscript for Devil in a Blue Dress. His professor secretly sent it to Loomis who sent it to Howard.90 “I got it on the first three pages,” he told me. “I said, oh, this is Raymond Chandler on the black side of town. This is great.”91 (Mosley tells it a little differently: “The funny thing about Norton taking the book is that Gerry was halfway through it before he realized it was a mystery.”) It was a hit. And, like, O’Brian’s Master and Commander, it launched a series, here centered around the protagonist Easy Rawlins. Each entry did better than the one before. President Clinton became a fan. “Most people think that there’s a lot of financial pressure on me to write bestsellers because of [the protagonist] Easy’s commercial success,” Mosley said. “But detective fiction isn’t really something Norton does a lot of, so there’s less pressure than one might expect.”92 With his rising fame, Mosley became an outspoken critic of white publishing. He chaired an initiative by the PEN American Center “to address minority hiring in book publishing,” which “sponsored a publishing day for minorities,” and “drew more than 100 minority students to a panel of minority professionals who discussed their experiences in book publishing.” Although Mosley spoke highly of working with Norton, he also said, “It’s an odd thing to be making money for someone who wouldn’t hire you.”93 Mosley’s criticism was implicit from the start. In the opening chapter of Devil in a Blue Dress, Easy Rawlins—a black man who lives in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and has recently lost his job manufacturing aircraft—hears a proposition to do detective work for a white man. At a time when whiteness

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was the default in U.S. fiction, an assumption about characters that could go unnamed, Mosley announced from the first sentence that he was going to name it: “I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar.” The white man is very white. “It’s not just that he was white but he wore an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks.” He works for a wealthy white investment banker who is trying to recoup stolen money. Rawlins takes the job so that he can pay his mortgage. Home ownership is a point of black pride. “I felt that I was just as good as any white man,” thinks Rawlins, “but if I didn’t even own my front door then people would look at me like just another poor beggar.”94 In the end, the man in the  off-white linen suit is dead and Rawlins has the investment banker’s money. The allegory—Rawlins is to Mosley as the investment banker is to white publishing—is obvious. Maintaining his publishing relationship with Norton, Mosley gave his first manuscript, written before Devil in a Blue Dress, to Black Classic Press, a small black-owned Baltimore-based house. He and the Black Classic’s founder, W. Paul Coates—father of Ta-Nehisi Coates—toured together to promote the book. Even if the conglomerates bring out Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terry McMillan, he told his audiences, they are still “white publishing.” With this partnership with Coates, Mosley said he was saying, “Hey, we want a little piece of this cake. We have writers in the cake, we have readers in the cake, we want a piece of the cake.”95 Mosley’s appetite for racial equity “eventually became something of a problem for us,” said Star Lawrence, “because he and his agent just decided they were running the show.” Michael Pietsch, David Foster Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown, began pursuing Mosley’s books. His last for Norton was published in 1998. It was Howard’s formation as a counterculture kid that led him to do books Star Lawrence would never have touched—like Raymond Chandler on the black side of town. “That was Gerry’s pick,” Lawrence told me. “It was not my kind of stuff.”96 Conglomerates rarely published writers of color, especially black men. Even Howard had internalized the conglomerate sensibility, to a degree: “there’s a resistance on the part of the culture at large to deal with the realities of black life.” Howard believed, in the 1990s, that many readers had problems seeing black male characters “as plain old people instead of superheroes like Michael Jordan, or a threatening presence.”97 And nonprofits didn’t really do genre. It was left to Howard and Norton to publish Devil in a Blue Dress and the Easy Rawlins series, at least until Mosley was a proven name. Patrick O’Brian and Mosley both started at Norton in 1990 and published there throughout the decade. Little would seem to unite the two at first glance.

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But both had handicaps that dimmed their chances at other houses. O’Brian had tried twice in the United States and failed twice. Mosley was a black man writing neither romances nor obvious literary multicultural fiction. Both succeeded, I think, for the same reason. Both wrote literary genre fiction—but not, like Joan Didion or Cormac McCarthy or Colson Whitehead, by absorbing genre techniques into literary fiction. O’Brian and Mosley wrote from within genre with the stylistic sophistication of literary fiction. They captured large and largely white audiences who wanted their genre with a healthy dose of prestige, so the colophon helped.98 Once captured, they had the reader on the hook for book after book.

HOWARD’S GROTT Y SCOTS

With O’Brian and Mosley bringing in big profits, editors at Norton had earned themselves a certain degree of trust when it came to fiction. “Here’s the thing about Norton,” Howard told me. “You couldn’t do anything, but you could do almost anything that you wanted. If it wasn’t crazy and it didn’t cost the company any money, you could do it.”99 But he went on to tell a story about doing something crazy. “So one day,” he said, “I get a lime green UK paperback from Georgina Capel, the Rights Director for Jonathan Cape,” the British publishing firm. The book was The Acid House by Irvine Welsh. Welsh grew up in public housing in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1960s, became addicted to heroin, played in punk bands in London, then found work back in Edinburgh in the local government’s housing department. How much of this biography is true and how much is selfmythology is unclear.100 He did, though, pick up a pen and write Trainspotting, a novel that depicts Edinburgh’s heroin subculture. He published it in the UK in 1993 where it was well-reviewed and sold in healthy numbers. Notably, it “began to be viewed as . . . representative of a predominantly youth-based counter-culture.” Welsh held readings in clubs, building his image as someone who was “taking literature out of the library and onto the dancefloor.” Welsh’s UK editor told scholar Claire Squires that he was attracting “non-readers.” To Squires, Welsh’s “use of a discourse that seems to speak these [non-]reader’s own language” was an “immeasurably clever cultural ploy” and his publisher’s embrace of him was a kind of neo-colonialism: extending the house’s audience “into new territories—in this case that of the group of non-readers, or readers

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attracted by books detailing alternative lifestyles—by appropriating their discourse.”101 No one was talking about any of this in the United States when Howard opened his copy of The Acid House, a book of short stories, Welsh’s follow-up to Trainspotting. It’s written in thick vulgar sometimes impenetrable Scottish dialect. Capel, seeking to extend Jonathan Cape’s territory across the pond, gave it  to Howard and said, “I dare you to publish it.”102 It was the right way to pitch him. Howard took it home and found it “scabrously funny.” He told himself, “I’m in trouble because I really like this, but this is in deeply questionable taste.” He decided against asking his colleagues to read it because he thought (rightly) that they’d hate it. Instead, he asked for their trust and only a little money. “I like this,” he said. “Can I just have $3000?” The board said yes. Howard decided he needed to be up front with Donald Lamm. “I went into Don Lamm’s office and I said, ‘Don, I want you to know what I’m doing here. If somebody comes around and talks to you about this book, I just want you to know that I’m doing this and I think I know what I’m doing.’ ” Lamm liked Howard and vice versa. It was a go. Howard argues, “I could not have gotten away with that anywhere else. They would have looked at me like, ‘why, if you like [The Acid House], do you only want to pay $3,000?’ ” (That would be about $6,000 in 2022 dollars.) The Acid House made, in Howard’s phrase, “a little splash.”103 Publishers Weekly didn’t care for it, writing, “the satire lacks teeth, descending instead to weak sarcasm.”104 But it earned a positive write up in the New York Times, which called it a “wildly promising American debut,” praising Welsh’s “sure-handed, incendiary use of language and his ability to develop characters through conversation.”105 Howard was pleased and read Trainspotting. It was, to his mind, less intelligible than The Acid House. “I thought, we can’t do this. I mean, we cannot do this. This is not English. It’s a foreign language title.”106 But then he learned that the team who made the film A Shallow Grave, which he admired, was making Trainspotting into a film, which encouraged him to go for it. Norton bought it for a paltry $5,000 ($10,000 in 2022 dollars) and sold an amazing one hundred thousand copies. It was one thing to publish Walter Mosley, whose books ripped into white supremacy in the name of home ownership, of upward mobility. It was another to publish Irvine Welsh, who mocked the class pretensions of literary elites for whom one could find no purer distillation than W. W. Norton—from May Sarton’s cats to Patrick O’Brian’s fussy sailors. “These unintelligible Scots,” Star Lawrence said to me, “this was stuff to be torched.”107

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Welsh’s quintessential scene takes place during the Edinburgh Festival, the largest art festival in the world, contributing to Edinburgh’s image “as the middle-class cultural capital of Scotland.”108 Although the chapter is titled “The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival,” we don’t see any of it. We stick with Mark (“Rent Boy”) Renton who tries to wean off heroin by taking a couple of time-release opium pills that he inserts rectally. The act of insertion instigates his bowels after five or six days of constipation. He begins to shit himself and rushes into a disgusting bathroom with an inch of urine on the floor and voids himself into the toilet, proceeding then to search through the feces to recover his pills, making “several long dredges through the mess, . . . panhandling . . . the shite ay many good Muirhoose and Pilton punters.”109 This scene, and the book as a whole, has been taken as a “crazed, splenetic rant against the sleek, selfcongratulatory Edinburgh of the Festival.”110 The irony that Claire Squires identifies in Trainspotting’s UK publication (“the initial ideological intent that Welsh describes, and that the text upholds”—its hostility to middle-class respectability— “is conscripted to facilitate the mainstream publisher’s enterprise”) is only intensified by the buttoned-up Brooks Brothers WASPiness of Norton.111 Howard went on to bring Welsh’s fellow Scot dialectitions, Duncan McLean and James Kelman (who’d won the 1994 Booker Prize), to Norton. “We had all three men over for what was billed as a ‘Great Scots Tour,’ which was very successful. New York Magazine paid for the drinks (and maybe drugs?) tab for Irvine Welsh as he careened about NYC in exchange for access. . . . Two weeks later the piece appeared, in which Irvine was called ‘a walking quality of life offense.’ Yes,” Howard concluded, “I turned Norton into the favored port of entry for the best in grotty Scottish fiction.”112

PALAHNIUK’S FIGHT CLUB

Around the time Kelman, McLean, and Welsh were rampaging in the Big Apple, Chuck Palahniuk, unknown and unpublished, sent Howard a short story. It wasn’t the first thing he’d sent Howard, who’d read Palahniuk’s manuscript for Invisible Monsters, the voice of which drove him “crazy with delight.” The problem was that Howard “couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on in the book.” At a basic level, he simply couldn’t follow it and “didn’t see how to fix it.” The two met at a writers’ conference, then again in New York City, and they got along. So Palahniuk sent Howard the story, which would form the basis for Fight Club. Howard told him, “keep up with this, there’s something here.”113

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Eventually, the novel came in, delivered by Palahniuk’s agent, Edward Hibbert, who at the time was playing restaurant critic Gil Chesterton on Frasier. Howard loved it. He went into the next editorial meeting enthusiastic to pitch it. He started talking it up but quickly realized that everyone was looking at him like he was nuts, just waiting for somebody else to say, “I don’t think so.” In his account of the meeting, he said he felt he was running out of time, that he maybe had fifteen seconds. He said, “Look, give me $6000,” or $12,000 in 2022 dollars. “That’s all I want. I won’t come back to you. I just think there’s something here.” It was quiet for a beat. Donald Lamm said, “Give the kid his book.” “That,” Howard told me, “is the paradigmatic Norton moment.”114 Fight Club takes Trainspotting’s implicit hostility to mainstream, middleclass respectability and makes it its raison d’être. The protagonist is a whitecollar worker, a “recall campaign coordinator” evaluating requests based on simple and crass economic criteria: if the recall will cost less than the total of projected settlements it is approved.115 He is alienated and lonely. He copes by attending different support groups for people with diseases he doesn’t have every night of the week, where he is able to cry. When a woman begins doing the same thing, showing up at his meetings, it kills his vibe; he dissociates into two personalities and starts fight clubs where men beat each other badly as a form of therapy for the ennui generated by consumer culture—and as a sanctioned way to physically touch. The protagonist blows up his own condo, which he had filled with bourgeois furnishings: a “Haparanda sofa group,” a “Johanneshov armchair,” a “Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel” (“oh, I had to have that”), and “clever Njurunda coffee tables.” He quits his job and finds ways to assault the aesthetic pleasures of polite WASP society. He takes gigs as a waiter for elite functions, serving “titans and their gigantic wives.” He urinates in the tomato bisque, dips his hard-on in the orange mousse, and farts “on a whole cart of Boccone Dulce.”116 He takes on the culture industry by working as a projectionist and splicing images of penises into films that flash by so quickly that they only leave a subliminal sense of unease. This is the novel as class resentment; Palahniuk came from a world of “bluecollar nobodies.”117 It is also a novel, however repressed, of gay utopianism: it is a very gay book.118 It opens with one man sticking a gun in another man’s mouth. The secret sign borne by Fight Club members is the scar of a kiss burned into the back of their hands by lye: “The back of your hand is swollen red and glossy as a pair of lips in the exact shape of Tyler’s kiss.” The problem with capitalism, in Fight Club, is that it channels and numbs men’s libidos—their vivacity, their sense of being alive—by redirecting their desire for other men toward commodities. In rebellion, Fight Club proliferates until it becomes a ubiquitous secret

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society dedicated to overthrowing “civilization, so we can make something better.”119 Star Lawrence read it straight. It seemed to him, “a nail [in the coffin] for civilization.” This was not, to Lawrence, a good thing. “Would I just as soon burn every copy of Fight Club I could lay my hands on?” he asked me. “You bet your ass I would.”120 This amounted to reciprocation for Fight Club’s protagonist’s assertion that he “would do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe [his] ass with the Mona Lisa.”121 Nevertheless, as editorial director, Lawrence assented to its publication. But it’s a misreading to read it straight. Despite its anticapitalist pretensions, it is the hard work of a striver. Palahniuk betrays his normie aesthetic ambitions when he compares his repetitive use of the eight rules of Fight Club as a method to transition between scenes with Orson Welles’s use of newsreel reports in Citizen Kane, and when he claims that “what I was writing was just The Great Gatsby updated”: tragedies of class mobility and among the most esteemed works of U.S. film and literature. Palahniuk’s grandiose expression of gendered  class resentment in the novel finds its banal source in frustration with the literary market: “the bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Sisters of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were novels that presented a social model for women to be together. . . . But there was no novel that presented a social model for men to share their lives.”122 Suddenly, we see Chuck Palahniuk and Patrick O’Brian as strange bedfellows, not only as fellow writers on Norton’s list, but because they committed their imaginations to depicting social models “for men to share their lives”—which is what made them misfits who belonged at Norton in the first place. Trainspotting and Fight Club operated against the consensus of the publishing industry in the mid-1990s. They were written primarily for men: but men, it was said, didn’t buy books. They created their own genre, their audience. In publisher parlance, they lacked comparative titles, or comps. That made them high risk. Howard called them experiments. “You find me a comp title for Fight Club,” he said. “Good luck with that. Or, you know, a comp title for Trainspotting.” He went on to explain, “There’s no context in which you can speak about it. There’s no prestige involved. I couldn’t go in and say Fight Club’s gonna win a National Book Award. None of the heuristics that you would use in a larger house to sell the book were applicable at all. But at Norton, because I had the respect of my colleagues—I behaved like a normal Norton editor in a lot of other respects, and I wasn’t asking for anything other than a minor sum of money—I was able to do those books.”123

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In 1998, Howard left Norton to become the editor in chief of Anchor Books at Doubleday. This was a moment when the logic of comps was solidifying, which is to say a logic that says what will work is what has worked. In other words, a reinforcement of the status quo. Nielsen BookScan launched in January  2001, providing far more accurate sales information than was previously available, allowing for the codification of comps. The forcefulness of the bottom line, embodied by executives like Alberto Vitale and ingrained by habits like comps, encouraged editors to play it safer, to avoid experiments.124 It became common sense not to buy a book for just a few thousand dollars; such little money implied too little confidence. For a long time, Palahniuk was ashamed of his advance for Fight Club. It was “so small I never told anyone. Not anybody.” Six thousand dollars was so low, he was told by other authors, that, typically, it was an amount meant to make the author “feel insulted and walk away.”125 As Norton’s Robert Weil wrote derisively in the Washington Post a few years later, “The equation is simple: A large advance, at least six figures, is required for a book to be taken seriously”—by marketing departments, sales staff, booksellers, and the press126 Literary history is a matter of contingencies. It’s altogether possible that hadn’t W. W. Norton died in 1945 and his wife Polly hadn’t sold the company to its employees; that hadn’t Times Mirror bought New American Library, launching the conglomerate era and, years later, installing the personnel who would compel Gerald Howard to flee to Norton; that there would be no independent employee-owned house in the 1990s and maybe Walter Mosley would have never left his job as a computer programmer, Irvine Welsh would still be a bureaucratic flunky, and Chuck Palahniuk a diesel mechanic.

MEHTA’S GRAB

Howard was exaggerating when he professed the lack of comps for Fight Club. It in fact bore great resemblance to a hit from just a few years earlier: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, another vicious hypermasculinist satire of white-collar work and consumer culture. Howard knew Ellis well. He reprinted Ellis’s debut, Less than Zero—which made Ellis a minor celebrity at age twenty-one—with Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction. Howard went to Ellis’s college graduation party the next year. Keith Haring and Andy Warhol were there. Warhol wrote in his diary, “It was such a cute party. All the kids had the right fashionable hair and the right fashionable clothes.” Howard said, “I’m a nice boy

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from Brooklyn, and what I encountered at that party I’d never encountered before—just this air of blasé corruption. I was fifteen years older than everybody there, and I felt like one of the less experienced people in the room.”127 Howard published Ellis’s second novel, Rules of Attraction, in paperback at Penguin in 1988. He knew what to expect from Ellis by the time American Psycho came round. He later remembered how the novel, “a macabre put-on that amplified every cliché about yuppie scum to Grand Guignol volume, created a firestorm when the literal minded (of whom there are so many) failed to get the joke.”128 The firestorm started before the novel was published when its editor, to provide advance warning, circulated the most egregious passages among his colleagues at Simon & Schuster. The response was “impassioned.”129 Everyone hated it. “There was some feeling of revulsion on the part of the younger women there,” Ellis’s agent, Amanda (“Binky”) Urban, told the New York Times.130 Rumors burbled into the fall, when Time reported on the unease at the house and called the book a compendium of “the most appalling acts of torture, murder, and dismemberment ever described in a book targeted for the best-seller lists.”131 Two weeks later, Simon & Schuster canceled it. Industry insiders believed the decision was made by Martin Davis, chairman of Paramount Communications, Simon & Schuster’s parent company. The president of the Authors Guild said, “This is a black day for Simon & Schuster and a black day for American publishing. And sadly, it’s a day the Guild has been predicting would come since giant corporations started buying distinguished American publishing houses.”132 Simon & Schuster had utterly transformed since it was acquired by Paramount (then Gulf + Western) in 1975. Its CEO, Richard  E. (“Dick”) Snyder, oversaw its expansion. Snyder was “florid, hot-blooded.”133 He wanted everything. He wanted, and got, Mary Higgins Clark and Rush Limbaugh. In 1991, he had just poached Philip Roth from FSG, to Straus’s rage. Snyder had frequent tantrums in the office, yelled at his employees.134 He went to Tufts, did a brief stint in the Army, and, like Jason Epstein, began his career as a trainee at Doubleday. In 1961, Snyder moved to Simon & Schuster as an assistant to the sales manager of one of the firm’s subsidiaries. He rose from there, appointed executive vice president of Simon & Schuster in 1972 and president in 1975. Between 1975 and 1991, he transformed the company from a respected trade publisher on the commercial end of the spectrum into an enormous powerhouse, briefly the biggest publisher in the United States, whose educational and professional divisions far exceeded trade.135

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He did it by marginalizing the importance of the trade division for profits. In 1975, Simon & Schuster was a trade house; now trade accounted for less than a quarter of total revenue; it had largely become “an educational publisher and a prominent supplier of information services to lawyers, accountants and other professionals.”136 Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux said, “Dick’s switch to the educational and professional areas has been very smart and exceedingly well done, but the trade side has suffered.” “I perceived that trade publishing alone was too volatile for a public company,” Snyder explained to the New York Times. “You cannot get the growth necessary to meet the standards of a parent like Paramount.” And the parent company was making its standards clear. The Times called Martin Davis Snyder’s “nemesis,” because he beat out a friend of Snyder’s for the position of chairman. Asked about Snyder by the Times, Davis said, giving a backhanded compliment, “He gets plenty of advice and he’s a good learner.” The word from those close to Snyder was that Davis canceled American Psycho and “forced Dick to carry the can.”137 Only two weeks later, Simon & Schuster fired Allen Peacock, editor to Richard Bausch, William Gaddis, and Manuel Puig, because, he was told, “he was not producing ‘enough bang for the buck.’ ” Thirteen writers, including Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, and William Gass wrote a letter in protest.138 Peacock told the Times that his former bosses were “grinding out anything that will improve the bottom line because they have to assuage a very greedy and voracious parent company.” The fear about conglomeration was that corporate overlords would interfere with editorial decisions, diminishing the possibilities for good writing, a fear inflamed only nine months earlier when Alberto Vitale fired André Schiffrin. In an ironic turn, it was Vitale’s Random House that scooped up American Psycho less than forty-eight hours later. That had everything to do with Sonny Mehta. Mehta—as I describe in chapter 4—was, by late 1990, maybe the most powerful person at Random House. He’d arrived in 1987 from London where he made his name publishing hot young writers, including Ellis. Numerous houses wanted American Psycho now. Because of the scandal, it was guaranteed to do good business. And not only had Mehta published Ellis in London, but he had a strong relationship with Binky Urban. American Psycho “is a book of serious intent,” Mehta told Publishers Weekly, after he’d acquired it. “Think of Pasolini, of Genet.”139 Random House editor Robin Desser wrote to Graywolf publisher Scott Walker, “Writing to you from new publishing offices for brat ellis. ich, help.”140

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The scandal didn’t stop there. Surely to Ellis’s, Mehta’s, and Urban’s delight, “the feisty feminists at NOW,” the National Organization for Women, disgusted by the novel, encouraged a boycott of Knopf and Vintage—the imprints associated with Mehta—and “closely monitored” Urban’s list, in what they called “Binky Watch.”141 Over time, her list has included E. L. Doctorow, Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Haruki Murakami. By the end of the decade, and after thirty-five printings, Vintage had more than half a million copies of American Psycho in print.142 This is to say, Howard had at least one precedent for Fight Club. Several theses have been devoted to comparing the two.143 Also, in 2017, Irvine Welsh told the New York Times that American Psycho and Fight Club “are the two novels from the end of last century which have not been overtaken as the seminal works in defining America in this century. One deals with the out-of-control greed and power lust of the 1  percent, the other with the lost generations of the  99  percent—poorer than their parents for the first time in American history.”144 American Psycho didn’t eliminate or even do much to diminish the risk for Howard or change the fact that no one else was bidding for Fight Club. Ellis’s first novel had already made him a literary superstar. Palahniuk was nobody. A single scandalous comp wasn’t enough. Not when you had someone like Roger Straus say of Mehta’s acquisition, “it is sad that a publishing house like Knopf/ Vintage, so distinguished in the past, should see fit to publish this book. Their motive escapes me, but it seems unusual that they are putting it out in a hurry, in paperback, at a cheap price in order to cash in on its notoriety.”145

STRAUS’S HOUSE

Straus had motives for badmouthing Knopf and Simon & Schuster (“the trade side has suffered”). He was their competitor and had spent his life positioning FSG as the independent, prestigious, respectable house against the embarrassing aesthetic compromises of the conglomerates: “publicly taunting his more commercial rivals with stiletto words of contempt.”146 Unsurprisingly, his relative freedom was subtended by inherited wealth: the Strauses owned Macy’s and his mother was a Guggenheim. He served in public relations in the Navy in World War II and, upon returning home, used family money to found his publishing house with John Farrar.147 He leveraged European contacts from the war—who also happened to be CIA agents—to acquire Alberto Moravia and Marguerite

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Youcenar.148 But the big break came when Robert Giroux came to the house in 1955, bringing with him from Harcourt, Brace, John Berryman, T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O’Connor.149 If Jason Epstein told himself he left Doubleday because they wouldn’t let him acquire Lolita, Giroux believed he left Harcourt, Brace—after a four-year delay—because they said no to The Catcher in the Rye. He did manage to pull off William Gaddis’s The Recognitions before he left.150 In the 1960s, FSG picked up Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion, John McPhee, Grace Paley, Walker Percy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Susan Sontag, and Tom Wolfe. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Nobel Prize for Literature went, more often than not, to an author on FSG’s lists. Philip Roth came to FSG in 1977, where he wrote his Zuckerman sequence, culminating, in 1986, with The Counterlife, a brilliant, dizzying metafiction that showcased Roth at his most FSG, before, to Straus’s rage, Roth’s agent, Andrew Wylie, convinced him to leave for more money elsewhere.151 Sontag was the most consequential acquisition. She and Straus became exceedingly close, so close that she would influence the shape of FSG’s list through her cosmopolitan taste, founded in her affection for the nouveau roman, which matched Straus’s European sensibility.152 She advocated for fiction that tended toward experimentalism and eschewed traditional characterization and plotting. This set her in opposition, eventually, to Gore Vidal, who lamented the influence of the nouveau roman on U.S. fiction, calling for a return to older, well-populated, compellingly plotted social novels. Journalists loved Straus because he talked frankly and “made good copy, famously arriving at the FSG offices on Union Square in an open-top Mercedes, stepping out in gabardine suits, open-collared shirts (‘to allow his silk ascot to debouch’—Tom Wolfe), his brushed-back silver hair topping a rugged, strongfeatured face.”153 He scoffed at trends such as doing paperback originals and resisted building vertically by buying a paperback imprint even after everyone else had. And, despite perpetual offers, he refused to sell. Robert Bernstein, president of Random House, and Si Newhouse, Random House’s owner, tried separately in 1986. Straus’s rejoinder? “When Knopf gets loose,” he said, puffing a cigar, “I’ll be interested in buying it.”154 He hated Newhouse for buying Gourmet, which his mother had cofounded, and ruining it by “putting fucking tampon ads in it.”155 FSG stayed profitable enough with a strong children’s list that included Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and by leveraging their brand to distribute for smaller outfits: “we now distribute four other publishers we consider lie in our area of publishing,” Straus told Publishers Weekly in 1986. “We can sell their books and make a considerable profit.”156 They also had Straus’s personal

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fortune to fall back on. Also, in 1987, they had two blockbuster bestsellers with Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities— success, though, that led the house to become too bullish with acquisitions and first printings, such that Straus had to lay off 15 percent of his staff in 1992.157 He never came to terms with Turow aesthetically, worrying, “What would Susan [Sontag] say about this?”158 By then, Straus was seventy-five-years old, “the last of the individual publishers whose firm bore their names and whose taste helped form the list.” He still came in to the office every day and ran the show, as he would for another decade, but he was thinking about succession. He had long been grooming his son, Roger (“Rog”) Straus III, to take control, but Rog had always been more interested in meetings and marketing and sales than his father and, in recent years, had argued for making the house more commercial by, for example, expanding in nonfiction and acquiring that long-refused paperback line.159 The differences between father and son became irreconcilable in 1993 after a blowout fight. Rog quit and Straus identified a new heir: Jonathan Galassi.160 Galassi had a perfect pedigree for FSG: Phillips Exeter, Harvard, Cambridge (on a Marshall Scholarship). At Harvard, he studied poetry under Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. He began his career as an editor at Houghton Mifflin in 1973, leaving in 1981 to spend an unhappy five years at Random House before landing at FSG in 1986.161 He was poetry editor of the Paris Review through the 1980s and became president of the Academy of American Poets in 1995. Also in 1995, with FSG’s national accounts manager, Maggie Richards, Galassi created National Poetry Month, which officially kicked off in April  1996.162 He translated Eugenio Montale from Italian and was himself a poet. He wrote silly doggerel to serenade Scott Turow for his bestsellers: “Then just for kicks along the way, / you killed the King and proved you have / more tensile strength than Steel.”163 He submitted a book of poems to Graywolf in the late 1990s; the poetry editor reported to Graywolf ’s director that, “In most cases, these poems come off as workshop exercises: notice the abstraction, the often obvious use of cliché or familiar turns, and especially the choppy, sometimes sing-song, sounds, rhyme, and rhythms. . . . What is amazing here is that there is no sensibility that I can see that has been influenced by Heaney, Brodski, Milosz, Walcott, Pinsky, Charles Wright, or C. K. Williams—all on the FSG list.”164 Graywolf turned him down, delicately (“I was tremendously pleased that you sent your poems to Graywolf ”).165 The collection was published by HarperCollins. At FSG in the early 1990s, Galassi showed an interest in multiculturalism, much like Gerald Howard did at Norton. He acquired Oscar Hijuelos’s second

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novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and printed forty thousand copies with a $50,000 marketing budget. (Hijuelos was a student of FSG author Donald Barthelme.) “It was the very first time that a major publisher invested in a Latino writer and put his book at the top of the list,” said Nicolás Kanellos, director of Arte Público Press.166 Galassi said, “I see a tremendous growth in works that show the ethnic diversity of America. Writers like Oscar Hijuelos and Amy Tan and Charles Johnson have shown that smaller cultures within our country have great appeal to mainstream audiences.”167 Around the same time, he acquired Darryl Pinckney’s High Cotton. His other writers, then or later, included Lydia Davis, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and Scott Turow, and, from past FSG editors, he inherited Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Jamaica Kincaid, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marilynne Robinson, and Derek Walcott.168 In 1994, then, FSG and Norton were the two surviving big independent houses. Both were insular, relatively impervious to trends in the industry, not least the growing influence of anyone other than editors on acquisitions. This was even more true at FSG, where instinct governed. Both houses not only acquired but sought out midlist titles that might sell fewer than ten thousand copies.169 Both had long violently resisted conglomeration. But with his son out of the picture, Straus needed to sell. He chose his buyer carefully, approaching Dieter von Holtzbrinck—head of Holtzbrinck, a German publishing conglomerate—because, he said, “I understand his feelings about the independence and integrity of the companies that make up his group.”170 Straus remained defiantly independent as long as he was alive— though Holtzbrinck acquired St. Martin’s Press in 1995, which launched Picador, a literary paperback imprint, which FSG quickly took advantage of.171 The next year, Holtzbrinck hired a new accountant for FSG to rationalize its finances.172 Galassi took over as president in 2002 and Straus died in 2004. FSG under Galassi adopted what Publishers Weekly called “a new corporate culture.”173 He hired and gave an imprint to Sarah Crichton—who had acquired Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point—“specifically for her commercial sense.”174 He fired FSG’s CFO, who had “worked ardently to  protect FSG’s autonomy,” and told his replacement to integrate FSG with Holtzbrinck’s other U.S. properties.175 (Profit-and-loss sheets finally became mandatory.) Galassi collaborated with Holtzbrinck’s CEO, John Sargent, on bureaucratic and logistical changes: he swapped FSG’s sales representatives for Holtzbrinck’s and handed over “all the backoffice functions—contract, warehousing, and the like.” This all played well with Sargent, who said, “Jonathan

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can be more aggressive in what he buys and we can be more aggressive in selling and marketing.”176 Boris Kachka, in his history of FSG, writes, “What looked like a mundane reorganization marked a radical shift, whereby FSG had to act  like a subsidiary.” After the 2007–2008 financial crash, FSG lost control over its “subrights deals, national sales accounts, and children’s imprint.”177 Every decade, Publishers Weekly wrote a feature article for FSG’s big anniversaries. In 2006, for the sixtieth, the headline, in huge font, read, “House of Galassi.” The only color on the page was Galassi’s name in bright red. It was his house now. And the author who best represented it, whom he had acquired and stuck with and developed, and about whom he was maybe most proud, was Jonathan Franzen. Unlike Straus, Franzen and Galassi came from new money, from strivers. Whereas Galassi gained his polish at Harvard and Cambridge, Franzen did his finishing at Swarthmore. Both were strivers themselves, ambitious careerists, if one (Galassi) a bit more tactful than the other. Franzen said he inherited from his father a “proletarian snobbery”: “an inborn hatred of the rich that comes from wanting to be rich. It curdles quickly into an envy which becomes actually constitutive of a class feeling about the rich, which is what I think I have.”178 The objective correlative to their milieux could be found in the fiction that Straus deemed “class-mass” and that Kachka called, in an attempt to characterize Galassi’s taste, “upper-midlist,” written by “intelligent but accessible novelists with breakout potential.”179 Galassi sanded off FSG’s idiosyncratic edges, the eccentric impulses, often tending avant-garde, that prevailed under Straus. He instituted mechanisms for more predictability and profit, integrating the house into the conglomerate era while maintaining its prestigious edge as a peer of Knopf and Penguin’s upstart imprint, Riverhead. Prestige, in turn, became a bit more class-mass, a bit more upper-midlist. Less Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion, Grace Paley, more Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson. Franzen was a perfect fit. He mostly disliked the kind of work that Sontag championed—the work of the old FSG—“unhiply” preferring character-driven social novels by Ann Beattie, Saul Bellow, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Christina Stead, in the spirit of Sontag’s antagonist, Vidal.180 So when Susan Golomb, Franzen’s agent, sent Galassi the manuscript for The Twenty-Seventh City in 1987, he read half the book and was ready to offer an enthusiastic yes—and a $20,000 advance (about $50,000 in 2022 dollars), which Franzen accepted. FSG printed an “aggressive” forty thousand copies,181 which failed to sell out, but the book wowed critics.182 Michiko Kakutani, lead critic for the New York Times, wrote that it was “wildly ambitious” and left the reader

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“feeling both impressed and disturbed.”183 Galassi took Franzen’s follow-up, Strong Motion, which did worse with both critics and sales. But then came The Corrections. FSG printed three thousand giveaway copies for the annual BookExpo—“the primary venue through which publishers clarify” to booksellers “exactly which titles they will be promoting”184—and Galassi made the rare gesture of including a personal note in which he called the novel “a masterpiece, a triumphant fulfillment of everything his earlier work led us to expect. Not only is this his best book to date, it’s one of the very best we’ve published in my fifteen years at FSG.”185 It was picked up by Oprah’s Book Club, which boosted sales, and then dropped after Franzen’s public ambivalence, which, in turn, thanks to the humming publicity from the scandal, might well have boosted sales even more. An aging Straus, loyal to Tom Wolfe and Wolfe’s record sales numbers for 1987’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, said, “If Franzen overtakes Wolfe, then that’s bad. I’ll kill him. I’ll cut it back somehow, dump a hundred thousand copies in the East River.”186 Sessalee Hensley, national fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, who, at the time, vied with Oprah for the title of most influential person in the world of fiction, named it one of her five favorite novels.187 It won the National Book Award, one year after Sontag had done so for FSG with her final novel, In America, before dying in 2004, the same year as Straus. Franzen was fêted and Galassi with him, if, as befits an editor, much more quietly. On receiving Franzen’s fourth novel, Freedom—dedicated to Galassi and Golomb—Galassi wrote to him, “it’s clear you’re the great novelist of our generation.”188 He was, at least, the novelist of a conglomerate FSG.

BERTELSMANN’S EMPIRE

Book people knew Bertelsmann had been sniffing around for another U.S. publisher. Rumors said it was looking at Harper, then Simon & Schuster. But when, in 1998, it bought Random House, it still knocked everyone down. Bertelsmann already owned the Bantam Dell Doubleday Group. It now added, through Random House, Ballantine, Crown, Knopf, Pantheon, and Vintage. This gave Bertelsmann nearly a quarter of the U.S. trade publishing market,189 double that of its nearest competitor.190 Back at Norton, the consolidation of the Galactic Empire felt like good news—or at least so they said to the press. “Actually, it will be a good opportunity for us as far as we’re concerned,” said Drake McFeely, Donald Lamm’s

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successor as president and CEO, reaching, without much in the way of evidence, for a positive spin. “We’re going to see better authors presented to us by the agents.”191 But Howard’s replacement at Norton would instead turn toward the past, not the future.

WEIL’S UNTIMELINESS

In the summer of 1998, Norton celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary. Publishers Weekly opened its write-up by saying, “W. W. Norton is a publishing house seriously out of step with the times. By most norms of the book business of the late 1990s, it shouldn’t exist at all.”192 The company, though, was flourishing. The college department was, as ever, a profitable workhorse. Further, the 1990s had made Norton a contender in trade. O’Brian, Mosley, Welsh, and Palahniuk brought in oodles of money. In 1997, they added a blockbuster with Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. With the departure of Howard, and with Star Lawrence and Carol Houck Smith slowing down, the character of Norton’s trade fiction was changing. Alane Mason, who had started at Norton in 1994, spun gold with Andre Dubus III’s The House of Sand and Fog in 1998. It became a National Book Award finalist and an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Mason would go on to work with Dara Horn and Brad Watson. A young assistant editor, Tom Bissell, after reading an essay by Jonathan Franzen that raved about Paula Fox, pitched his bosses that they bring her Desperate Characters back into print. They did in 1999 to critical and financial success. Jill Bialosky, a poet who graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1983 before becoming an editor at Norton, had long acquired poetry, but began to venture into fiction in the late 1990s, with a particular focus on writers of ethnic literature, including Diego Vázquez (Chicano), Lan Samantha Chang (Chinese-American), Tova Mirvis (Jewish), Manil Suri (Indian-American), Nicole Krauss (Jewish), Daniyal Mueenuddin (PakistaniAmerican), and Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopian-American). Bialosky became Norton’s executive editor in 2004. To fill Howard’s job, Norton hired Robert Weil, a man with emphatically untimely taste. Weil has a narrow, bespectacled face with the shadow of a goatee and hair clipped short. He earned a degree in history from Yale in 1977 then entered publishing. Before Norton, he spent a decade at St.  Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan. Holtzbrinck purchased a majority share of Macmillan in 1995. St. Martin’s had a reputation as a commercial house, but it

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let Weil “do weird things.”193 He worked extensively, for example, on the four volumes of Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream. Roth was well into his eighties at the time and “saddled” Weil “with a tremendous, almost unfair responsibility: that of doing the work for him. The process of selection, of elimination, of organization, was his responsibility.”194 Nevertheless, despite whatever leeway he was given to acquire, Weil left for Norton because, unlike St. Martin’s after Holtzbrinck, “it’s independent—we don’t have to do certain kinds of books.”195 Weil’s untimeliness was a good match for Norton. Other publishers, including St. Martin’s, were worrying about Amazon and ebooks;196 they were taking advantage of Harry Potter–driven growth in the young adult fiction market;197 they were investing in audiobooks.198 Weil’s priorities were less fashionable. He wanted to reprint underappreciated writers, sponsor translations, and pursue highbrow graphic novels. “Woe to those gifted novelists who write in foreign languages,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “The market here for translated literature is so grim that Congress should encourage quotas by country to counter the literary xenophobia that creates insuperable barriers for all but those on a Nobel level. I can name fewer than ten editors who actively seek to acquire literature in translation.”199 He brought from St. Martin’s a contract to do The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, published by Norton in November 2001. Babel was a Russian Jew from the cosmopolitan port town of Odessa whose life as a writer began just before the Russian Revolution in 1917. He became famous with short stories about Russia’s botched attempt at invading Poland in 1920, collected as Red Cavalry. He was a writer hungry to capture everything and he did so while careening from black humor to tender brutal melancholy with an intensity of concision that even Ernest Hemingway envied. His oft-quoted line from an early story captures his sense of the power of language: “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” Raymond Carver, in a craft essay for the New York Times, said that that line “ought to go on a three-by-five.”200 Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, and Philip Roth considered him an influence.201 He was arrested by the Soviet police in 1939 and killed by firing squad in 1940. His last words were, “Let me finish my work.”202 Babel’s daughter, Nathalie—under Weil’s direction—edited the volume, the entirety of which was newly translated by Peter Constantine. Cynthia Ozick provided an introduction built around the trope that Babel was Kafka’s equal and obverse. Nathalie Babel wrote in her preface, “In this W. W. Norton edition, all of Babel’s known writings . . . have been assembled for the first time in any language.”203 Constantine acknowledged his debt to Weil “for his insightful

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and knowledgeable editing and particularly for his expertise in American and European Jewish literature.”204 The New York Times published two admiring reviews of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel and placed it on their year-end list of notable books. Richard Bernstein declared it was “marvelously translated.”205 But Alex Abramovich, writing for Slate, panned the translation, saying Constantine fell “far short of the  mark,” taking “undue liberties with the text” and making “inexplicable” changes. Weil didn’t need to worry about eccentric mistakes when it came to his next monumental project, given that he collaborated with the impeccable Ann Goldstein. “As a newly hired editor at W. W. Norton & Company in 1998,” Weil writes, “having started to prepare the Complete Works of Isaac Babel with Nathalie Babel, one of Babel’s daughters, I began to contemplate doing the same for [Primo] Levi’s canon, aware that his publisher, Einaudi, had brought out his collected works the preceding year.”206 He initiated the endeavor in 1999. Goldstein, head of the copy desk at the New Yorker and future translator of Elena Ferrante, joined in 2004. They decided, “in the interest of achieving a high degree of consistency and accuracy,” that they would retranslate thirteen of the fourteen works.207 All in all, it took sixteen years. It was finally published in 2015. Levi was an Italian Jew and a chemist who joined the antifascist resistance during World War II, was captured by the Germans, and sent to Auschwitz, an experience that compelled him to write If This Is a Man. Suffering from depression, he committed suicide in 1987 at the age of sixty-seven. His work was wellreceived in Italy where it was supported by his friend Italo Calvino, but it took a long time for it to reach international audiences. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Americans began to address what Hitler did to the Jews, and then Elie Wiesel made a better representative than Levi, who preferred not to foreground his Jewishness, criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and was not a gifted public speaker. Only in 1984, when an advocate persuaded influential literary critic Irving Howe to stump for Levi, did his work find a warm reception in the United States. He gained powerful admirers, such as Toni Morrison, who wrote a brief introduction for The Complete Works, and Philip Roth, who traveled to Turin to visit Levi in 1986, only months before Levi’s death. The Complete Works earned glowing front-page treatment at the New York Times Book Review, where Edward Mendelson wrote, “these three handsome volumes bring into focus the breadth and coherence of his genius, and make unexpectedly clear how deeply his work as a chemist shaped his unsettling work as a moralist.”208 In the New Yorker, James Wood called the volumes “a gift,” and

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wrote that, when reading Levi, “you are in the hands of a true writer, someone equipped with an avaricious and indexical memory, who knows how to animate his details, stage his scenes, and ration his anecdotes.”209 That Weil could pull off such an ambitious project of translation across sixteen years was a privilege enabled by his move to Norton. Weil has also revitalized the oeuvres of several prolific writers he considered underappreciated, including J. G. Ballard, Patricia Highsmith, and Larry McMurtry. All three elevated genre fiction (science fiction, mystery, and Western, respectively) with their literary sensibilities, making them expressions and extensions of the logic that brought Walter Mosley and Patrick O’Brian to Norton. Ballard had had an uneven publishing history in the United States, which reached its nadir in 1970 when Doubleday “destroyed the entire printing” of The Atrocity Exhibition “before the book could be distributed.” The book included the chapter, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” Ballard’s theory was that “Nelson Doubleday, a ‘close friend’ of the California governor, had chanced on the Reagan story, and “within minutes the order had gone out to pulp the entire edition.”210 Weil felt that Highsmith’s novels “were neglected and that she was, indeed, a great American writer, someone who had anticipated many of the cultural and sexual themes that pervade television and movies by decades.”211 He tracked down her estate, which was “controlled by her Swiss publisher.” He began calling its rights managers. He called and called. By his account, he called “almost weekly for nearly one year,” eventually acquiring fourteen novels that were out of print—and just in time for the film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley.212 As for McMurtry, Weil told Publishers Weekly that he “reconceptualized the West and gave it a realism no one had ever seen before.”213 Weil tactically pursued books that conglomerates were neglecting: translations, authors who had fallen out of favor—and graphic novels. Norton was the rare house where he could do all three.

WEIL’S COMIX

If one untimely passion of Weil’s was to bring back writers, another was the graphic novel. An oft-named origin for the genre is Will Eisner’s Contract with God, published by Kitchen Sink Press (KSP) in 1978.214 Along with KSP, two other small presses dedicated to graphic novels started in the late 1970s, Fantagraphics and NBM, selling to comic book specialty stores. A decade later, with

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the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (Pantheon) in 1986 and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (DC) and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight (Warner) in 1987, it looked like the genre might break out.215 “The graphic novel,” reported Publishers Weekly in May 1987, “is a hybrid form publishers and booksellers are keen to see more of.”216 But industry interest wasn’t matched by consumers. Trade presses quickly abandoned graphic novels. Looking back from 1994, Wendy Wolf, who was an editor at Pantheon when it published Maus (and resigned to protest Schiffrin’s firing in 1990), told PW that, back then, “everyone said the world is now safe for graphic books. What it was safe for was Maus 2. What crosses over crosses over for good reason. So far, no trade publisher has successfully established a trade line of graphic novels.”217 It was only in the late 1990s, with the rapid decline of comics shops—the numbers in the United States halved in that decade218—that graphic novels began to appear with any regularity in general bookstores.219 But bookstores couldn’t figure out where to shelve them, and the books faced “a certain perception barrier” because consumers didn’t see them as serious.220 Gary Groth, founder and president of Fantagraphics, griped in 1998 that Publishers Weekly “runs its annual ‘Graphic Novels Are Finally Making It into Bookstores’ article every year when in fact it has never happened.’ ”221 As late as 2000, a graphic novel in which the industry invested high hopes, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (Pantheon), was “languishing on the shelves.”222 Graphic novels are zhuzhed up comics. They are more expensive and present as more literary. They fell into a chasm between fans of comics, to whom they were pretentious, and literary readers who saw them as childish. A big break came in 2001, when Norton agreed to distribute Fantagraphics. At that year’s BookExpo, Groth’s then-distributor lectured Ware about “how to make his work more commercial.” Groth was furious and, in a fit of pique, approached Norton’s head of trade sales, William F. Grusin, and pitched him, saying Fantagraphics was the “comics equivalent of other publishers they were distributing,” such as New Directions and Schiffrin’s New Press.223 (Fantagraphics published such arty graphic novelists as Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Joe Sacco, and Ware.) Grusin gave Groth his card and told him to call in a few days. Groth did, and pitched again, this time successfully. “Signing with Norton really gave us a boost both morally and financially,” Groth told a journalist. “With Norton, I felt that a discriminating entity was asking us to join them because they recognized comics as part of the world of literature and serious politics.”224 For Norton’s part, it treated Fantagraphics “as a high-grade literary fiction imprint.”225 It was win-win.

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Pantheon was, until that point, the only trade house with a foothold in the genre. It famously published Maus in 1986, when Schiffrin still ran the imprint. After Schiffrin was fired and his editorial staff left in protest. Pantheon hired Dan Frank, who’d worked with Gerald Howard at Viking Penguin, to fill the ranks. Frank was committed to the graphic novel, continuing to work with Spiegelman in addition to Daniel Clowes, Ben Katchor, and Chris Ware through the 1990s. “It’s what Pantheon is here to do,” he said. “Maybe the other big publishers are more conservative.”226 They were. It was in 2002 that things changed. That year, “trade paper and hardcover comics—graphic novels—made huge strides toward becoming a legitimate category in general trade book publishing,” wrote Publishers Weekly.227 The trade journal had made that claim many times, but finally the numbers backed it up. By one account, what happened was that book superstores were facing pressure, on one flank, from Amazon, and, on another, from declining music sales because of the rise of Napster and other peer-to-peer sharing platforms. Conditions meant they were “incentivized to take risks on emerging sales categories” and Japanese manga publishers had been looking for an opportunity to break into the U.S. market, which, with the blessing of Kurt Hassler, the national graphics buyer for Borders, they did in 2002.228 Manga was categorized as graphic novel, which had the effect of legitimizing the genre for U.S. booksellers and readers alike. This time the trend was sustained. At Pantheon, Frank had a hit with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in 2003. In March 2004, PW could report, “Over the last three years, sales of graphic novels have increased 103% in the book trade.”229 That fall, I was a senior in college taking a course called “Modernism and Postmodernism,” in which the medium made the syllabus. I read Maus as an exemplar of the postmodern collision of high and low. That same fall saw trade publishers, including Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster, making moves to acquire seriously in the genre.230 Robert Weil was on the bleeding edge. He initiated what would become a  longstanding relationship with R. Crumb in the summer of 2004. In January 2005, within a week of Will Eisner’s death, Weil acquired his backlist of fourteen graphic novels from DC.231 Later he acquired work by Alan Moore and David Small. The logic, here, as I see it, parallels that which made  Ballard, Highsmith, McMurtry, Mosley, and O’Brian right for Norton: it was a way to publish what Norton bet would become popular yet prestigious work that more commercial houses weren’t yet ready for—or had given up on.

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LIVERIGHT’S RETURN

In 2011, Star Lawrence stepped down from his position as editor in chief at Norton, which he had held for eighteen years. Weil, it seemed, could be next in line. Instead, Drake McFeely hired an outsider, bringing in John Glusman from Crown. Glusman got his start in the heady days of the trade paperback at Vintage Contemporaries in the 1980s, working alongside Gary Fisketjon and Jonathan Galassi, before moving to Macmillan to head up their new trade paperback line. At Macmillan’s Collier, he began a relationship with Richard Powers, publishing Prisoner’s Dilemma in 1989. Glusman took Powers with him when he moved to FSG, then Crown (after Galassi fired him),232 and finally to Norton where together they published first Orfeo, then the hugely successful The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. Glusman’s sense was that McFeely hired him because he worked with “commercial fiction and commercial nonfiction” and would bring “a range of experience” from conglomerate publishing to help build a more profitable trade list at Norton—a contrast with Weil’s sensibility. (Glusman was married to Emily Bestler who had her own commercial imprint at Simon & Schuster, where she published Vince Flynn, Jodi Picoult, and Sister Souljah.) On his arrival, Glusman surveyed the operation. He had worked at a lot of houses, but Norton was the first without a marketing department, which was “a huge surprise.”233 The few staff who worked on marketing, publicity, and sales had been with Norton a long time. Sales director William Grusin—who was married to Barnes & Noble national fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley—had been at Norton since 1971; publishing director Jeannie Luciano started the next year; publicity director Louise Brockett was nearing twenty years, having started in 1993; the most recent addition was director of sales and marketing, Eugenia Pakalik, who joined in 2003. Glusman told McFeely that he had only one thing on his wish list and that was a marketing director to build such a department. In 2014, Glusman hired Meredith McGinnis to the position. Norton’s lack of a marketing department speaks to its long-term profitability, its WASPish disdain of materialism, its untimeliness, and its exemption from the conglomeration of authorship through the PR revolution at commercial presses in the 1970s, the rise of the agent, and the influence of the chain bookbuyer. It also shows its difference from the mission-driven anticommercial literariness of nonprofits where acquisition is backed by philanthropists and the government. In either case, an author became a figure in a crowd. At Norton, in contrast, in 2016, Robert Weil could still tell an interviewer, “It’s lonely to publish a book.”234

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In lieu of appointing Weil editor in chief in 2011, McFeely offered him his own imprint: Liveright, which brings us back to the beginning. Horace Liveright was at the front of the cohort of brilliant young Jews who founded publishing houses in the early twentieth century, along with Bennett Cerf, Harold Guinzburg, Alfred Knopf, Max Schuster, and Richard Simon, responsible, between them, for Random House, Viking, Knopf, and Simon & Schuster. At the time of writing, they all belong to Bertelsmann. With Albert Boni, Liveright established Boni & Liveright in 1917. They published T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, early novels by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. They also created The Modern Library, a line through which they published works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, H. G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde, among many others. It was by buying The Modern Library from Boni & Liveright in 1925 that Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer started Random House. Boni & Liveright went bankrupt in 1933 and reorganized as Liveright Publishing Corporation. It was sold to a holding company in 1969 and purchased by Norton in 1974, which sat on it until 2011, when McFeely gave it to Weil, himself a Jewish editor with idiosyncratic taste—a smart move by McFeely. Weil was built for a boutique imprint. “If Horace Liveright were alive today,” Weil told Publishers Weekly, “he’d be doing great graphic works and he would have loved R. Crumb.”235

NORTON’S ROLE

It was in 1990 that the conglomerate era settled into itself, defined in part by the dialectic between commercial and nonprofit publishers. Several prominent independent publishers were propped up by private wealth, or had been until recently: Laughlin’s New Directions, Rosset’s Grove, Straus’s FSG. Grove ended up in Morgan Entrekin’s hands in 1993, with financial help from his mother, brother, and several friends.236 FSG went to German conglomerate Holtzbrinck in 1994. W. W. Norton, with its cooperative structure and relationship to higher education, thrived as a unique model. Every era depends on publishers to serve as its gatekeepers, deciding which books will enter the world backed by the faith of the colophon printed on their spines, and which few among those will receive the resources to have the best shot at navigating booksellers, reviewers, and prizes to end up in our hands. Because of its unique history, its college division, its employee ownership,

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W. W. Norton was able to acquire and publish fiction that didn’t fit with conglomerates or nonprofits. It’s no coincidence that the house began acquiring fiction in earnest at the same time that Schiffrin was fired and Jim Sitter was uniting nonprofits through grants. Norton published the exceptions, the misfits, Master and Commander, Devil in a Blue Dress, So Far from God, Trainspotting, Fight Club, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Complete Works of Primo Levi. This chapter, unlike the others, is about editors and executives—not booksellers, not grant writers, not literary agents, not publicists—not because these other figures didn’t matter to Norton, of course they did, but because they mattered less, and in an untimely way, because Norton is an anachronism, and because it downplayed the commercial side of the book business to maintain an aura of prestige and natural, effortless success. Its staff, until Glusman arrived in 2011, was full of people who had been at Norton since the 1970s and 1980s. Gerald Howard was emblematic. He was an oddly good fit for Norton. The way Norton did business forced him to be scrappy, unconventional, ingenious— conditions in which he thrived. In his last twenty years, he had just one hit in fiction to match the culture-shaping smashes of his first twenty years: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. He did solid novels with Kevin Barry, Pat Barker, and Walter Kirn, and a funny, slight, campus novel by Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members. He also, eventually, went back to the well of his past, working again with Walter Mosley, Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and a newly discovered novel by Iceberg Slim, all of them established, older, and maybe a bit less sharp than in the 1990s. The narrative I have been telling these previous few pages, in which Norton remains near static through to the present, elides the last important development I need to account for. In 2008, Amazon and the financial crisis shifted the center of gravity, accelerating the neoliberalization of the industry and nudging, I suspect, Norton into a position where it made sense to bring on an old commercial hand like John Glusman and build, finally, a marketing department. I take up the latest phase of the conglomerate era in the conclusion.

Conclusion

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t is still the conglomerate era. It is more the conglomerate era than ever. We’ve come a long way from Random House in the 1950s as a familial company housed in the Villard Mansion whose entire staff could be listed on a postcard, as described in the beginning of chapter 3. In 2013, Penguin and Random House merged, forming Penguin Random House. Here’s how Publishers Weekly profiled the company in 2017: “Penguin Random House is the world’s leading trade book publisher, comprised of nearly 250 imprints and brands on five continents, with more than 15,000 new titles and 800 million print, audio, and e-books sold annually. The company employs 10,582 people globally.”1

NACHTRÄGLICHKEIT, OR DEFERRED ACTION

In 2020, Penguin Random House won a bid to acquire Simon & Schuster, the third largest trade publisher in the United States. Before the deal could go through, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sued to block the acquisition on antitrust grounds, leading to a high-profile trial in August 2022. It’s a bit unusual for the government to try to block an acquisition when four major companies will still be in the field: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and PRH + S&S. The postmerger company, though, would have held as much as half of market share. In late 2022, Judge Florence Pan sided with the DOJ, killing the deal. But Hachette and HarperCollins have both expressed interest in

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Simon & Schuster. One may well have made an offer by the time this book goes to press. The future of the conglomerate era depends on how the DOJ responds if that happens. The DOJ v. PRH trial brings us full circle. The introduction relates how conglomeration in the 1970s created a sense of crisis for literary advocates. The Authors Guild held a press conference in 1977, calling on the Department of Justice to fight further consolidation. It only took forty-five years. Meanwhile, the trauma of the market’s perceived wounding of literature has engendered repetitive declension narratives but also the rich fiction this book analyzes.

CONTINUITIES

If any year in recent memory were to mark the end of one era in publishing and the start of another it would be 2008 with its major financial crisis and the surging popularity of ebooks, thanks to the Amazon Kindle. Did 2008 inaugurate a new era? Has Amazon changed U.S. fiction? Has Audible? Social media? Wattpad? Has authorship changed? Have these upstarts eroded the power of the old conglomerates? After all, Netflix transformed Hollywood and Spotify derailed the music business. From the perspective of the old conglomerates, the answers are no. After a few hiccupping years, they learned to accommodate ebooks, audiobooks, and Amazonian distribution, emerging bigger and stronger than ever. These changes have been huge for how people get and read books, less for how books are written and produced within the mainstream ecology. Rather than remaking the industry, 2008 intensified the conglomerate era. The big five doubled down on autofiction, literary genre, and multiculturalism. Nonprofits continued to flourish as the obverse of the conglomerates, and W. W. Norton as an anachronism. The mass-market format continued dying its slow death. Conglomerate authorship now operates similarly to how it did twenty years ago, only further distributed across sprawling bureaucracies. From the perspective of Amazon or TikTok or Wattpad, however, much has changed. On their platforms, authors experiment with rapidly evolving new genres and perform socially embedded authorship in new ways. Millions read and write there, yet have either barely touched the mainstream industry or been subsumed into its long-standing practices.

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FREE FALL

In late 2008, Doubleday cut 10 percent of its staff. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt froze acquisitions.2 Random House restructured, entailing massive layoffs. By year’s end, book industry stocks had plummeted 46.6  percent from the year before, fifteen points worse than the Dow Jones.3 Chain bookstores had a “horrific” run.4 Borders imploded and closed entirely by 2011. Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly named Jeff Bezos its 2008 Person of the Year.5 Madeline McIntosh jumped ship. The head of Random House Audio defected for Luxemburg and a post at Amazon as “director of content for the international rollout of the Kindle.” She had for years been playing a long game, and this was another move. She graduated from Phillips Exeter in 1987 and Harvard in 1991 with a degree in arts administration, planning to become a curator but making a late switch to publishing, attending the Radcliffe Publishing Course, and taking a job as a temp at HarperCollins before finding a permanent position at W. W. Norton. In 1994, McIntosh, still in her mid-twenties, “saw that the internet would irreversibly transform publishing” and joined a fledgling new media department at Bantam Doubleday Dell.6 In 1998, she became director of online sales7—a new position— and established an account with Amazon.8 By 2003, she ran all adult sales for Random House. In 2008, she went to Amazon. Less than two years later, the new CEO of Random House, Markus Dohle, lured McIntosh back with a new role as president of sales, operations, and digital, reporting directly to him. She became CEO of the merged Penguin Random House in the United States in 2018; Dohle—an industrial engineer who came up in the printing business—became global CEO. McIntosh and Dohle looked at books differently than Random House founders Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. They represented the new world of publishing after 2008. McIntosh especially positioned herself to take full advantage of ebook and audiobook rights. Amazon and the financial crisis intensified conglomerate rationalization: managerial interventions in the name of customer service and profit growth through the exploitation of new markets. Digitization enabled executives to take the fundamental logic of the conglomerate era in book publishing and radicalize it.

BOOKS, E AND OTHERS

Fear was widespread in the aftermath of 2008 that ebooks would do to publishing what mp3s had done to the music industry: destroy it. Ebooks had existed

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for a long time but only after the release of the Kindle in November 2007 did readers begin to buy them with any frequency. In 2008, U.S. ebook revenue hit $69 million, a still modest number. Four years later, that number climbed to $1.5 billion, which amounted to about 20 percent to 25 percent of revenue for U.S. publishers.9 Many worried that ebooks were going to make the printed book obsolete and exacerbate the decline of focused attention ushered in by the internet. The printed book became an emblem of nostalgia for a past when stiller waters ran deeper. That said, as book historian Leah Price pointed out, “serious, silent, solitary cover-to-cover reading has never been more than one of many uses to which print has been put.”10 It wasn’t so long ago that society’s minders warned of the deleterious effects of reading novels. Hopes and fears were misdirected. After 2012, ebook sales leveled off. Most readers stuck with print. The most historically consequential effect of ebooks was less about form than format: most of their revenue came at the expense of the long-suffering mass-market paperback, whose share, as ebooks rose, dropped, at least at one of the conglomerates, “from 15% to 6%.”11 It turned out that what people wanted to read on a screen was romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and thriller: the bread-and-butter of pocket books. Ebooks did not kill the printed book—in fact, because they have low overhead, they settled into a profitable supplement to print—but they effectively pounded the nail in the coffin of the mass-market variety. As ebooks plateaued, audiobooks became the site of growth, especially for fiction.12 No audiobook company was bigger than Audible, which Don Katz founded in 1995. He’d been a writer for Rolling Stone when MTV transformed our relationship with music and he was on the masthead at Sports Illustrated as ESPN came to dominate sports coverage, experiences that taught him that it was possible for upstarts to elbow their way into spaces seemingly filled by legacy media. He inherited his passion for audio from Ralph Ellison under whom he studied in college. “With his help, I came to believe that American literature was the product of vernacular.”13 He sold Audible to Amazon in 2008 for $300 million.14 It took three more years and the ubiquity of smartphones for audiobooks to become commonplace. Now hundreds of millions of people globally carried a device with them at all times on which they could listen. Jeff Bezos noted in Amazon’s 2013 annual report that “Audible makes it possible for you to read when your eyes are busy.”15 An entire industry of performers, producers, and prizes—the Audies—grew around the medium. Ads in Publishers Weekly invited prospective producers to join the “goldrush.”16

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Audiobooks infuse reading—as Katz learned from Ellison—with the intimacy and interpretation of the human voice, further enhanced by musical scores and professional editing. Scholar Sheri-Marie Harrison experienced the difference while listening through Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, which, with the exception of Tar Baby, Morrison narrated. “When you hear Morrison herself say, ‘Quiet as it’s kept,’ or ‘They shoot the white girl first,’ it adds an entirely different kind of conspiratorial intimacy,” writes Harrison. Morrison’s voice also brings a sense of continuity and unity to what we might otherwise read as autonomous, distinct texts. “The black communities became one large one, in my mind,” Harrison continues, “where the women gossiping around Mrs.  MacTeer’s table in The Bluest Eye are the same ones who patch Cee back up after the doctor she worked for did things that Home doesn’t even try to describe.” Harrison began to see Morrison’s novels as belonging to a “single narrative,” a career-long project of imagining “the possibility of community in the midst of quotidian cruelty and violence.”17 It’s easy to understand the seduction of audiobooks: they offer intimacy and convenience. From a publisher’s perspective, they were an answer to the 2008 crisis. Readers have only so many hours in a day when their hands and eyes are free to read, and publishers were, if anything, losing their ability to claim that time to the many dopamine-giving pleasures of the internet. But audiobooks on smartphones mined a new vein, like the contemporaneous innovation of fracking, encroaching on untapped interstitial spaces. As Harrison writes, audiobooks are “in the technological vanguard of contemporary grind culture— helping you get your edification on while you work out, or do laundry, or drive to pick up your laundry after you work out. It is an art form for the ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ age, allowing us to optimize every transitional moment into a productive one of learning, entertainment, or both.”18

SOCIAL MEDIA

Publishing wasn’t the only industry pummeled by the 2008 financial crisis. It also accelerated the decline of traditional journalism and network television, which eliminated swaths of traditional publicity and review venues for books publishers had relied on since the 1970s. Most newspapers shuttered their standalone book review sections, and the New York Times Book Review—the most important one—was nearly halved from its mid-1980s length. Network morning shows dropped dedicated book producers.19 Amazon gained unprecedented

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control of retail visibility, governed by its proprietary algorithm, an apotheosis of the decades-long trend of the purported sovereignty of the consumer over against the elitist tastes of the bookseller: an illusionary sovereignty, whose true suzerain was Amazon.20 In response, publishers redoubled their marketing and publicity efforts on the internet. Minimally, they built websites and developed email databases. Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove Atlantic, partnered with Andrew Hunter and Terry McDonnell to found Literary Hub, a website that served as a sort of promotional Switzerland for publishers, a neutral zone where they could publish excerpts from forthcoming titles alongside independent literary journalism.21 Maybe most important, and most surprising, was the ability of young influencers from YouTube and TikTok subcultures—BookTube and BookTok—to sell books.22 By 2022, BookTok had become an extremely valuable publicity outlet for publishers.23 Publicists became assiduous about tracking influencers to whom they could send advance reading copies.24 Increasingly, publishers expected authors to participate in promotional entrepreneurship online to the point that “conscientious engagement in DIY modes of publicity” became “mandatory.”25 “These digital accoutrements typically include a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account,” wrote Simone Murray in 2018, “but can also span digital technologies such as podcasting, videoblogging (vlogging), Instagram, Pinterest, webfora, and Skype.”26 This is true even for giants. Margaret Atwood is active across social media. Fans can witness Joyce Carol Oates regularly rile up Twitter with graphic pictures of her feet or indictments of works of autofiction as “wan little husks”—coming from this prolific maximalist. Danielle Steel posts regularly to Instagram. One effect has been to intensify cultural fantasies about authorial genius and to further elide the industry and its laborers who bring work to print. Wattpad is a noteworthy exception, celebrating and explicitly integrating collaboration into the writing process. It is a social media site for the written word, modeled on YouTube and Instagram. It had three million monthly users in 2011, forty-five million in 2015, and eighty million in 2019. It is not, though, or didn’t start as, a publishing company. Almost none of its users partake to become professional writers. They show up, instead, to connect with others over “the shared activity of writing and reading stories.” These tend to be serialized; readers provide feedback as the stories develop, which alters characters and plots. Roughly 90 percent of users are lurkers, 10 percent offer commentary, and 1 percent “actively contribute new content.” For these superusers, “the very thought of removing their story from the Wattpad environment can be distressing because the comments and the likes are part of the story itself.”27 The site is

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especially popular among teenage girls. Romance and fan fiction are its dominant genres. The sense of community users gain from Wattpad—or the tendency on social media, built into its design, to want to be liked (or even seen)—is reflected in the site’s fiction. Scholar Sarah Brouillette identifies two common tropes: “having one’s own experiences seen and acknowledged via reflection in narrative” and envisioning “a scene of inclusion, in which the usually overlooked or denigrated is presented, or becomes perceivable, as both beautiful and worthy of treatment in artistic expression.”28 To Brouillette, Wattpad serves as therapy in a culture of scarcity, offering care that its largely young female userbase isn’t finding elsewhere. Inevitably, Wattpad’s data became too tempting not to monetize through publishing, allowing it to hack the acquisition process. In 2019, the company launched Wattpad Books, publishing the site’s most loved stories, such as QB Bad Boy and I’m a Gay Wizard. Wattpad is a social media site and Wattpad Books is a traditional publisher with a novel acquisition method. The most quantitatively superlative development for fiction, though, has been the wild expansion of self-publishing.

SELF- PUBLISHING

Various self-publishing platforms emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century, none more popular than Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). They made it easier for anyone to make their writing serviceable for the interested consumer. The numbers are astonishing. In 2000, some ten thousand new works of fiction were published in the United States. In 2020, that tally climbed, it appeared, into the hundreds of thousands.29 KDP and similar platforms, such as Smashwords, have nurtured ecologies unique to themselves where niche genres find audiences and flourish, escaping  the avaricious long tail of oblivion. These are realms of polymorphous perversity, unchecked ids, loosened imaginations, and derivative fantasies, mapped by Mark McGurl in Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021). Meanwhile, traditional publishers—conglomerate, nonprofit, and the few remaining independent commercial publishers—have gained strength, largely indifferent to the vast, dynamic self-publishing worlds. “What’s happened in  practice,” argues John Thompson, “is that these two worlds, traditional

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publishing and self-publishing, have developed and co-existed alongside one another, like two parallel universes that seldom overlap directly.”30 Rare is the author whom mainstream publishing chooses to elevate from the vastness of KDP and its peer platforms, despite several notable exceptions, including Amanda Hocking, Colleen Hoover, Hugh Howey, Andy Weir. Most famously, E. L. James first wrote what became Fifty Shades of Gray as Twilight fan fiction on Fanfiction.net, which—like the similarly popular fan fiction site, Archive of Our Own (AO3)—differs from self-publishing in that no one is copyrighting and selling their work. Fanfic thus exhibits collective authorship at its purest. These sites have millions of users writing millions of stories spawning new genres no single person can make a claim to originating: they are emergent. Eventually, writers nevertheless stake claim to a genre by moving it into the commercial sphere, as Addison Cain did with the Omegaverse, which began as fanfic for the CW show Supernatural and developed into its own coherent genre in which “couples engage in wolflike behavior.”31 When another writer, Zoey Ellis, did the same, publishing her own Omegaverse fiction, Cain expressed outrage and sued over copyright infringement. But both were drawing from and privatizing the fanfic commons, using the law to transform into their individual property what thousands of minds together had wrought. Like every other culture industry, publishing is attempting to radicalize rationalization by adopting strategies from data science. From this perspective, the internet-enabled proliferation of self-published writing constitutes a valuable and ever-enlarging dataset. Commercially astute editors trawl there for talent. The most astute run the numbers.32

THE CONGLOMERATE ERA, IN FULL

It’s no accident that one of the bestselling novels of the twenty-first century originated as Twilight fanfic. Traditional publishing found a huge latent market in young adult (YA) fiction. Harry Potter captured millions of children’s attention in 2001 and as they grew, the series—and the market the series hinted at— grew with them, as seen in the successes of Twilight (2005), Looking for Alaska (2005), and The Hunger Games (2008).33 Thanks in part to YA, conglomerates are in a stronger position now than they were before 2008. Ebooks provide good margins. Audiobooks provide valuable rights. Post-2008 restructuring cut personnel costs through layoffs and new staffers are better positioned to maximize profits. They have titles such as

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assistant director of digital campaigns and media planning, associate director of digital strategy, author marketing specialist, business intelligence analyst, director of digital sales and social media, senior vice president of trade finance and analytics, and vice president of data science and analytics.

NPD BookScan provides more precise sales data that support the continued rationalization of acquisition through comparative titles, or comps. Big brand names such as John Grisham, Stephen King, James Patterson, John Sandford, and Danielle Steel continue to deliver reliable profits. In 2019, Markus Dohle, repeating a favorite line, told an audience at the Frankfurt Book Fair, “This is the best time for publishing since Gutenberg.”34 On the stand at the DOJ v. PRH trial, Dohle testified that PRH print sales “grew by more than 20 percent” between 2012 and 2019 and went on to do even better, adding another 20 percent during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2019 to 2021.35 Rationalization, facilitated by digitization, is at the root of the rise. But it serves publishers to pretend otherwise. Pointedly, PRH hoped to make the case at the trial that small companies can compete with the big five. To that end, PRH representatives insisted that success in publishing is totally unpredictable— despite the fact that it is their job to prove the opposite is true, to leverage their immense resources to tame the market, a job they’ve done well. This hypocrisy reached its apogee when Dohle testified, “Everything is random in publishing. That’s why we have that name. So the founder thought: Everything is random. Success is random. Best sellers are random. So that’s why we are the Random House.”36 That is not why they are Random House. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer acquired Modern Library’s rich backlist and figured they’d publish additional books here or there at random. Dohle was closer to honest when comparing publishing and venture capitalism. “We are angel investors in our authors and their dreams, their stories. That’s how I call my editors and publishers: angels.”37 Despite booming business, conglomerate bosses have counted on spiritual compensation to substitute for the material well-being of their employees. After decades of low pay that has often meant that only those otherwise subsidized can afford to work in New York publishing, many feel fed up. On November 10, 2022, workers at HarperCollins went on strike, demanding an increase of the minimum starting salary from $45,000 to $50,000 and that the company

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address the lack of diversity among the staff. How—or whether—conglomerates will respond to inequality within their companies remains to be seen.

PUBLISHING TOMORROW

To assess recent developments, I looked at fifteen editors recognized as rising stars from 2018 to 2021 by Publishers Weekly. Ten of the fifteen are women. Six are people of color. Eight work at conglomerate publishers. Of the others, two work at independent comics publishers and two at independent genre publishers. One is at Catapult, funded by a disaffected member of the Koch dynasty. One runs a boutique art-book press. One is at Quirk, the gimmick publisher that won a hit with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. What trends unite these editors? They foreground their desire to publish books by underrepresented voices. This fits with a broader development in the industry. A major study conducted by PEN on race and equity in book publishing, released in 2022, noted that “publishing is investing in reform in unprecedented ways,” such as implementing DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, building marketing teams dedicated to diverse readerships, keeping public demographic data about authors and employees, and setting hiring benchmarks.38 At the same time, the PEN report emphasizes the long history of purported interest in diversification in publishing without follow-through. Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek show that narratives of rising multiculturalism since the 1980s overstate the case and that publishers’ lists—at least at the conglomerates—remained, as late as 2018, 89 percent white.39 With that caveat, these millennial editors say they are “particularly interested in lifting up writers from marginalized communities.”40 They say they want “strong, underrepresented voices and bold, progressive ideas.”41 They want to publish “books where writers of color are free to pursue stories in all their complexity.”42 They “seek  out  new writers” within communities that include the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Cave Canem, Kundiman, and the Twitter account Writers of Color.43 One of these young editors, Danny Vasquez, left a position at Farrar, Straus & Giroux for a job at Astra. Astra is a new imprint of a Beijing-based publishing conglomerate that, for more than a decade, has been translating world literature into Chinese and publishing it in China. Astra House says it “is dedicated to publishing authors across genres and from around the world.” It hit the

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National Book Award longlist for fiction in 2022 with Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon, acquired by Vasquez. That Astra has entered the United States and has the clout to headhunt top U.S. editorial talent might be the first hint at a future in which the rise of China could entail a deprovincializing of the  U.S. literary field, an opening of the U.S. publishing industry to world literature. If so, it would be a future prefigured by nonprofit publishers that have energized the translation market in the United States. Edwin Frank founded New York Review Books, an imprint of the New York Review of Books, in 1999, building a list that includes hundreds of translations. Graywolf had its first huge hit with Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses in 2007 and went on to publish much of his oeuvre alongside a strong list of translated fiction.44 Europa Editions—the U.S. imprint of Italy’s Edizioni E/O—created a financial cushion for itself with the publication of Elena Ferrante’s work, as did Archipelago with Karl Ove Knausgaard. For many years, Dalkey Archive was responsible for most translated fiction in the United States. Chad Post, who started at Dalkey, left to found Open Letter, dedicated to translation. After Dalkey’s founder John O’Brien died in 2020, Will Evans acquired the house for Deep Vellum to keep its backlist in print as he continues to publish new translated work under several imprints. These publishers presented literary translations. Amazon entered the field as a prolific publisher of popular translations under its imprint, AmazonCrossing. “I would like to think that globalization will lead us toward a new cultural unity,” wrote a hopeful Gabriella Page-Fort, editorial director of AmazonCrossing, in Literary Hub in 2018, paying maybe too little attention to geopolitics, “a world where books are as unique as the people who write them and readers are drawn together through stories, beyond the borders of language or country.”45 With a different understanding of world literature in mind, Random House, in 2023, launched a new imprint, Random House Worlds, “dedicated entirely to licensed book publishing.”46 It is the home “for major pop culture brands to be published within the Random House division, including Star Wars, Minecraft, Stranger Things, Garfield, Magic: The Gathering, Lore Olympus, Critical Role, and others.”47 The imprint is a spinoff from Del Rey, founded by Judy-Lynn and Lester Del Rey at Random House in 1977 to publish fantasy. One of Del Rey’s first successes was a novelization of Star Wars. Here we see another turn in the saga of radicalizing the conglomerate era. Penguin Random House isn’t creating these copyrights and exploiting them, but embracing those of others, the contemporary regime of recycled intellectual property.

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BLOOM

It took thirty years—from 1960 to 1990—for the conglomerate era to mature. Si Newhouse fired Robert Bernstein and installed Alberto Vitale at Random House. Nonprofits secured grants from large foundations such as Andrew W. Mellon and Lila Wallace. Hardcover and trade paperback absorbed the serial logic, genres, and brand names from the mass market. Norton took advantage of what was excluded from the conglomerate-nonprofit ecology. By the 1990s, the system was in place. Many of the names who continued to dominate bestseller lists in the 2010s are products of those earlier years: Grisham, King, Koontz, Steel. The biggest of them all, James Patterson, is the apotheosis of conglomerate-era brand fiction.48 In the 1990s, autofiction, literary genre, and multiculturalism were nascent. In the twenty-first century, they entered full bloom. The editors most responsible for the new fiction are products of the 1990s or early aughts. Jordan Pavlin interned at Ecco Press while an English major at Vassar, graduated in 1990, attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course (now at the Columbia School of Journalism), took a job at St. Martin’s, then Little, Brown, before landing her dream job at Knopf in late 1996.49 She acquired some of the most notable books in ethnic literature in recent decades, by authors such as Nathan Englander, Yaa Gyasi, Tayari Jones, Ayana Mathis, Tommy Orange, and Julie Otsuka. She also acquired major works of literary genre from Jennifer Egan (including her gothic horror, The Keep) and Karen Russell, and she edited Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel, Klara and the Sun. She acquired a preeminent autofictionalist, Jenny Offill. After the death of her mentor, Sonny Mehta, she was appointed Knopf’s editor in chief, one of the most prestigious posts in U.S. publishing. Susan Petersen Kennedy founded Riverhead at Putnam in 1994. Putnam was known as the consummate commercial publisher under CEO Phyllis Grann. But Grann wanted Petersen to do something different. Petersen would publish novels “about ‘the other’ in terms of nationality or culture,” because she had “always been fascinated with the ‘mysterious other.’ ”50 Riverhead’s location as a quality imprint within a particularly commercial publisher meant that mysteriousness manifested at the intersection of literary and genre fiction. Two of Petersen’s initial editors, future industry stars Julie Grau and Cindy Spiegel, acquired Junot Diaz, Chang-Rae Lee, and James McBride. Others added Mohsin Hamid, Marlon James, Helen Oyeyemi, George Saunders, Emma Straub, Jeff VanderMeer, and Claire Vaye Watkins, an all-star lineup of literary genre authors.51 The quintessential contemporary literary genre writer is Colson Whitehead, who is also the most celebrated currently practicing U.S. novelist. Literary agent

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Nicole Aragi sold his first novel, The Intuitionist, a postmodernist mystery, to Bill Thomas at Doubleday, where it was published in 1999. The Aragi-ThomasWhitehead trio has stayed together since, their prestige redounding upon one another. Aragi has built a list that includes Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Aleksandar Hemon. Thomas acquired Whitehead’s fellow literary genre writer, Jonathan Lethem, while becoming Doubleday’s editor in chief and publisher. Whitehead wrote a zombie novel (Zone One), a meta-slave narrative (The Underground Railroad), and a work of crime fiction (Harlem Shuffle), collecting a Guggenheim, a MacArthur Grant, a National Book Award, and two Pulitzers.52 Meanwhile, Mitzi Angel, who succeeded Jonathan Galassi as publisher and president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is the genius of autofiction: she has edited Rachel Cusk, Garth Greenwell, Ben Lerner, Yiyun Li, and Sally Rooney.

CONSTELLATIONS

We’ve learned—whether through recognizing Stephen King’s and Danielle Steel’s struggles for individuality against the notoriety of their brands, or Michael Crichton’s retrenchment of white male power in Disclosure via ressentiment over the feminization of publishing, or Jonathan Franzen’s oeuvre as an expression of Holtzbrinck’s acquisition of FSG as facilitated by Galassi—that time and place matter. As I say in the introduction, autofiction is not one thing. Literary genre fiction is not one thing. Multiculturalism is not one thing.53 Each changes depending on who is using it, when, after whom, under which financial constraints. Reading the books matters. It is in the work of fiction that the particular constellation of forces that formed it finds its full expression. Often that expression is a bloodied field where we discover evidence of positions taken, battles fought. In The Last Thing He Wanted, Joan Didion exposes systematic misogyny, its stakes heightened by the Cold War beyond the stultifying patriarchy of publishing. In Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk pisses in the tomato bisques of the WASPs at W. W. Norton who publish him, an act of class warfare in a book that is also a bid to join the class to which his editors belong. These authors take up arms against systems because they are themselves industrial writers, whether their sector of that industry is defined by or against conglomeration. They are privileged vessels for conglomerate authorship. Until we recognize that, we have misread six decades and more of U.S. fiction.

Glossary of Publishing Figures

Caveat: This glossary is idiosyncratic and far from comprehensive. Angel, Mitzi. Succeeded Jonathan Galassi as publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2018 and president in 2021. Edited Rachel Cusk, Garth Greenwell, Ben Lerner, Yiyun Li, and Sally Rooney. Applebaum, Irwyn. Hired as president and publisher of Bantam Books in 1992 after seven years with Pocket Books. Hoarder who managed to maintain in his apartment “clearly defined, if indirect, paths to the bathroom and kitchen.”1 Attuned to the market, in the 1980s, for television nostalgia books, he wrote The World According to Beaver, about Leave It to Beaver. Graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism. Edited Louis L’Amour. Laid off after the 2008 financial crisis. Aragi, Nicole. Raised in Libya and Lebanon. Attended the University of London. Could not find work in publishing so opened a bookstore. Sold it to become an agent. Represents Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Aleksandar Hemon, Valeria Luiselli, Tommy Orange, and Colson Whitehead. Kept on her desk at one point a “Joseph Cornell–esque curio given to her by Foer”—“an antique bird-watching kit, with binoculars and (Foer’s touch) bits of stories tucked away in its card-catalogue drawers.”2 Maintains a “baba ghanouj rivalry” with Englander.3 Arthur, Reagan. University of California, Los Angeles, BA in English, 1986. St. Martin’s, 1990–2002. Little, Brown, 2002–20. Given her own imprint in 2008. Knopf, 2020–present. Fourth publisher of Alfred A. Knopf. Edited Sherman Alexie, Kate Atkinson, Joshua Ferris, Cristina García, Ian McEwan, James Patterson, and George Pelecanos, among others. Asahina, Bob. New York University, MA in philosophy. Acquired William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho for Simon & Schuster, though his boss canceled the last one. Followed Richard Snyder from S&S to Golden Books, which failed under their management. Hired by Doubleday in 1999. Lasted less than a year, replaced by Gerald Howard. At the time of writing, sits on the editorial board of Francis Fukuyama’s American Purpose. Ballantine, Ian. Mass-market legend. Columbia University. First U.S. publisher of Penguin, 1939–45. Left Penguin to become first head of Bantam, 1945–52. Left Bantam to found

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Ballantine. Published Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and J. R. R. Tolkien for the U.S. mass market. Acquired, edited, and published Carlos Castaneda and Tom Robbins.4 Baron, Carole. Danielle Steel’s editor of four decades. Started in 1960s at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyedited Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Moved to Dutton, then Pocket Books, becoming vice president in 1978, then Crown as editor in chief before becoming publisher of Dell in 1982, where she met Steel. Given her own imprint at St. Martin’s in 1986. After three weeks went to Bantam Books at Random House, before shifting back to Dell, now a Random House property, as president. Laid off after Bertelsmann bought Random House in 1998. Phyllis Grann made her president of Dutton, now a property of Penguin Putnam. Succeeded Grann as president of Putnam in 2001. Went to Bookspan, a book club company, in 2005. Returned to publishing as editor with Knopf in 2007. Belden, Kathy. Syracuse University, BA in art history and journalism. Grew up “in a small factory town in upstate New York.”5 Itinerant life, working at a Finger Lakes winery, scouting in Spain, and fundraising for a glassblowing studio. Editor at Four Walls Eight Windows 1996–2004, Bloomsbury 2004–14, Scribner 2014–present. Edited Gordon Lish, who “would bring lemon squares down to the office from his freezer.” 6 Authors include Roz Chast, Kiese Laymon, Lisa See, Will Self, Jesmyn Ward, John Edgar Wideman, and Kevin Young. Bernstein, Robert. Harvard University, 1944. Served in the China Burma India Theater late in World War II. Started in publishing in sales at Simon & Schuster in 1946. Helped found Little Golden Records, S&S’s children’s music label. Moved to Random House as sales manager in 1958. Became Random House president in 1966, a position held until Si Newhouse fired him in 1989, replacing him with Alberto Vitale. Founded Human Rights Watch in 1978 to support dissident writers around the world. Brought Toni Morrison to Random House in 1967. She praised his passion and curiosity, calling him “a friend I could rely on.” Bezos, Jeff. “Amazon launched what was internally referred to as ‘Project Gazelle.’ It placed book publishers into one of three categories based on their dependence on Amazon revenue streams, & those most dependent on Amazon (mostly small and independent publishers) were targeted for increased co-op fees & lower revenue splits.” Joked that “ ‘Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would approach a sickly gazelle,’ picking them off first and weakening the overall herd of publishers before targeting the rest.”7 Bradford, Gigi. Appointed literature director of National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1992 after stints as executive director of the American Academy of Poets and poetry director at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Resigned from the NEA in 1997, having spent her tenure battling Republicans in Congress to keep the NEA funded. Brown, Marie. Joined Doubleday as trainee in 1967 at the solicitation of Loretta Barrett. Bookseller and journal editor in Los Angeles, 1969–72. Returned to Doubleday as editor. As of 1980, was, along with Toni Morrison, one of two black senior editors in trade publishing. Formed Marie Brown Associates, a literary agency, in 1984. Buchwald, Emilie. Barnard College, BA; Columbia University, MA; University of Minnesota, PhD—all in English. Children’s book author. Wrote Gildean: The Heroic Adventures of a Most Unusual Rabbit, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1973. Cofounded Milkweed Editions, a literary nonprofit publisher, in Minneapolis in 1984. Coedited Transforming a Rape Culture in 1993. Retired in 2003. Founded Gryphon Press in 2006 to publish children’s literature fostering empathy for animals. Buford, Bill. University of California, Berkeley, BA; Cambridge University, MA, Marshall Scholar. Relaunched Granta in London in 1979. Appointed first fiction editor at the New Yorker in 1994, assuming duties previously shared between Roger Angell, Charles (“Chip”) McGrath, and Daniel Menaker. Picked up a story by New Yorker editorial assistant and recent Harvard grad Nell Freudenberger for a fiction issue in 2001 and published it beside a photo of her, doe-eyed

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on red velvet, which led to representation by Binky Urban, a six-figure deal, and the phenomenon of schadenfreudenberger. Replaced by Deborah Treisman in 2002. Spent twelve years writing a book about French cooking—having become obsessed with chicken—published by Knopf in 2020. Busch, Ron. Started with Bantam in 1957. Moved in 1974 to Ballantine (owned by Random House), as president. Within four years, quadrupled Ballantine’s volume.8 Went to Pocket (owned by Simon & Schuster) as president in 1978. On the rise of women’s historical romance in the 1970s, said, “We’re in it because we have to be in it,” deriding it as “pop schlock.” By 1983, according to the company, had taken it from the fifth to the most profitable mass-market house.9 Died in 1987. At his memorial, described as “moody, not easy to work for.”10 Cader, Michael. Brown University, 1993. Author of The Cat Who Would Be President. Launched Publishers Lunch in the early days of the internet, a daily newsletter about industry happenings—including reports about book deals—that became and remains must-reading for those in the business. Campbell, Maria. Smith College. Born Mariolina Sara Alessandra Barra de Giovanni di Santa Severina. Raised on the Upper East Side. Legendary “international superscout”:11 “the eyes and the ears in the American market for a group of international publishers.”12 Began with Italian publisher Mondadori in 1973. Built a scouting agency to represent various European and South American publishers. Scouted for Steven Spielberg; sent him The Bridges of Madison County and Jurassic Park. Maria B. Campbell Associates exclusively retained by Netflix in 2017. Stepped back from day-to-day business to become executive chair in 2022. Cerf, Bennett. Columbia University, 1919. Cofounder of Random House. TV personality, appearing weekly on What’s My Line? for sixteen years. Instrumental in the publication of Ulysses in the United States. Commins, Saxe. University of Pennsylvania, 1913. Dentist. Editor of William Faulkner. Mentor to Dr. Seuss. Appointed head of editorial at Covici, Friede in 1929. Resigned in 1930 to complete a book. Hired as an editor at Random House in 1933. Codirected editorial at Random House with Harry Maule beginning in 1939. Remained at Random House until his death at the age of sixty-six in 1958. Bennett Cerf wrote that he “was a frustrated writer. When he himself wrote, it was purple prose, the kind of thing he would have laughed at if somebody brought it to him.”13 Desser, Robin. Yale University, BA in English, 1982. Pantheon editor, moved to Vintage in 1989, to Knopf in 1993 (all within Random House). Worked with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Anne Carson, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Pico Iyer, Valeria Luiselli, and Gloria Naylor.14 Wrote Graywolf executive director Scott Walker when Alberto Vitale fired André Schiffrin, “To tell you the truth, I’ve been walking a kind of emotional tightrope about this,” not sure whether to side with Schiffrin or her bosses. Became a vice president at Knopf in 2002. Two years later said, “Seabiscuit was a reminder of how great horse storytelling can be.”15 Retired in April 2022 as editor in chief of Knopf. Doctorow, E. L. Kenyon College, 1952. Studied under John Crowe Ransom. Studied toward a masters in English drama at Columbia University, 1952–53. Drafted into U.S. Army. Editor at New American Library, 1959–64; Dial, 1964–69. Author of several novels. Dohle, Markus. CEO of Random House, 2008–2013. Penguin Random House CEO, 2013–2023. Dystel, Oscar. New York University and Harvard Business School. President of Bantam Books, 1954–79. Rescued company from crisis, built it into “far and away the most successful” mass-market house of the 1960s and 1970s.16 Enoch, Kurt. University of Hamburg, PhD in political economy. Jewish publisher. Left Germany for Paris in 1936 and for the United States after the fall of France in 1940. President and

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managing director of Penguin U.S., 1945–48. Cofounder with Victor Weybright of New American Library in 1948. According to André Schiffrin, “small, trim, very shy.”17 Entrekin, Morgan. Stanford University, 1977. Attended Radcliffe Publishing Course (now the Columbia Publishing Course). A top U.S. croquet player in the 1980s. Received his own imprint in 1984 at Atlantic Monthly Press, which he acquired in 1991 and merged with Grove in 1993. Cofounded Literary Hub in 2015. Epler, Barbara. Harvard University, BA, 1984. Started at New Directions as editorial assistant that year, editor in chief in 1994, publisher in 2008, and president in 2011. Responsible for publishing, among others, César Aira, Inger Christensen, Jenny Erpenbeck, Fleur Jaeggy, László Krasznahorkai, and Yoko Tawada in the United States. Epstein, Barbara. Radcliffe College, 1949. Editorial assistant at Doubleday, assigned to The Diary of Anne Frank. Cofounded the New York Review of Books in 1962. Coedited it with Robert Silvers until her death in 2007. Hosted parties first in Greenwich Village then on the Upper West Side that were the literary salons of her time. Epstein, Jason. Epicure. Editor. Doubleday, 1951–57. Invented the trade paperback. Random House, 1958–99. Cofounded the New York Review of Books. Cofounded Library of America. Erskine, Albert. Bookseller in Memphis in his early twenties until Robert Penn Warren secured him employment at Louisiana State University. Business manager of The Southern Review, 1935–40. New Directions, 1940–41. Bounced around until landing at Random House in 1947, where he stayed until 1976. Married to Katherine Anne Porter, 1938–1942. Edited Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry, Cormac McCarthy, James Michener, John O’Hara, and Robert Penn Warren. Ettlinger, Marion. Author photographer. “To be ‘Ettlingered’ means to have imparted to you an aura of distinction and renown.”18 Shot “almost inky black-and-white portraits, so textured they sometimes appear etched.”19 Subjects include Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Edwidge Danticat, Patricia Highsmith, John Irving, Mary Karr, Richard Ford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jay McInerney, Walter Mosley, and Joyce Carol Oates. Evans, Joni. Worked at Ladies Home Journal and McCall’s in the mid-1960s. Joined William Morrow in 1967, appointed editor in 1969. Left to run subsidiary rights at Simon & Schuster in 1974. Serenaded Richard (“Dick”) Snyder at a Simon & Schuster sales conference as part of an “S & S all-girl singing group” with “My Guy.”20 Named associate publisher in 1977. Married Snyder in 1978, divorced 1990. Received her own imprint, Linden Press, in 1979. Named president of S&S trade division in 1985. Moved to Random House in 1987. Named executive vice president and publisher of trade publishing. Pushed out as publisher in 1990. Given her own imprint, shuttered in 1994. Moved to William Morris as literary agent. Fisketjon, Gary. Williams College, 1976. Befriended there by Jay McInerney. Attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course. Editor at Random House, Atlantic Monthly Press, Knopf. Launched Vintage Contemporaries in 1984, instigating trend of paperback originals with McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Fired by Knopf in 2019 for policy breach. Fox, Joe. U.S. Marine, 1944–1946. Harvard University, 1946–1950. Befriended Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy Onassis) there. Editor at Knopf 1950–1955. Fired 1955. Went to NBC. Hired by Random House in 1960. Died at his desk of a heart attack in 1995. Cultivated and lured authors across many years, including Renata Adler and Peter Matthiessen. Also edited Truman Capote, Alison Lurie, and Philip Roth. Frank, Dan. Haverford College, BA, 1976. University of Chicago, MA. In high school, “took night classes in philosophy at the New School . . . audited lectures given by Hannah Arendt and followed a reading list adapted from her syllabuses.”21 At Harcourt Brace Jovanovic and Alfred A. Knopf before moving to Viking Penguin in 1984, executive editor 1987, editorial director 1990. Went to Pantheon as senior editor 1991, editorial director 1996–2020. At Viking,

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convinced Joseph Mitchell to publish an omnibus collection, which became Up in the Old Hotel.22 Under Art Spiegelman’s influence, made Pantheon increasingly a home for graphic novels, publishing Dan Clowes, Ben Katchor, and Chris Ware.23 Edited Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Friedman, Jane. New York University. Publicist at Random House. First title with a living author was John Updike’s Couples in 1968.24 Later associate publisher and vice president at Knopf, then publisher of Random House Audiobooks. Named publisher of Vintage in 1990, executive vice president of Knopf in 1992, and executive vice president of Random House in 1996. Appointed president and CEO of HarperCollins in 1997. Galassi, Jonathan. Phillips Exeter. Harvard University, 1971. Studied under Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship. Houghton Mifflin, 1973–81; Random House, 1981–86 (fired); FSG, 1986–2021. President of FSG, 2002–21. Poetry editor of the Paris Review in the 1980s. Created National Poetry Month with Maggie Richards in 1995. Translated Eugenio Montale from the Italian. Giroux, Robert. Columbia University, 1936. The G in FSG. Brought in John Berryman, T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O’Connor. Glusman, John. Columbia University, BA, 1978; MA, 1980. Random House, 1980–85. Washington Square Press, 1985–86. Collier Books at Macmillan, 1986–91. FSG 1991–2005. Harmony at Crown, 2006–2008. W. W. Norton, 2008–. Edits Saidiya Hartman and Richard Powers. Married to Emily Bestler, who runs Emily Bestler Books at Simon & Schuster where she publishes Vince Flynn, Jodi Picoult, and Sister Souljah. Goldstein, Ann. Bennington, 1971. Joined the New Yorker as copyeditor in 1974, later head of copy. Member of the organizing committee for a New Yorker union in 1976. Translator for Elena Ferrante, Primo Levi, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Gorey, Edward. Harvard University, 1946–50, roomed with Frank O’Hara. Author of more than a hundred books. Avid collector of “everything from tarot cards to trilobites to particularly interesting cheese graters.”25 Dedicated admirer of George Balanchine. Devoted to cats. Worked as an illustrator at Doubleday in the 1950s, initially for Jason Epstein’s Anchor Books. Tall, bald, often draped in a fur coat. Gottlieb, Robert. Columbia University, 1952. Simon & Schuster, 1955–68; Knopf, 1968–87; New Yorker, 1987–92. “Widely regarded as one of the best editorial minds in the business.”26 Edited every novel by Toni Morrison after The Bluest Eye. Gottlieb, Robert. Elmira College, BA, 1976. Started in William Morris mailroom 1976. Mentored by literary agent Owen Laster, who told him, “the great thing about books is that they’re used in a lot of media, from movies to TV.”27 Major advocate on behalf of authors’ rights. Authors include Tom Clancy, Janet Evanovich, and Dean Koontz. Graff, Robert de. Founded Pocket Books, introducing modern mass-market paperbacks to the United States. Graham, Nan. Yale University, BA in English, 1977. Editorial assistant at Ballantine, 1978, Pantheon, 1979, Viking Penguin, 1984, Scribner as editor in chief, 1994. Married novelist Mark Costello, college roommate of David Foster Wallace. Authors include Ann Beattie, Don DeLillo, Anthony Doerr, Jennifer Egan, James Franco, Mary Gordon, Amy Hempel, Katherine Hill, Miranda July, Stephen King, Rachel Kushner, Frank McCourt, Annie Proulx, and Dana Spiotta. Grann, Phyllis. Barnard College, 1958. First woman CEO in publishing. Worked up from secretary to Nelson Doubleday to senior editor at David McKay, then senior editor and vice president at Simon & Schuster, then editor in chief of Pocket Books.28 Michael Korda claims she took the last position “reluctantly,” having been sent “into exile,” resenting Joni Evans’s advances within Simon & Schuster itself as Dick Snyder’s girlfriend, leading her to leave for

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Putnam where she led a “dazzling” career, which Snyder’s boss, Martin Davis, “seldom failed to bring to [Snyder’s] attention.”29 At Putnam, “pioneered blockbuster publishing strategies that have become widespread in the industry.”30 Published Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, and Dick Francis. Grau, Julie. Columbia University, BA. Hired as assistant editor at Random House in 1988. Joni Evans called Grau, “my alter ego.”31 To Riverhead in 1994, appointed co–editorial director with Cindy Spiegel in 1998, co-publisher in 2003. Poached in 2005 to establish a new division at the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, part of Random House, named Spiegel & Grau. Shut down in 2019. Reopened as an independent in 2021. Authors include Brené Brown, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, and Piper Kerman. Griffiths, Ed. Joined RCA in 1948, rose from credit department to president in 1976. Nicknamed Bottom Line Ed. “Had a reputation as a blunt and highly successful financial executive who demanded that things be done his way.”32 Sold Random House to S. I. Newhouse in 1980. Grose, Bill. Editor at Dell, 1972–80. Aggressively published Danielle Steel. Jove, 1980–83. Pocket, 1983–96. Hamill, Sam. Cantankerous cofounder of Copper Canyon Press with Tree Swenson. Asked about business in 1982, said, “we’re tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, just like always.”33 Mentored by Kenneth Rexroth. Poet and translator of Chinese poetry. Organized a poet’s protest of the Iraq War in 2003. Harris, Charles. Joined Doubleday in 1956, became editor in 1964, “perhaps the first black editor in a major publishing house.”34 Launched Zenith Books in 1965, an imprint dedicated to “informing secondary school children of the origins of American minority groups.”35 Succeeded by Loretta Barrett, who hired Marie Brown, who, along with Toni Morrison, became among the first black women editors in U.S. publishing. Stints at Portal Press and Random House—where he and John A. Williams edited Amistad, which they claimed was the first periodical dedicated to black writing—before creating Howard University Press in 1972, running it until 1986. Returned to trade in 1986, founding Amistad Press, sold to HarperCollins in 1999, remained editorial director until 2003. Hensley, Sessalee. Louisiana State University, BA in sociology. Worked at B. Dalton in college, moved to Bookstop, a Texas bookselling chain. Became fiction buyer after Barnes & Noble purchase, one of the most powerful people in the book business. Fired in 2020. Hoffman, Harry. Yachter, golfer. Revolutionized wholesaling in the 1970s at Ingram Book Company, 1968–79, and retailing at Waldenbooks, 1979–91. “Caught particular heat for suggesting at a Walden holiday party, which were huge events in the day, that what the industry really needed were shorter books that could be read before going to sleep.”36 Holtzbrinck, Dieter von. Son of Georg von Holtzbrinck, founder of Holtzbrinck, which began as a book club after World War II and was Germany’s second-largest publisher after Bertelsmann by the 1980s. Took control after his father died in 1983. Bought Henry Holt & Co. in 1985, FSG in 1994, and St. Martin’s in 1995. Howard, Gerald. Cornell University, 1972. Copywriter at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, college department, 1974–78. Editor at New American Library, 1978–80; Penguin, 1980–88; W. W. Norton, 1988–98; Doubleday, 1998–2020. Acquired Paul Auster, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo, William S. Burroughs, William Kennedy, Walter Mosley, David Foster Wallace, James Welch, and Hanya Yanagihara. Jaffe, Marc. Harvard University, BA in English, 1942. Joined New American Library in 1948. Moved to Dell in 1959, replaced at NAL by E. L. Doctorow. To Bantam in 1961 as editorial director. Acquired William Blatty’s The Exorcist. Rose to president and publisher.37 To Ballantine, owned by Random House, in 1980 as executive vice president and editor in chief.

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Given his own Random House imprint, Villard Books, in 1983. Moved to Houghton Mifflin in 1986 with his own imprint. Janklow, Morton. Corporate securities lawyer turned literary agent. Represented Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Loathed by Roger Straus but friendly with Jason Epstein. In 1976, wrote to a French chef in anticipation of Epstein and Gore Vidal’s travels to secure them personal attention: “One of my very dear friends is Jason Epstein who is Vice President and a Senior Editor at Random House here in New York. He is the Editor for, and a very close friend of Gore Vidal, who, as I am sure you know, is one of our most important American novelists and a man of letters whose most recent book entitled ‘1876’ is the current No. 1 best seller in the United States. Jason and Gore are enormously attractive intellectual gourmets and they frequently travel in France together on short trips for the purpose of partaking of the great cuisine.”38 Danielle Steel wrote, “He is extremely famous and a remarkable person. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have the career I do today.”39 Johnson, John H. Started as editor of company magazine at Harry Pace’s Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company. Founded Negro Digest in 1942, Ebony in 1945, Jet in 1951, Fashion Fair Cosmetics in 1973. Jones, Judith. Bennington College, 1945. Editorial assistant for Doubleday in the 1940s in New York and from France in the early 1950s. Lifted The Diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile. Editor at Knopf, 1957–2011. Discovered Julia Child. Edited John Hersey, William Maxwell, Anne Tyler, and all but one work of fiction by John Updike. Kakutani, Michiko. Yale University, 1976. Started as an intern at the Washington Post. Began writing regularly for the New York Times in 1979, decades as its chief book critic. Stepped down in 2017. Kamil, Susan. George Washington University, BA. Hired at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1975 in subsidiary rights, fired in 1978. Appointed director of subsidiary rights at Simon & Schuster in 1979, moved briefly to Crown in 1987 before joining Joni Evans at Random House as executive editor the same year. Tapped by Carole Baron to revive Dial Press for Dell in 1993. Made editor in chief of Random House in 2008 and publisher in 2010. Authors included Ta-Nehisi Coates, Paul Harding, Elizabeth McCracken, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Strout, and Gary Shteyngart. Died 2019. Kanellos, Nicolás. Fairleigh Dickinson, BA, 1966; University of Texas at Austin, PhD, 1974. Launched Revista Chicano-Riqueña in 1972, which in 1979 won a $5,000 fellowship from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines ($20,000 in 2022 dollars). Founded Arte Público in 1979, dedicated to recovering the “US Hispanic Literary Heritage.” At a 1990 keynote address said, “There’s no question that the commercial publishing industry is bigoted and chauvinistic.”40 Kaplan, Mitchell. University of Colorado at Boulder, 1972. Founded Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida, in 1982. Cofounded Miami Book Fair in 1984. President of American Booksellers Association 2006. Karten, Terry. Vassar College, BA, 1969. Joined Harper & Row in 1980, editor in 1986, senior editor in 1989, and executive editor in 1993, where she remains. Authors include Susan Choi, Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Nicole Krauss, Francine Prose, and Miriam Toews. Kidd, Chip. Penn State University, 1986. Book designer at Knopf, 1986–present. Over time added responsibilities as comics editor for Pantheon. “Let’s face it,” he told the New York Times in 1996, “hard-cover books, by and large, are luxury items. So you’re talking about a cross-section of the public that is probably more open to new design ideas, and they want to see design that strikes them as sophisticated.”41 According to Publishers Weekly in 2001, “he’s as much in demand as a party guest, raconteur and genial wit as designer and editor.”42 Designed covers for Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Crichton’s Disclosure,

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Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Haruki Murakami’s IQ84, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Klopfer, Donald. Enrolled at Williams and Columbia University, never graduated. “Unquestionably patrician”—Robert Gottlieb.43 Cofounder of Random House with Bennett Cerf. Convinced Philip Roth to come to Random House over lunch at Doney’s in Rome in 1960. Roth stayed until 1972. Kloske, Geoffrey. Kenyon College, BA, 1991. St. Martin’s Press, 1991–92. To Little, Brown in 1992. To Simon & Schuster in 1999, rose quickly to executive editor. To Riverhead in 2006 as publisher. Built an early connection to the This American Life Extended Universe, acquiring titles from Ira Glass, Dave Eggers, Jon Ronson, David Sedaris, and Sarah Vowell. Knopf, Alfred A. Columbia University, 1912. Cofounded eponymous firm in 1915 with his wife, Blanche. Sold it to Random House in 1961. Published Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and John Updike. Knopf, Blanche. Cofounder of Alfred A. Knopf. Suggested the borzoi as colophon. Acquired Elizabeth Bowen, Raymond Chandler, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Andre Gide, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Muriel Spark. Korda, Michael. Read History at Magdalen College, Oxford. Simon & Schuster, 1958–2005. After Leon Shimkin assumed presidency of Simon & Schuster, Robert Gottlieb (along with Nina Bourne and Anthony Schulte) left for Random House. Korda replaced Gottlieb as editor in chief. List tended toward the commercial, including Carlos Castaneda, Mary Higgins Clark, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Harold Robbins, and Jacqueline Susann. Also edited Joan Didion’s Democracy. Kornblum, Allan. New York University and University of Iowa dropout. Founded Toothpaste Press as a letterpress operation in Iowa City in early 1970s. In 1984 incorporated as a nonprofit, moved to Minneapolis, and changed name to Coffee House Press. Retired in 2011. Died in 2014. Lane, Allen. Founded Penguin Books in 1935 in London, introducing the modern mass-market paperback to the Anglophone world. Lane, John. Wofford College, 1977. Roadtripped from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to Port Townsend, Washington. Encountered Sam Hamill and Tree Swenson and learned letterpress publishing. Founded Hub City Press in Spartanburg in 1995. Laughlin, James. Harvard University. “In 1934, James Laughlin IV, 19 years old, six-and-a-halffeet tall, and heir to a once-great Pittsburgh steel fortune, substituted sophomore study at Harvard with a year’s fateful sojourn in Europe, where the writers he revered lived. He spent a month in the French countryside with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, thanklessly writing press releases for Stein’s forthcoming American lecture tour and changing tires during their motor car jaunts through the mountains. Then he wrote to his hero Ezra Pound in Rapallo, Italy, asking to visit. From the poet came a terse but apparently welcoming cable that read, ‘Visibility high,’ and Laughlin set off by night train that same day. At the ‘Ezuversity’ in Rapallo he spent six months in unstructured, intensive non-credit tutelage that changed his life.”44 Lawrence, Starling. Princeton University, 1965. Editor at W. W. Norton, 1969–present. Acquired Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Selected James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor and Richard North Patterson’s The Lasko Tangent from the slush pile. Edits Michael Lewis. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. Swarthmore College, 1956. Yale School of Drama, 1959. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962–63. Dial Press, 1963–65. New York Times Sunday Book Review editor, 1965–69; book critic 1969–2000; chief obituary writer 2000–2006. Lish, Gordon. Moved to California in 1959, sought out Neal Cassady,45 founded a literary journal, and worked as the linguistics director for Behavioral Research Laboratories.46 Appointed fiction editor at Esquire in 1969. Became editor at Knopf in 1977, stayed until 1995.

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Loomis, Robert. Duke University, 1949. Editor at Random House 1957–2011. Edited Maya Angelou, Daniel J. Boorstin, Frederick Exley, Seymour Hersh, Jerzy Kosinski, Neil Sheehan, and William Styron, his college classmate. Louie, Lorraine. California College of Arts and Crafts. Book designer. Gary Fisketjon called her “incredibly talented, adventurous, and personable.”47 Lucas, Lisa. University of Chicago, BA in English, 2001. Went from publisher of Guernica to become first woman and first person of color to be executive director of National Book Foundation in 2016. Appointed publisher of Pantheon and Schocken in 2020. Lynch, Megan. Brown University, 2001. Editor at Riverhead, 2003–14. Editorial director at Ecco, 2014–19. Publisher at Flatiron, 2019–present. Authors include Rumaan Alam, Jesse Ball, Ben Fountain, Elizabeth McCracken, Helen Oyeyemi, Jess Row, Emma Straub, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, and Nell Zink. Marmur, Mildred. University of Minnesota, MA in French. Translated Madame Bovary for New American Library.48 Climbed ranks at Simon & Schuster to director of subsidiary rights, 1953–74. Moved to Random House as director of subsidiary rights, 1974–85. Orchestrated some of the most expensive auctions of the era, including All the President’s Men, Centennial, and Ragtime. First woman president and publisher of Scribner, 1985–87. McCrae, Fiona. University of Bristol. Joined Faber and Faber in London in 1983. Moved to Faber and Faber U.S. in 1991. Appointed executive director of Graywolf Press in 1994, retired in 2022. McDonald, Erroll. Born in Limon, Costa Rica. Yale University, 1975. Random House, 1977–present. Hired by Toni Morrison. Defended Alberto Vitale’s firing of André Schiffrin in 1990. Moved to Pantheon as executive editor in 1990, remained until 2021. Moved to Knopf as executive editor in 2021. Launched Aventura, a paperback imprint dedicated to world literature, in 1983. Brought Wole Solinka’s work to United States. Acquired Sandra Cisnero’s Woman Hollering Creek and Salmon Rushdie’s East, West and The Moor’s Last Sigh. McDonald, Sean. Yale University, BA. Worked under Nan Talese at Doubleday, 1998–2003. Hired as senior editor and online director at Riverhead in 2003. Executive editor in 2005. Poached by Farrar, Straus and Giroux to be executive editor in 2010. Authors include John Darnielle, Junot Díaz, Nuruddin Farah, Aleksandar Hemon, and George Saunders. McGrath, Charles (“Chip”). New Yorker, 1974–94. Editor of the New York Times Book Review, 1994–2003. Father of Sarah McGrath (Scribner editor, 1998–2006; Riverhead, 2006–present) and Ben McGrath (New Yorker staff writer, 2003–present). McGrath, Sarah. Harvard University, BA, 1996. “The best human on the planet”—Lauren Groff.49 Started at Knopf in 1997 as an editorial assistant under Jordan Pavlin and Jane Garrett. Then “chosen to assist chairman and publisher Sonny Mehta.”50 To Scribner as associate editor under Nan Graham in 1998. To Riverhead as executive editor in 2006. Authors include Brit Bennett, Danielle Evans, Lauren Groff, Paula Hawkins, Bruce Holsinger, Lisa Ko, Sigrid Nunez, Meg Wolitzer, and Tiphanie Yanique. McIntosh, Madeline. Phillips Exeter Academy, 1987, Harvard University BA in Arts Administration, 1991. Became CEO of Penguin Random House U.S. in 2018. Resigned in 2023. Mehta, Sonny. Cambridge University, 1962–65. Third editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf. Granada Publishing, 1966–72. Pan Books, 1972–87. Knopf, 1987–2019. Morgan, Calvert. Yale University, BA. Started at St. Martin’s 1988. Moved to HarperCollins in 1999, became senior vice president, executive editor, and editorial director of Harper Perennial. Stepped down in 2015. Hired in 2017 as executive editor of Riverhead Books. Authors include Akwaeke Emezi, Brandon Taylor, Jess Walter, and Kate Zambreno. Morrison, Toni. Editor at Random House, 1967–83. Also an author. Murdoch, Rupert. Australian American businessman. His conglomerate, NewsCorp, acquired Harper & Row in 1987 and William Collins in 1989, forming HarperCollins.

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Murray, Brian. HarperCollins Australia CEO, 2001–2004. HarperCollins General Book Group president, 2004–2007. HarperCollins CEO, 2007–present. Nesbit, Lynn. Northwestern University, 1960. Attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course, where she met literary agent Sterling Lord, for whom she worked from 1960 to 1965. Left in 1965 to launch literary division of Artists Agency Corporation, later International Creative Management. Mentored the most influential literary agent of the next generation, Amanda (“Binky”) Urban. Left ICM in 1988 to form Janklow Nesbit with Morton Janklow. On her client, Donald Barthelme: “his central obsession is not to be boring, because he is so easily bored himself.”51 Represented Renata Adler, Donald Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Robert Caro, Jimmy Carter, John Cheever, Michael Crichton, Joan Didion, Frederick Exley, William Gass, Michael Korda, Toni Morrison, Tim O’Brien, Ann Rice, and Tom Wolfe. Nevler, Leona. Boston University, 1947. Started as secretary at Little, Brown in 1948. Appointed associate editor in 1951. Moved to Holt as assistant editor in 1952, promoted to associate editor later in 1952. To Fawcett as associate editor in 1955. Appointed editor in chief of Fawcett imprints Crest and Premier in 1971, promoted to publisher of Fawcett in 1974. Promoted to vice president of CBS, Fawcett’s parent company, in 1978. Appointed executive editor of Ballantine in 1982 after CBS liquidated Fawcett and sold the name to Random House. Moved to Berkley Books at Penguin Putnam in 2001, where she worked until her death in 2005. Married Jim Silberman in 1960, divorced in 1976. Newburg, Esther. Wheaton College, 1963. Literary agent ICM, 1976–present. Aide to Robert Kennedy during 1968 presidential campaign, one of the Boiler Room Girls. Represented Karamo Brown, Pete Dexter, Carl Hiaasen, Steve Martin, John Sandford, George Saunders, and Henry Winkler. Newhouse, S. I. Syracuse University dropout. Inherited Condé Nast from his father in 1979. Acquired Random House in 1980 and the New Yorker in 1985. Fired William Shawn as New Yorker editor and replaced him with Robert Gottlieb from Knopf. Then fired Gottlieb’s friend, Robert Bernstein, longtime Random House president, and replaced him with Alberto Vitale, who fired André Schiffrin. Parks, Carole. Joined Hoyt Fuller’s Black World as an associate editor in 1970, moving to Chicago from New York where she worked at Doubleday. Fired with Fuller in 1976. Moved to Atlanta in 1976 and founded First World. Left at the end of 1977.52 Pavlin, Jordan. Vassar College, BA in English, 1990. Attended Radcliffe Publishing Course. St. Martin’s, 1990–92; Little, Brown, 1992–96; Knopf, 1996–present. Fourth editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf. Said, as a child, “I was utterly promiscuous in my affections. I moved right from Judy Blume to Rona Jaffe and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins and Robert Ludlum and James Michener. And from there it was a short hop to the nineteenth-century novel, and from there to the Russians.”53 Authors include Jennifer Egan, Nathan Englander, Tayari Jones, Ayana Mathis, Jenny Offill, Tommy Orange, Julie Otsuka, and Karen Russell. Peacock, Allen. Harvard University, 1976. Editor at Dial, 1981–84; Linden Press at Simon & Schuster under Joni Evans, 1984–90 (fired); Holt, 1991–98. Edited Robert Olen Butler, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin. Acquired William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own before he was fired from S&S. Pietsch, Michael. Harvard University, 1978. Scribner assistant editor, 1980–81; editor, 1981–82; editor and marketing coordinator, 1982–85; senior editor, 1985. Harmony Books at Crown senior editor, 1985–90; executive editor, 1990–91; Little, Brown senior editor, 1991–96; executive editor, 1996–99; editor in chief, 1999–2002, senior vice president and publisher, 2002–2008, executive vice president, 2008–12. Hachette CEO, 2012–present. Reid, Meg. University of Maine at Farmington, BFA in creative writing, 2008; University of North Carolina at Wilmington, MFA, 2012. Named assistant director of Hub City Press in 2013,

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director in 2017. Gravitates toward “multi-generational, multi-POV stories that illuminate lesser-seen parts of the South,” including fiction by Anjali Enjeti, Jessica Handler, Ashleigh Bryant Philips, and Carter Sickels. Reidy, Carolyn. Middlebury College, 1971; Indiana University, PhD in English, 1982. Random House subsidiary rights administrator, 1978–81; manager of subsidiary rights, 1981–83. Morrow subsidiary rights director, 1983–85. Vintage at Random House associate publisher, 1985–87. Random House vice president and associate publisher, 1987–88. Vintage at Random House publisher, 1988. Anchor at Doubleday publisher, 1988. Avon Books president and publisher, 1988–92. Simon & Schuster president and publisher, 1992–2007, CEO, 2007–20. Rey, Judy-Lynn del. Hunter College, 1965. Editor of Galaxy, 1965–73; Ballantine, 1973–86. Given her own imprint, Del Rey, in 1977. Died 1986. Created the modern genre of fantasy. Edited Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov, Anne McCaffrey, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein. Rey, Lester del. George Washington University dropout. Prolific science fiction writer. Followed his wife to Ballantine as an editor in 1975, continued her imprint, Del Rey, after her death in 1986 until his retirement in 1992. Riggio, Leonard. NYU dropout. “His career as a bookseller began in the early 1960s, when he took a job at New York University’s college bookstore to help pay for his tuition. He dropped out of college to open a rival bookstore, SBX, for Student Book Exchange, and started managing several other campus bookstores.”54 Bought Barnes & Noble, a single struggling Manhattan bookstore, in 1971. Popularized the book superstore. Said in 1976, “We set the customer free in an unintimidating atmosphere to roam over a vast space.”55 Acquired B. Dalton in 1986. Accused his rival, Harry Hoffman, of “buffoonery and bad taste” and “boorish behavior.”56 Barnes & Noble sold to a hedge fund in 2019. Robbins, Henry. Harvard University, 1949. Editor at Knopf, 1955–63; Dial, 1963–64; FSG, 1964–73; Simon & Schuster, 1973–76; E. P. Dutton, 1976–79. Edited Joan Didion, who titled her 1992 essay collection, After Henry, after him. Edited Donald Barthelme, Paula Fox, John Irving, Walker Percy, and Tom Wolfe. Rosset, Barney. Swarthmore dropout. Bought Grove Press “for $3,000 in 1951, built it up into one of the most influential publishers of the post-war era, and then was summarily fired after selling it to Ann Getty for $2,000,000 in 1986.”57 Sale, Faith. Cornell University. At Cornell met her husband, Kirkpatrick Sale, and befriended classmate Thomas Pynchon. Editor at J. B. Lippincott, 1959–63; Macmillan, 1963; E. P. Dutton, 1977–79; Putnam, 1979–99. Edited Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Kaye Gibbons, and Amy Tan. Saletan, Rebecca. Yale University, BA in English, 1982. Yale University Press, 1982–84. Got her start in trade publishing in 1984 as an assistant to Jason Epstein where Peter Matthiessen provided her her “first experience of being taken seriously as an editor”: “One day he asked if I would look at one [story] he’d been laboring over. Something was hampering it, but he didn’t know what. I read it and instantly saw—or rather, felt—what was off: The story was constructed on a hinge, and the hinge was stuck, much as an actual hinge might be.”58 To Simon & Schuster as a senior editor in 1991. To FSG in 1997 as editorial director of its North Point imprint. To Harcourt in 2004 as editor in chief of adult trade. Resigned in late 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis. Joined Riverhead in early 2009 as editorial director. Authors include Dean Bakopoulos, Mohsin Hamid, David Treuer, and Claire Vaye Watkins. Sargent, John, Jr. Only son of John T. Sargent, who, “as president and later chairman of Doubleday & Company oversaw its expansion from a modest-size family-controlled book publisher to an industry giant with interests extending into broadcasting and baseball.”59 Sargent Junior joined Doubleday in 1983 on the business side. Moved to Macmillan in 1986.

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To Simon & Schuster in 1987 as publisher then president of the juvenile division. To Dorling Kindersley (DK) as CEO in 1993. To St. Martin’s (owned by Macmillan) as president in 1996, after Holtzbrinck acquired the house. In 1998, promoted to president of Holtzbrinck’s U.S. holdings, which included FSG and Henry Holt, ultimately under the title of CEO of Macmillan. Fired in 2020. One of the first things Roger Straus told Sargent was “I had the hots for your grandmother,” the wife of Nelson Doubleday.60 Facilitated the conglomeration of FSG. Schiffrin, André. Author of A Political Education: Coming of Age in Paris and New York and Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War. Seajay, Carol. University of Michigan at Kalamazoo. Cofounded Old Wives’ Tales, a woman’s bookstore, in San Francisco in 1976. Became a leader in the feminist bookstore movement by starting Feminist Bookstore News, a newsletter, that year. Sehgal, Parul. McGill University, BA, 2003; Columbia University, MFA, 2010. Book reviewer at Publishers Weekly, 2008–11. Books editor at NPR, 2011–12. Editor at New York Times Book Review, 2012–17. New York Times book critic, 2017–21. Staff writer at the New Yorker, 2021–present. Shatzkin, Mike. University of California, Los Angeles, 1969. Son of Leonard Shatzkin, “responsible for innovations that became industry practice, including standard book sizes for production efficiency, maintaining a nationwide sales force, and methods for stocking stores.”61 Started in books as a sales clerk at Brentano’s in 1962. Director of marketing at Two Continents Publishing Group, 1974–79. Became publishing consultant in 1979. Has maintained his blog, The Shatzkin Files, since 1995. Silberman, James. Harvard University, 1950. Attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course. Dial Press, 1953–63. “After Alfred A. Knopf, James Baldwin’s first publisher, rejected Giovanni’s Room because they felt its gay white characters might alienate Mr. Baldwin’s Black audience, Mr. Silberman scooped it up for Dial. He went on to edit Mr. Baldwin’s Another Country and The Fire Next Time.”62 Random House 1963–75. “Left Random House in 1975 after refusing to fire Selma Shapiro, the company’s vice president for publicity, with whom he was having an affair and whom he later married.” Simon & Schuster, 1975–91. Michael Korda wrote that Dick Snyder hired Silberman for “solid midlist books.”63 Little, Brown, 1991–98. Died 2020. Sitter, Jim. Book impresario, good talker, oenophile. Smith, Carol Houck. Vassar College, 1944. W. W. Norton, 1948–2008. Snyder, Richard. Tufts University, 1955. Simon & Schuster, 1960–94. Fired after Viacom acquired S&S. Acquired Golden Books in 1994 and ran it into the ground, selling to Random House in 2001. Spiegel, Cindy. University of Pennsylvania, BA in English; University of California at Berkeley, MA in comparative literature, 1989. Worked at Random House and Ticknor & Fields before joining Riverhead in 1994. Appointed co–editorial director with Julie Grau in 1998, copublisher in 2003. Poached to establish a new division at Doubleday Broadway, part of Random House, in 2005. Spiegel & Grau shut down in 2019 and reopened as an independent in 2021. Strachan, Pat. Duke University. Radcliffe Publishing Course. FSG, 1971–88. Began as assistant to Robert Giroux. Appointed assistant editor in 1974, associate editor in 1975, executive editor in 1981, and vice president in 1985. Acquired Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Padgett Powell, and Marilynne Robinson. Felt passed over by Jonathan Galassi and resigned abruptly.64 Fiction editor at the New Yorker, 1988–91. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991–94. Houghton Mifflin, 1997–2002. Little, Brown, 2002–15. Catapult, 2015–22. Straus, Roger. A “brash and opinionated grandee.”65 Founded Farrar, Straus and Company in 1946. Stayed with the house, sold to Holtzbrinck in 1994. Died 2004.

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Subin, Nina. Author photographer. “Writers may be difficult in their private lives, but on the other side of the camera lens they tend to be nervous but sweet. . . . It’s rather like a long first date. The writer starts out uncomfortable and tense. If hair and make-up have been requested, that may be a first experience. Initial movements and expressions tend to be awkward. But then the conversation rolls on, the logistics become familiar, and the writer usually drifts into a more relaxed state. This may well be boredom, but from my point of view, the face softens and that’s often when the best pictures are taken.”66 Photographed Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Diaz, Rivka Galchen, and Tayari Jones. Swenson, Tree. Cofounded Copper Canyon with Sam Hamill in 1972. Left in 1993. Executive director at the Academy of American Poets, 2002–2012, Hugo House, 2012–21. Talese, Nan A. Manhattanville College, 1955. Random House, 1959–73. Started as proofreader, rose to associate editor. Simon & Schuster, 1973–81. Houghton Mifflin, 1981–88. Doubleday, 1988–2020. Received eponymous imprint in 1990. Inaugural recipient of the Center for Fiction’s Maxwell E. Perkins Award for lifetime achievement in 2005. Edited Margaret Atwood, Pat Conroy, Jennifer Egan, Adam Haslett, and Ian McEwan. Targ, William. Chicago high school dropout. Started as office boy at Macmillan in 1925, among the early wave of Jews in publishing. Changed his surname from Torgownik to Targ. Opened his own bookstore in 1929. Editor World Publishing, 1942–64; G. P. Putnam, 1964–78. Acquired Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Wrote a publishing memoir, Indecent Pleasures. Tebbel, John. Central Michigan College, BA, 1935; Columbia University, MS, 1937. “A newspaperman by training, Mr. Tebbel worked in nearly every aspect of publishing, as a reporter, journalism professor, magazine and book editor, historical novelist and the author of more than two dozen nonfiction books. A former chairman of New York University’s journalism department, he was also the first director of the university’s Graduate Institute of Book Publishing, founded in 1958.”67 Author of four-volume A History of Book Publishing in the United States. Died 2004. Thomas, Bill. Started as an assistant to Robert Weil at St. Martin’s. Doubleday, 1993–present. Promoted to editor in chief in 1998, to senior vice president, editor in chief, and publisher in 2008. Acquired Aimee Bender, Mark Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, and Colson Whitehead. Trubek, Anne. Oberlin College, BA, 1988. Founder and publisher of Belt Publishing. Writes the popular publishing newsletter “Notes from a Small Press.” Urban, Amanda (“Binky”). Wheaton College, 1968. “Raised in affluent Summit, New Jersey, where ‘we all went to private schools and had princess telephones in our rooms and the dads had big jobs in New York and the mothers stayed home.’ ”68 Worked various jobs out of college, including for Grey Advertising and New York. Hired by Lynn Nesbit at ICM in 1980, where she remains. Her legs served as the model for the Vintage Contemporaries cover of Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter.69 Represented E. L. Doctorow, Anthony Doerr, Stuart Dybek, Bret Easton Ellis, Richard Ford, Adam Haslett, Siri Hustvedt, Michiko Kakutani, Chip Kidd, Atticus Lish, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, James Salter, Edmund White, and Joy Williams. Vitale, Alberto. University of Turin, PhD in economics, 1956. Olivetti, 1959–71. IFI, an Italian holding company owning Fiat, among others, 1972–75. Appointed senior vice president of administration at Bantam Books in 1975. Elected executive vice president and COO in 1978. Elected CEO in 1985. After Random House, which owned Bantam, acquired Doubleday in 1986, named president and CEO of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Group. In 1989, replaced Robert Bernstein as president and CEO of Random House. Left shortly after Bertelsmann acquired Random House in 1998. Walker, Scott. Founded Graywolf Press in 1974. Resigned at the request of the board of directors in 1994 after financial mismanagement.

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Weil, Robert. Yale University, 1977. Started as editorial assistant at Times Books in 1978, promoted to assistant editor in 1980. Editor of Omni magazine’s book division, 1981–88. St. Martin’s Press, 1988–98. W. W. Norton, 1998–present. Mentored Geoffrey Kloske, Andrew Miller, and Bill Thomas, among others. Weybright, Victor. “A large and amiable man who reminded some of his friends of a handsome Alfred Hitchcock.”70 Cofounded New American Library in 1948 and Weybright & Talley in 1967. Williams, Alan D. Phillips Exeter Academy; Yale University, BA. Started as a traveling salesman with McGraw-Hill, promoted to advertising manager in 1952. To Lippincott as advertising and promotion manager in 1953. Associate editor at Lippincott in 1954. To Little, Brown in 1959. To Viking in 1965, becoming editorial director in 1968. To Putnam in 1984 and William Morrow in 1987 to run its Arbor House imprint. In 1990 appointed publisher of Grove. Died 1991. Authors included Nadine Gordimer, Shirley Hazzard, and Stephen King. Wilson, Edmund. Princeton University, 1916. Classmate of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Magazine writer. Cofounder of Library of America with Jason Epstein. Wright, Lee. Managed Wright Libraries in New York City until 1935. In 1935 joined Simon & Schuster as an editor of mystery. “A native New Yorker, Wright was married to John Basset, with whom she collaborated in adapting stories for WOR radio’s program Murder Clinic. For Simon & Schuster, she selected at least one story a month, and they proved to be one of the firm’s most popular lines.”71 Moved to Random House in 1958 where she stayed until 1976. Died 1986. Wylie, Andrew (“The Jackal”) 72. Harvard University, 1970. Son of Craig Wylie, editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin. Founded Andrew Wylie Agency in 1980. “To be even remotely acquainted with the legend of Andrew Wylie is to have certain images and ideas fixed in your mind. There are the berets and bad poetry of the 1970’s, when he aped the avant-garde and genuflected before Andy Warhol. There are the hard drinking and the hard-driving bargains of the 1980’s, when he clawed his way into the pantheon of powerful literary agents with the hunger and cunning of a scavenger come late to a feast.”73 Represented Martin Amis, John Banville, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolaño, Teju Cole, Kiran Desai, Dave Eggers, Larry McMurtry, Norman Mailer, Sally Rooney, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, and John Edgar Wideman. Yamazaki, Paul. Student and activist at San Francisco State during the 1967 strike, was expelled and later imprisoned. Released in 1970. Found work at City Lights Bookstore. Became its book buyer in 1982 and remains in the position.

Notes

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

André Schiffrin, “An Enemy of the People,” New York Times, January 29, 1985, A27. See Thomas Whiteside, “The Blockbuster Complex—1,” New Yorker, September 29, 1980. Will Underwood, “On Presses and Press Marks,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 31, no.  3 (April 2000): 139. Gerald Davis, Managed by the Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2. Davis, Managed by the Markets, 76; see also Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005), 18. Davis, Managed by the Markets, 78. Albert Greco counts 573 mergers between 1960 and 1989, another 300 between 1990 and 1995, and 380 more between 1996 and 2001, for a total of 1253 from 1960 to 2001. See Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 51. See Thomas Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981). Ben H. Bagdikian situated literature among the mass media in his critique of corporate consolidation in his popular book The Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon, 1983). Christopher Dickey, “Publishing’s New ‘Merger Mania,’ ” Washington Post, June 7, 1977, B7. John Y. Cole, ed., Responsibilities of the American Book Community (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1981), 23. Cole, Responsibilities, 41, 35. As Leah Price reminds us, “the publishing industry has never been propelled by great novels, poems, or plays. The 1,500 copies or so of Pride and Prejudice published in 1813 made no splash, but in the same year, poet laureate Robert Southey’s biography of the scandalous navy hero Lord Nelson sold out twice, celebrity biographies being the closest thing to a sure bet in the most speculative of industries. Cookbooks fared even better.” Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 52. Cole, Responsibilities, 42. Cole, Responsibilities, 32. Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980– 1996 (Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 11.

240 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

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Roger Cohen, “Profits—Dick Snyder’s Ugly Word,” New York Times, June 30, 1991, sec. 3, 1. See Greco, Book Publishing Industry, 60–61. In 2004, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén wrote about how “content ownership” served as a pretext for the conglomeration of publishing, though she withheld judgment on the success of the strategy. See Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 78. As the scholarship on the history of authorship informs us, the figure of the author as we know it today emerged gradually across two centuries after the rise of printing and, alongside it, capitalism. See Authors and Owners by Mark Rose and The Construction of Authorship by Martha Woodmansee. As Christine Haynes reminds us, before then, authorship was understood as distributed, “tied to the practices and institutions of manuscript culture,” in which writing “was frequently collective and fluid.” See “Reassessing ‘Genius’ in the Study of Authorship,” Book History 8 (2005): 310. This was the world of the “craft guild” in which the individual was subjugated to the corporate. See Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Over time, economic and legal exigencies created a need for designating the individual or individuals responsible for the text who could—especially after John Locke’s theory of property—own the copyright to their work or be prosecuted for their crimes. It was only under Romanticism in the early nineteenth century that the author became a sedimented figure in British literary culture and the notion of artistic genius coalesced. The installation of the author as the owner responsible for her text moved yet more slowly in the United States, where the priority of the public sphere meant that print was depersonalized under the purview of the state “in a culture that regarded the free circulation of texts as the sign and guarantor of liberty,” such that the author we know today only gained sway here toward the end of the nineteenth century. See Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 48. For an overview of scholarship on authorship, see Simone Murray, The Digital Literary Sphere (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 25–29; Simone Murray, “Authorship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Publishing, ed. Angus Phillips and Michael Bhaskar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 38–54. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), v. Gerald Gross ventured a rare attempt at reversal: “Since at least the legendary Maxwell Perkins’s time, editors have been expected to be unsung, faceless, nameless technicians assisting the author in the creation of the completed manuscript. . . . But why does it have to be that way? . . . Why should the editor remain anonymous? Why shouldn’t the editor be named on the jacket or on the copyright page? . . . I suspect it’s time to put this sacred cow of anonymity out to pasture!” His cri de cœur was not embraced. See Gerald Gross, “Preface: Reflections on a Lifetime of Editing,” in Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know about What Editors Do, ed. Gerald Gross (New York: Grove, 1993), xvi. More recently, on January 27, 2022, Lisa Lucas, publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, tweeted, “I wish books had credits like film and tv does, or programs like dance and theater does [sic]. It’s a damn shame that most people don’t know how many people it takes to make a book!” Lisa Lucas, Twitter post, January 27, 2022, 1:33 p.m., https://twitter.com/likaluca /status/1552346393032941571. Abram Foley, The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 9. Evan Brier describes editorial invisibility as “a custom designed to exalt the author-as-literary-hero and to strengthen the literary system of which the editor was a part,” but which was reversing itself under the pressures of conglomeration. The editor, that is, by Brier’s lights, was becoming increasingly visible through imprints, prizes, and published critiques of conglomeration, a visibility that positioned editors “to champion, and to stand for, the residual, symbolic, ostensibly noneconomic value of the book” in an era when everyone

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

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else was subject to the vicissitudes of greater capital flows. See Evan Brier, “The Editor as Hero: The Novel, the Media Conglomerate, and the Editorial Critique,” American Literary History 30, no. 1 (2018): 92, 101. Novelists tend to invite this image. “That novelists may have a possessive investment in the narration of their loneliness can cause problems in the study of their creative processes,” writes sociologist Clayton Childress. See Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 17. Christine Haynes, surveying studies of authorship in 2005, could write that recent scholarship had “done little to advance our understanding of the history of authorship but has, in fact, often served to perpetuate the Romantic notion of genius” (“Reassessing ‘Genius,’ ” 288). Martha Woodmansee offers an early corrective to the focus on the solitary author, arguing that by the 1990s authorship practices in most spheres, especially outside arts and letters, had become increasingly collaborative, and that theories of authorship ought to respond accordingly. See Martha Woodmansee, “On the AuthorEffect: Recovering Collectivity,” Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 10, no.  2 (1997): 279. In 2013, Meredith McGill edited a collection of essays that investigates the “magnetic appeal of the author” while counteracting the cult of genius that Haynes bemoaned through attention to collective authorship in theater, film, the works of Percy Shelley, and even Michel Foucault’s “What Is An Author?,” essay. See Meredith McGill, introduction to Taking Liberties with the Author (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), para. 3. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 275. Megan O’Gieblyn, “Babel,” n+1 40 (Summer 2021). Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Concept of Flow,” in Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology (New York: Springer, 2014), 239–63. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 387. They were also intervening in—culminating and ending—a discourse about “man” that had been lively for several decades. See Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 281–315. The transnational body of work in textual scholarship is immense, and is especially strong in Germany and France. For an overview as it relates to perspectives on authorship, see Tim Groenland, The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver & David Foster Wallace (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 9–16. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 12. See Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–8; Dorothy Oberhaus, Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles: Method and Meaning (State College: Penn State University Press, 1995). McGann, Textual Condition, 12. See also Howard Becker, “All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be” (Art Worlds [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 1). A rich body of scholarship on the history of publishing reminds us that books are made by many hands. See especially the works of Jean-Yves Mollier and John Tebbel. Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 100. The five-volume series The History of the Book in America is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the topic. A History of the Book in America, edited by David D. Hall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). See also Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, The Broadview Introduction to Book History (Guelph, ON: Broadview Press, 2017). The foundational document

24 2

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

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of the field is Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?,” Daedalus 111, no.  3 (1982): 65–83. John K. Young, Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race since 1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 7. Often authors have less a hand in authorship than readers assume, down to the words on the page. This is true for fiction factories, staffed by ghostwriters such as those of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, who wrote the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books, or those of Book Creations, responsible for “the Nick Carter detective stories and the phenomenally successful eight-volume ‘Kent Family Chronicles,’ ” or those who write as Tom Clancy or other brand-name writers; it is true with someone like bestselling mid-century mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, who ran what he called his “fiction factory” out of his ranch in Temecula, California, which employed as many as fifteen staff at a time; it is true when an author in possession of a big advance flounders and the press turns to a boutique developmental editing shop, such as Gareth Cook’s Verto Literary; it is true in an ordinary way when developmental editors at publishing houses pitch ideas to writers and work with them to flesh them out, as Paul McCarthy often did during his tenures at Dell and Pocket in the 1980s and 1990s; and it is true, occasionally, for literary fiction, such as when Gordon Lish wrote significant passages in Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. See Marilyn S. Greenwald, The Secret of the Hardy Boys: Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2017); Edwin McDowell, “Book Packagers Come of Age,” New York Times, July 20, 1981, C13; Martyn Lyons, The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 156–57; Paul  D. McCarthy, “Developmental Editing: A Creative Collaboration,” in Gross, Editors on Editing; Groenland, Art of Editing. Childress, Under the Cover, 96. John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 136, 128 For an account of how finances work in book publishing from the perspective of the Chief Financial Officer, see Greco, Book Publishing Industry, 91–98. Laura B. Mcgrath, “Comping White,” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 19, 2019. The whiteness of comps is in part a consequence of the deep and long-standing whiteness of publishing staffs. The mismatch between the mostly white industry and its far more racially diverse readerships has led to spectacular dramas, such as that of Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, expertly analyzed by Ignacio Sánchez Prado, who observed that Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, attempted “to capitalize on a growing Latinx market and on the political visibility of the questions of immigration” by pushing a book that grossly misrepresented Mexico, leading to vocal backlash. Sánchez Prado, “Commodifying Mexico: On American Dirt and the Cultural Politics of a Manufactured Bestseller,” American Literary History 33, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 372. I refer here to what Alice Grundy terms professional editing, or “work undertaken in advance of publication when an editor works in collaboration with an author.” This is in opposition to more typically scholarly work that Grundy terms “textual editing,” which “is concerned with changes made to a text—whether by an author, editor, or in the course of production (for example, by a typesetter)—which becomes evident in the post-publication stage.” As Grundy goes on to note, “Textual editing is a large and rich field of scholarship. Coverage of professional editing is scarce.” Grundy, Editing Fiction: Three Case Studies from Post-war Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 1–2. Alan D. Williams, “What Is an Editor?,” in Gross, Editors on Editing, 7. Richard Curtis, “Are Editors Necessary?,” in Gross, Editors on Editing, 34. Tom Engelhardt, one of the Pantheon editors who quit to protest Schiffrin’s firing, later wrote an apocalyptic novel about how conglomeration wrecked publishing in which his protagonist says, “I wasn’t tired of

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45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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editing. It wasn’t something you could be tired of. I still felt ready to be used by anyone whose words mattered to me, just not by what had come to pass for an editor’s life.” Engelhardt, The Last Days of Publishing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 9. Marc Aronson, “The Evolution of the American Editor,” in Gross, Editors on Editing, 19. Clayton Childress brings into view “the silent partners in [an author’s] creative process: the novelists, friends, and allies who sent her novel into directions she could not have arrived to on her own” (Under the Cover, 12). Thompson, Merchants of Culture, 97. On the early history of literary agents, see James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 77–102. For that history with specific attention to the United States, see Childress, Under the Cover, 64–67. Jason Epstein, Book Business (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 6. Thompson, Merchants of Culture, 75, 73. Laura B. McGrath, “Literary Agency,” American Literary History 33, no. 2 (Summer 2021). Patrizia D’Ettore, “Distributed Agency in Ants,” in Distributed Agency, ed. N. J. Enfield and Paul Kockelman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 132. Lisa Siraganian analyzes collective intention and the emergent properties of corporations in modernist literature and legal theory. She shows how authors such as Muriel Rukeyser, Frank Norris, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Reznikoff “generated an early workshop of thought experiments on how seemingly authorless entities make meaning.” She argues, “Like business entities, aesthetic movements possessed emergent properties that were more than the sum of their artist parts.” Inferring from Stein’s G. M. P., Siraganian differentiates between businesses and artists: “Corporations create extremely complex, potentially immortal institutions or structures, impermanent social relations, and consumable products. In contrast, modern art movements create impermanent social relations and creations that go on and on.” In this book, I ask, what happens when these two—corporations and art movements—intersect? What emergent properties result when the bureaucratic rationality of conglomeration produces art? See Siraganian, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 3, 115, 139. For an overview of middlebrow as an aesthetic and sociological category, see Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 3–10; Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5–44. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Ben Libman, “Susan Sontag and the Americanization of the Nouveau Roman,” Post45, August 29, 2022. Brian  K. Goodman, The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023). Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires, The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). A proper analysis of the multinationalism of publishing in the conglomerate era would have to take into account the consequences of the logic of extraterritoriality as theorized by Matthew Hart, who plants a seed for such, noting “the absorption of publishing and book retail within a small group of vertically integrated transnational media corporations—a development that has not led to the homogenization of cultural life, but to increased specialization and diversification.” We should expect that that diversity nevertheless reconverges in “trending extraterritorial,” with significance only legible through analysis of that literature itself. Matthew Hart, Extraterritorial (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 6, 9.

24 4 58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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Under conglomeration, many works of fiction have come to be “born translated,” in Rebecca Walkowitz’s words. They approach “translation as medium and origin rather than as afterthought. Translation is not secondary or incidental to these works. It is a condition of their production.” One consequence of this is that such works of fiction “no longer conform to the logic of national representation,” changing the political-geographic horizon of interpretation, further explored in Matthew Hart’s Extraterritorial (see previous note). Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia Univerity Press, 2015), 3–4, 30. For an alternative model, I direct readers to Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s study on the struggle between Mexican literary institutions and Mexican writers to establish competing ideas of world literature. Sánchez Prado, Strategic Occidentalism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 6, 19. I draw here from Anna Kornbluh, who argues that literary critics ought to eschew long-standing disciplinary trends toward disassembling and tearing down, which she terms “anarcho-vitalist,” and take up constructive projects: “ideas about making, about making relations, about making spaces and orders deliberately and justly.” I reveal the sociality of authorship, demonstrating the collective rather than atomistic nature of literary production, with sustained attention to the institution of publishing, limning the system so that we might become better interpreters of it— and perhaps change it, too, for the better. Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 4. Roger Cohen, “A $78 Million Year: Steve Ross Defends His Paycheck,” New York Times, March 22, 1992. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 416. Richard M. Clurman, To the End of Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 321. Cohen, “A $78 Million Year.” Wallace, Infinite Jest, 11. Wallace drew on early Christianity and the writing of Lewis Hyde for the inspiration for his idea of these communities. See Dan Sinykin, American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 135–38. John Mutter, “People,” Publishers Weekly 221, no. 18 (February 19, 1982): 24. Heather Vogel Patrick, “The Competition Is Murder,” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 15 (April 14, 1997): 40. Groenland, Art of Editing, 122, 129. D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (New York: Viking, 2012), 205. Groenland makes this a tenet of editing: “Editing is necessarily dialectical rather than harmonious.” Groenland, Art of Editing, 204. This argument has a precedent in film theory. Jerome Christensen and J. D. Connor make the case that we only understand films when we recognize studios as their proper authors. Studios make films, they argue, that are strategic allegories for the studios themselves. Hollywood films are vastly more expensive and rarer than conglomerate fiction. Publishers cannot pay nearly the same attention to single works that studios can, and they have much less invested in almost all but the exceptional blockbuster bought dearly at auction. Because of these differences, I deviate from Christensen and Connor, arguing not that the publishing house is the rightful author of the works on its lists, but that authorship is an emergent effect of a system that includes but is greater than the house, involving agents, booksellers, creative writing programs, distributors, government agencies, and printers. See Jerome Christensen, America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); J. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

1. M ass M a r k et (I) 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

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Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 47, 365. See Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 25. Mark McGurl, “The Novel’s Forking Paths,” Public Books, April 1, 2015. Lee Konstantinou, “Autofiction and Autoreification,” The Habits of Tlön, February  6, 2021. Claire Squires made a similar point in 2007 about the internalization of marketing into the form of contemporary British fiction: “the author is resuscitated not only as author-promoter, then, but also in the act of writing itself.” See Squires, Marketing Literature, 39. Claus E. Anderson, in his forthcoming book The Very Edge of Fiction: Karl Ove Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel (State University of New York Press), argues that the 2007–2008 financial crisis, with its exposure of the risks of fictitious capital, led to the current faddishness of autofiction as practiced by Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, and many others. For a smart, polemical argument against autofiction on the grounds that it is the paradigmatic literary expression and alibi of neoliberalism, but that maximalist genre fiction writers such as N. K. Jemisin and Kim Stanley Robinson offer a salutary alternative, see Mitch Murray, “All Auto All the Time: Artwork, Art Work, and the University,” https://www.mitchrmurray.com/all-auto -all-the-time#_ ftn24, April 9, 2022. McGurl, Program Era, x. Calvin Reid, “New Press Gets $1.1M Grant for Diversity Program,” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 24 (June 10, 1996): 37. Diane Patrick, “The New Press: Better Diversity Through Internships,” Publishers Weekly 261, no. 52 (December 15, 2014): 28.

1. Mass Market (I): How Mass- Market Books Changed Publishing 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

I relied for details on Hannah O’Neill, “Eight Days in May,” Continuum Magazine (University of Minnesota), May 23, 2017, https://www.continuum.umn.edu/2017/05/eight-days-may/; and Forgotten Minnesota, “The Eight Days in May Protests,” June 3, 2015 (https://forgottenminnesota .com/forgotten-minnesota/2015/06/the-eight-days-in-may-protests). Joseph Ripp, “Middle America Meets Middle-Earth: American Discussion and Readership of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ 1965–1969,” Book History 8 (2005): 264–66. Edward James, “Tolkien, Lewis and the Explosion of Genre Fantasy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendelsohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 74. Piers Anthony, Bio of an Ogre (New York: Ace Books, 1988), 17. Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek, “Just How White Is the Book Industry?,” New York Times, December 11, 2020. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and MiddleClass-Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3. “Although I inferred from seminar discussions that I ought to prefer Henry James to Anne Tyler, Faulkner to John Le Carre, Pound to Carlos Castaneda, and Gravity’s Rainbow to The Thorn Birds, I could not always discipline my preferences as I thought I should.”

24 6 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

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Richard Ohmann’s “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–1975,” although published more than forty years ago, offers one exception. See Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–1975,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1 (September 1983): 212. John Guillory’s Cultural Capital offers the classic analysis here; as has been repeatedly observed in the last few years, his incisive argument about the limits of multiculturalism have been cited often but acted on rarely. From a different angle, Franco Moretti initially made the case for digital humanities and quantitative methods by inveighing against collective scholarly ignorance of “the slaughterhouse of literature,” all those books that have gone seldom read. The Stanford Literary Lab later published a pamphlet analyzing the difference a broad corpus of texts might make— or not—for computational analyses of literature over against a narrower canon. See John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (March 2000): 207–27; Mark Algee-Hewitt, Sarah Allison, Marissa Gemma, Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti, and Hannah Walser, “Canon/Archive. Large-scale Dynamics in the Literary Field: Pamphlet 11,” Stanford Literary Lab (January 2016). I used keyword searches in MLA Bibliography to substantiate this claim. Janice Radway’s scholarship, a guiding influence in this chapter, is one prominent exception. See, for example, Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath, and J. D. Porter, “Who Cares About Literary Prizes?,” Public Books, September 3, 2019. Malcolm Cowley, The Literary Situation (New York: Viking, 1958), 106. For an excellent account of modernism and mass-market books, see David Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 151–217. See Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Beth Luey, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” The History of the Book in America, vol. 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 43. Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 22. Kurt Enoch, “The Paper-Bound Book: Twentieth-Century Publishing Phenomenon,” Library Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1954): 222–23. Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, a novel about publishing published in 1958 and a bestseller, portrayed its mass-market editor, based on Fawcett’s William Lengel, as more cynically invested in the democratic mission of uplift: “People have to learn to crawl before they can walk. First they won’t read anything but the most obvious kind of lurid adventure stories. Then we sneak in a good book or two. We train them. Eventually all our books will be as good or better than the so-called literary hard-cover books. Do you think all hard-cover books are good literature just because they cost four dollars? Most of them stink.” Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (New York: Penguin, 2005), 28. Enoch, “Paper-Bound Book.” 214. His ideals dovetailed with the government’s desire to advertise modernist aesthetics as expressive of U.S. freedom and individualism over against the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, which helped evacuate modernism of its radical or reactionary politics and turn it into a middlebrow style. For a nuanced account of the scholarship on how the Cold War intervened in the reception of modernism, see Greg Barnhisel, introduction to Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 1–24. David Earle, on the other hand, argues that high modernism was entwined with the middlebrow from the beginning. See Earle, Re-Covering Modernism, 1–4. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 43.

1. M ass M a r k et (I) 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

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Roger Cohen, “Profits—Dick Snyder’s Ugly Word,” New York Times, June 30, 1991, sec. 3, 1. E. L. Doctorow, World’s Fair (New York: Random House, 1985), 171–81. E. L. Doctorow, Reporting the Universe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10. New York Times, July 19, 1939, 34. Thomas L. Bonn, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 66. Doctorow, Reporting, 12, 60. Grace Glueck, “A Solid Gold Jubilee for Random House,” New York Times, August 1, 1975, 9. Andrew Wylie would soon become the literary author’s bank account’s best friend, but even he was unable to come near Ragtime. He scored $800,000 for a Salmon Rushdie novel in the late 1980s and $2 million for three books by Philip Roth around the same time, moving the author from FSG to Simon & Schuster. As far as I can tell from sleuthing in various places, including advance news clearinghouse Publishers Marketplace, the closest anyone has come since is Tom Wolfe, who won a $7 million advance for Back to Blood in 2008, which would be about $9.8 million in 2022 dollars. See Simone Murray, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 61; Trip Gabriel, “Call My Agent!,” New York Times, February 19, 1989; Roger Cohen, “Roth’s Publishers: The Spurned and the Spender,” New York Times, April 9, 1990; Emily Temple, “A Brief History of Seven-Figure Book Advances,” LitHub, May 8, 2018. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 21, 25. Amy Elias argues that Jameson found in Ragtime “the potential to defamiliarize the naturalness of historical narratives and possibly provoke readers to question the seamless political narratives about history and culture central to the ideological functioning of post-industrial capitalism.” See Amy J. Elias, “Postmodern Metafiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945, ed. John  N. Duvall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 25. Kenneth Davis, Two-Bit Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 278, 148. Victor Weybright, The Making of a Publisher (New York: Reynal & Co., 1967), 220. Publishers Weekly 175, no. 16 (April 20, 1959): 39. Kinohi Nishikawa, Street Players (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 4. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 7, 18, 35, 8. For an analysis of MacLeish as a poet-critic and administrator who “made it possible for powerful people who did hold liberal beliefs to claim modernism as a public good and to overlook its more illiberal or apolitical aspects,” see Evan Kindley, Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 73–85. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 164. Fellow publisher William Targ assessed Weybright’s memoir: “He appears to me pompous, selfconsumed with his own importance, and seems to believe that he lifted American literacy to its present level single-handedly.” See Targ, Indecent Pleasures: The Life and Colorful Times of William Targ (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 11. Rabinowitz, American Pulp, 23–26. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 181, 218, 219. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 177, 205. For an account of how NAL influenced Faulkner’s reputation, see Lawrence  H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 56–61, 66–69. “Millions of Critics,” Newsweek 35, no. 1 (January 2, 1950): 54–55. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 213. Albin Krebs, “The Fiction Factory,” New York Times, March  12, 1970. See also Bonn, Under Cover, 72. Gardner had no literary aspirations. He told an editor at Black Mask, “I’m in the game

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46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

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for money and if I have talent I haven’t prostituted, and find it out, I’ll start her out on the streets tonight.” See Martyn Lyons, The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 156–57. Dwight MacDonald chose him as paradigmatic of mass culture: “His books have been manufactured rather than composed; they are assembled with the minimum of expenditure of effort from identical parts that are shifted about just enough to allow the title to be changed.” See Dwight MacDonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” Partisan Review 27, no. 2 (Spring 1960): 206. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 155. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 285. Although the novel was historically a popular form, it had been elevated as art by Henry James. Some leading U.S. modernists, such as Faulkner and Fitzgerald, split their work, subsidizing their art novels by selling middlebrow stories for exorbitant sums to the Saturday Evening Post. See Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Loren Glass argues that the rules had indeed changed, that “the dialectical engagement between modernism and mass culture that might have made” Norman Mailer’s novels into “masterpieces” had “dissolved in a postmodern world of fragmented cultural fields.” See Glass, Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 196. MacDonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” 592. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 288. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 276, 282–83. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 281. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 294. André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2001), 29. Weybright, Making of a Publisher, 296, 320. Larry McCaffery, “A Spirit of Transgression,” in Conversations with E. L. Doctorow, ed. Christopher D. Morris (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), 73–74. E. L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (New York: Random House, 1971), 32, 289. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Random House, 1975), 101, 84, 18. Doctorow, Ragtime, 259. Paul Nathan, “Rights,” Publishers Weekly 207, no. 11 (March 17, 1975): 36. Jameson, Postmodernism, 25. Kathy Piehl, “E. L. Doctorow and Random House,” Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 3 (1980): 407. Al Silverman, The Time of Their Lives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 417. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, July 8, 1975. Susan Braudy, “Paperback Auction: What Price a ‘Hot Book?,’ ” New York Times, May 21, 1978. Alvin P. Sanoff, “The Audacious Lure of Evil,” in Morris, Conversations with E. L. Doctorow, 147. Letter to James Silberman, October 23, 1970, Random House records, Box 1446, Folder 1969– 1970 Doctorow, E. L. correspondence, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1–33. Doctorow’s former employee at Dial, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, now the lead book reviewer at the New York Times, read Loon Lake, Doctorow’s follow-up to Ragtime, as an homage to Dreiser, such that he imagined that the novel “could easily have been subtitled ‘An American Tragedy Revisited’ or ‘A Better Place in the Sun.’ ” See Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Books of the Times: ‘Incandescent Splendor’: A Change in Perception,’ ” New York Times, September 12, 1980,

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68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

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C21. Diane Johnson saw traces of John Dos Passos in Loon Lake’s experimentalism. See Diane Johnson, “Waiting for Righty,” New York Review of Books 27, no. 17 (November 6, 1980): 18. Bill Moyers, “E. L. Doctorow, Novelist,” in Morris, Conversations with E. L. Doctorow, 149, 162. John F. Baker, “PW Interviews E. L. Doctorow,” in Morris, Conversations with E. L. Doctorow, 1. Brian McHale saw historiographic metafiction reflecting how postmodernism privileged metaphysics (inquiry into the nature of the world) over epistemology (the study of how we gain knowledge of the world). Epistemology, he argued, had preoccupied such earlier modernists as William Faulkner and James Joyce. Amy Elias, for her part, argued that “postmodern arts and sciences posit that history is something we know we can’t learn, something we can only desire.” See Brian McHale, Postmodernism Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1987); Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History of Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xviii. James F. English, “Now, Not Now,” Modern Language Quarterly 7, no. 3 (2016): 410. English, “Now, Not Now,” 410. Pruett, “Managed Abundance,” 46–47. English, “Now, Not Now,” 415. Alexander Manshel has developed English’s theory in Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Contemporary Canon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023). Ray Walters, “Paperback Talk,” New York Times, October 11, 1981, 47. Luey, “Organization,” 32. For a longer history of subsidiary rights, see James  L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 114–43. Keel Hunt, Family Businesss: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books (Berkeley, CA: West Margin Press, 2021), 39–40, 41. “Letter to the Editor,” Publishers Weekly 198, no. 19 (November 9, 1970): 17–18. Hunt, Family Business, 45. Malcolm Magruder, “The Big New Sound from Nashville: How the Ingram Book Company Brought Innovation to Trade Book Wholesaling,” Publishers Weekly 203, no. 18 (April 30, 1973): 42, 43. Hunt, Family Business, 58, 94. See Pruett, “Managed Abundance,” 34. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 379–80. Edwin McDowell, “The Paperback Evolution,” New York Times, January 10, 1982, 7. English, Economy of Prestige, 200. Manshel, Writing Backwards, forthcoming. I derive the narrative of the rise of historical fiction in this paragraph from Alexander Manshel’s Writing Backwards, where he provides the data and capacious theory to understand the phenomenon. For an extended analysis of minimalism and the MFA, see McGurl, Program Era, 273–320. On the fraught relationship between Carver and Lish and how Carver’s reception has distorted the legacy of his work in relationship with minimalism, see Groenland, Art of Editing. Josh Lambert and David Winters argue that Lish edited and promoted a wide range of styles that cannot be reduced to minimalism without distortion. He championed, for example, Don DeLillo, Stanley Elkin, and Grace Paley. Lambert shows that Lish had a particular sensitivity for Jewish writing noting especially Cynthia Ozick and Paley, and identified himself emphatically as Jewish. Josh Lambert, The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 55–58; David Winters, “Theory and the Creative Writing Classroom: Conceptual Revision in the School of Gordon Lish,” Contemporary Literature 57, no.  1 (Spring 2016): 114–16.

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94. 95.

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See Margaret Doherty, “State-Funded Fiction: Minimalism, National Memory, and the Return to Realism in the Post-Postmodern Age,” American Literary History 27, no.  1 (Spring 2015): 79–101. See Claire Grossman, Stephanie Young, and Juliana Spahr, “Who Gets to Be a Writer?,” Public Books, April 15, 2021. Manshel, Writing Backwards, forthcoming. See Andrew Hoberek, “The Novel after David Foster Wallace,” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, ed. Marshall Boswell and Stephen  J. Burn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). For early accounts of literary genre fiction, see Andrew Hoberek, “Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion,” American Literary History 23, no. 3 (Fall 2011); Jeremy Rosen, “Literary Fiction and the Genres of Genre Fiction,” Post45, August 7, 2018. Bonn, Under Cover, 68. Ray Walters, “Paperback Talk,” New York Times, April 15, 1979, BR8; Edwin McDowell, “Publishing: New Novel in the World of John Irving,” New York Times, June  5, 1981, C24; Edwin McDowell, “About Books and Authors; What Sold in 1982,” New York Times, January 2, 1983, 22.

2. Mass Market (II): How the Mass Market Won the World and Lost Its Soul 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

Nikki Finke, “A Fantasy Named Danielle Steel: After 23 Books in 15 Years, Her World Sometimes Seems Too Unreal to Be True,” Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1988. Michelle Nichols, “Author Danielle Steel Had Childhood Dreams of Becoming a Nun,” Reuters, February 21, 2008. Danielle Steel, “A Fashion Love Story,” Harper’s Bazaar, May 2, 2019. Paula Chin, “Danielle Steel,” People 37, no. 25 (June 29, 1992). Vickie L. Bane and Lorenzo Benet, Lives of Danielle Steel: The Unauthorized Biography of America’s #1 Best-Selling Author (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 29, 31, 33. Danielle Steel, Going Home (New York: Pocket Books, 1973), 4, 199. Publishers Weekly 204, no. 8 (August 20, 1973): 90. Publishers Weekly 213, no. 12 (March 20, 1978): 51. Melinda Henneberger, “Author of ‘Love Story’ Disputes a Gore Story,” New York Times (December 14, 1997), 40. Publishers Weekly 198, no. 15 (October 12, 1970): 39. Publishers Weekly 199, no. 4 (January 25, 1971): 232. Publishers Weekly 207, no. 7 (February 17, 1975): 47. Ray Walters, “Paperback Talk,” New York Times, March 9, 1978, BR13. Kenneth Davis, Two-Bit Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 364. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 40; Denise Hardesty Sutton, “Marketing Love: Romance Publishers Mills & Boon and Harlequin Enterprises, 1930–1990,” Enterprise & Society, January 19, 2021, 3. Danielle Steel, The Promise (New York: Dell Publishing, 1978), 67, 65, 69, 70. Steel, The Promise, 184. Steel’s problem—how to retain autonomy and not be washed away by the force of her brand—was common to all brand-name authors, as we’ll see with regard to Stephen King in the next chapter. As Clayton Childress writes, “For name-economy authors whose time and identity are tethered to

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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their writing, there can be fear that in the fields of production and reception the guarantee of their names overshadows any true engagement with the quality—or lack thereof—of their work.” Each writer addresses the problem with tactics specific to her disposition, or what sociologists after Pierre Bourdieu would call her habitus. See Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 44. Steel, The Promise, 126–27. Beth Luey, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” in The History of the Book in America, vol. 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 47. “Danielle Steel,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/profile/danielle-steel/?sh=75fec4f79edd. Danielle Steel, “The Process and the Team,” www.daniellesteel.net, November 26, 2012. Steel, “Process and the Team.” Steel, “Process and the Team.” One influence on Steel’s productivity must be changing norms in the industry. Clayton Childress writes, “it was believed until recently that there was not a market for more than one book per year by name-economy authors.” Beginning in the late 1990s, however, that changed with increasingly production from the likes of Steel and Stephen King and, above all, James Patterson. Childress, Under the Cover, 45. Edwin McDowell, “About Books and Authors,” New York Times, April 24, 1983, 30. Richard R. Lingeman, “Book Ends,” New York Times, April 3, 1977, 273. Linda Wolfe, “Mort Janklow: Friends Make the Man,” New York, February 13, 1978, 43. Wolfe, “Mort Janklow,” 41. Lingeman, “Book Ends,” 273. “1st Safire Novel in Paperback Said to Bring over $1 Million,” New York Times, February 8, 1977, 29. Michael Korda, “Le Plat Du Jour Is Power,” New York Times, January 26, 1977, C1. William Safire, “On Language; Arrogance of Power,” New York Times, July 13, 1986, 6. Wolfe, “Mort Janklow,” 41. Laura B. McGrath, “Literary Agency,” American Literary History 33, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 350. John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 65. Publishers Weekly 222, no. 12 (September 17, 1982): 71. Edwin McDowell, “Power Behind the Pen: The Book Agent’s Rise,” New York Times, January 19, 1989, C26. Thompson, Merchants of Culture, 65. In the 1970s and 1980s, book club, paperback, and serial rights were the big business. By the 1990s, all three had declined in value. Book clubs—other than Oprah’s—were struggling. Most publishers did hardcover and paperback in house and acquired rights to both from the start. Serial rights declined with magazines. Buzz over electronic rights was considerable—as was arguing between agents and publishers over who ought to possess them—but they weren’t generating profits. The real money, in the 1990s, was in foreign rights. “The Foreign Rights,” Publishers Weekly 241, no. 48 (November 28, 1994): 34–35. See also Roger Cohen, “Agents Fight for Share of Foreign Book Rights,” New York Times, February 26, 1990. For economic context on the rise of foreign rights in publishing and across the cultural industries, see Eva Wirtén, No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 90–92. Subsidiary rights managers, who were mostly women, increasingly became executives. In his novel about the publishing industry, The Novel, James Michener has a subsidiary rights director tell her new junior colleague, “In one house after another, across New York, there are young women like me who started as nothing, wound up handling the automatic paperwork associated with subsidiary rights. In those days we were paper-pushers only, filling the blanks in the final deal, and if we did well the company made

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five thousand dollars, if poorly, only four thousand dollars. But you heard the figures for my last Wednesday. A fortune. So now the big companies find that their drab little secretaries who handle subsidiary rights have become some of the most powerful kids in the industry. If you ever get a chance to move into this office, grab it.” See Michener, The Novel (New York: Random House, 1991), 99. Powerful women in publishing such as Joni Evans, Susan Kamil, Mildred Marmur, and Carolyn Reidy took this path. Robert Dahlin, “Agents 1989,” Publishers Weekly 218, no. 22 (November 28, 1980): 22. Madalynne Reuter, “Busch, Janklow Disagree on Plight of Paperbacks,” Publishers Weekly 222, no. 23 (December 3, 1982): 12. Dahlin, “Agents 1989,” 20. Ron Busch, “My Say,” Publishers Weekly 223, no. 4 (January 28, 1983): 80. Leonore Fleischer, “Talk of the Trade,” Publishers Weekly 225, no. 3 (January 20, 1984): 83. Judith Solomon, “Judith Krantz: Her Sweet Revenge,” Jerusalem Report, July 17, 2000, 42. Susan Dominus, “The Lives They Lived: Judith Krantz,” New York Times Magazine, December 23, 2019. “Krantz on Shopping,” New York Times, July 26, 1978, C9. Herbert Mitgang, “Behind the Best Sellers,” New York Times, March 19, 1978, BR13. “Krantz on Shopping,” New York Times. Mitgang, “Behind,” New York Times. Judith Krantz, Sex and Shopping (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 277. Robert Mcg. Thomas Jr., “Henry Rogers, 82, Press Agent Who Built Hollywood Stars,” New York Times, May 1, 1995, B11. Solomon, “Judith Krantz,” 42. Krantz, Sex and Shopping, 277. Georgia Dullea, “At Party for Judith Krantz, Life Imitates Art,” New York Times, May 2, 1986, A24. Clive James, “A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses,” London Review of Books 2, no. 11 (June 5, 1980). Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, May 1, 1986, C23. Laura Shapiro, “From the Little Fur Desk of Maxi Amberville,” New York Times, May 4, 1986, 15. Margy Rochlin, “The Hardest Working Woman in Trash Fiction,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1990. Elizabeth Schambelan, “I’ll Take Manhattan: Judith Krantz, Donald Trump, and the Long, Long 1980s,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 26, 2018. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, October 31, 1985, C21. Solomon, “Judith Krantz,” 42. “Two Top Agents Combine,” Publishers Weekly 234, no. 25 (December 16, 1988): 7. McDowell, “Power Behind the Pen.” Edwin McDowell, “Random House Gets New Chief,” New York Times, November 9, 1989, D1. Radway, Reading the Romance, 28, 29. For the earlier history of the rise of magazines in U.S. print culture, see Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996). Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage, 1988). Gary Westfahl, The Rise and Fall of American Science Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019), 241. Gary Westfahl, “The Marketplace,” in The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, ed. Gary Latham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 88, 89. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 380. “Chthon,” Publishers Weekly 191, no. 23 (June 5, 1967): 180.

2 . M ass M a r k et (II) 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

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David G. Hartwell, “Dollar and Dragons: The Truth About Fantasy,” New York Times, April 29, 1990, sec. 7, 1. Piers Anthony, Bio of an Ogre (New York: Ace Books, 1988), 202, 197, 203. Robert Dahlin, “Ballantine and Random House Join Their Imaginations to Publish a Fantasy of Epic Size,” Publishers Weekly 211, no. 1 (January 3, 1977): 38. Anthony, Bio of an Ogre, 105, 205. Gerald Jonas, “Science Fiction,” New York Times, December 25, 1977, 138. Hartwell, “Dollar and Dragons,” sec. 7, 1. Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 45, 60. Radway, Reading the Romance, 38. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists, 73. Radway, Reading the Romance, 38 Miller, Reluctant Capitalists, 74. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists, 56, 60. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists, 46. Keel Hunt, The Family Business: How Ingram Transformed the World of Books (Berkeley, CA: West Margin Press, 2021), 63. Hunt, Family Business, 69, 70. N. R. Kleinfeld, “The Supermarketer of Books,” New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1986, sec. 6, 44. Richard Sandomir, “Harry Hoffman Dies at 92; Led the Expansion of Waldenbooks,” New York Times, June 5, 2020. Kleinfeld, “Supermarketer of Books.” Kleinfeld, “Supermarketer of Books.” Kleinfeld, “Supermarketer of Books.” Kleinfeld, “Supermarketer of Books.” Miller, Reluctant Capitalists, 51. Allene Symons, “Bookstop Trades Discount Prices for Consumer Data,” Publishers Weekly 225, no. 14 (April 6, 1984): 41. “Barnes & Noble Buys Controlling Interest in Bookstop,” Publishers Weekly 236, no. 15 (October 13, 1989): 10. Keith Gessen, “The War of the Words,” Vanity Fair, December 2014. Joanne Kaufman, “So Many Books, So Much Power,” Wall Street Journal, December, 18, 2003. Clayton Childress writes, “In publishers’ marketing and distribution meetings ‘Sessalee will like this’ or ‘Sessalee won’t like this’ [was] a common refrain,” observing, further, that publishers were “regularly forced to react to her preferences.” Childress, Under the Cover, 164. Rachel Donadio, “Promotional Intelligence,” New York Times, May 21, 2006. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists, 56. Laura B. McGrath, “Comping White,” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 19, 2019. McGrath, “Literary Agency,” 351. Judith Rosen, “Paperback Trade Up for Impact,” Publishers Weekly 249, no.  26 (July  1, 2002): 21, 23. Sessalee Hensley, “The World We Live In,” Publishers Weekly 252, no. 28 (July 18, 2005): 158. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and MiddleClass-Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 222. Birte Christ, “The Aesthetics of Accessibility,” Post45, July 1, 2016. Robert Dahlin, “Men (and Women) Who Made a Revolution,” Publishers Weekly 244, no.  31 (July 1, 1997): 51.

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Herbert  R. Lottman, “Bertelsmann Sales Worldwide Up 10% in Past Year,” Publishers Weekly 239, no. 42 (September 21, 1992): 8. John  F. Baker, “Bantam Streamlines Structure, Cuts Lists, Some Jobs,” Publishers Weekly 239, no. 35 (August 3, 1992): 9. Jim Milliot, “Are Mass Market Paperbacks Passé?,” Publishers Weekly 251, no. 48 (November 29, 2004): 5. Roger Cohen, “Profits—Dick Snyder’s Ugly Word,” New York Times, June 30, 1991. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 376. Doctorow, Reporting, 4. E. L. Doctorow, “By the Book,” New York Times, January 16, 2014.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

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3. Trade (I): How Women Resisted Sexism and Reinvented the Novel 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

Roger Cohen, “Top Random House Author Assails Ouster at Pantheon,” New York Times, March 9, 1990, D18. Edwin McDowell, “The Media Business: 40 at Random House Critical of Pantheon,” New York Times, March 13, 1990. McDowell, “Media Business.” André Schiffrin, “Letter to E. L. Doctorow,” December 17, 1990, Pantheon Books, Correspondence, Folder 12, Box 16, MSS.056, E. L. Doctorow Papers, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University Libraries. Reports of executives vetoing titles explicitly because of conflicts with the conglomerate are, naturally, sparse. But Ben Bagdikian describes Simon & Schuster’s president, Richard Simon, rejecting a book by journalist Mark Dowie that Nan Talese was hoping to acquire with the prospective title Corporate Murder on the grounds that “it made all corporations look bad.” See Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 27–30. David Sarnoff, president of Warner Publishing, had the ten-thousand-copy print run of Counter-Revolutionary Violence by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman destroyed in 1973 on learning what it contained. See Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, 31–35. Presumably, such an eventuality is less likely with fiction. Lewis Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter Powell, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 184. E. L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate (New York: Random House, 1990), 145, 321, 3, 119. “Cross Currents,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 43 (October 1990): 16. Jason Epstein, Book Business (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 12, back cover. Eugene  L. Meyer, “Jason Epstein ’49: Publishing Icon, Perennial Student,” Columbia College Today (Spring 2012). Epstein, Book Business, 57. Epstein, Book Business, 40, 39. “The Colorful New Doubleday Offices,” Publishers Weekly 159, no. 16 (April 1951): 30. Meyer, “Jason Epstein ’49.” Jason Epstein and Anne Freedgood, “Jason Epstein and Anne Freedgood of Vintage Books: It’s a Tough—But Stimulating—Time for Vintage Paperbacks,” interview by A.K.T, Publishers Weekly 206, no. 25 (December 1974): 24. “Currents,” Publishers Weekly 174, no. 9 (September 1958): 17. In late 1953, Jason and Barbara married and boarded a ship with their friend Edmund Wilson and his wife, Elena, for their European honeymoon. They ended up seated at dinner with Buster

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18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

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Keaton. See Jason Epstein, “Transatlantic Passions,” New York Times Magazine, February  15, 2004. Epstein, Book Business, 50. Epstein, Book Business, 73. Ironically, Wilson’s own work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County, was banned on the grounds of obscenity in 1946 and wouldn’t be reissued in the United States until after Lolita was deemed publishable in 1958. See Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 93–94. Epstein, Book Business, 4. Richard D. Lyons, “Charles Allen Jr., 91, Founder of Investment Company, Is Dead,” New York Times, July 17, 1994. Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminisces of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 2002), 278. Epstein, Book Business, 88. C.B.G., “A Long View of the Book Business,” Publishers Weekly 183, no. 3 (January 1963): 85. Jason Epstein, “A Criticism of Commercial Publishing,” Daedalus 92, no. 1 (Winter 1963): 63, 65. They still do. For a study of twenty-first-century book reviewers, see Philippa K. Chong, Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). Hardwick had recently written, famously, “The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself—have made the New York Times into a provincial literary journal, longer and thicker, but not much different from all those small town Sunday ‘Book Pages.’ ” Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” in The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: NYRB Classics, 2017), 60–61. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, 69, 75, 310. James Atlas, “The Ma and Pa of the Intelligentsia,” New York Magazine, September 14, 2006. Ann Birstein, What I Saw at the Fair (New York: Welcome Rain, 2003), 184–85. Jason Epstein, “The Realm of King Roger,” New York Review of Books, September 26, 2013. Boris Kachka, Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 67. Kachka, Hothouse, 67. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, 312. Atlas, “Ma and Pa.” Michael Shnayerson, “The Lions in Summer,” Vanity Fair, July 25, 2013. Shnayerson, “Lions.” Toni Morrison, foreword to Robert  L. Bernstein, Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights (New York: The New Press, 2016), ix, x. Morrison, foreword, xi. Bernstein, Speaking Freely, 73. See Thomas Whiteside, “Blockbuster Complex—1,” New Yorker, September 29, 1980, 51–52. Bernstein, Speaking Freely, 161, 76. Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves (New York: The New Press), 1999, 13, 213. E. L. Doctorow, World’s Fair (New York: Random House, 1985), 255–56. Joe Fox Memo on Random House Fellowships, July 17, 1967, Random House records, Box 848 and Folder Miscellaneous B-F, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library [RBML/CUL]. For an account of the break between Knopf father and son, see Josh Lambert, The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 133–42.

256 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

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Ben Libman, “Susan Sontag and the Americanization of the Nouveau Roman,” Post45, August 29, 2022. He is brilliant on Sontag’s “structural misunderstanding”—borrowing the phrase from François Cusset—of the nouveau roman, in transforming it for U.S. audiences. He argues that Sontag’s intervention shaped experimental fiction in the United States in subsequent decades, an insight I build on here by situating it in publishing history. Kachka, Hothouse, 235. George Plimpton, “Capote’s Long Ride,” New Yorker, October 5, 1997, 62. Merle Miller, “Why Norman And Jason Aren’t Talking,” New York Times, March 26, 1972. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, 173. Joe Fox letter to Mrs. Diggory Venn, June 5, 1962, Random House records, Box 565 and Folder Personal 1962, RBML/CUL. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, 166, 111. There were a few exceptions, including Frances Phillips, editor in chief at William Morrow, but they were rare. Nan A. Talese editorial letter to Philip Roth, November 21, 1961, Random House records, Box 592 and Folder Correspondence, RBML/CUL. Evgenia Peretz, “How Nan Talese Blazed Her Pioneering Path through the Publishing Boys’ Club,” Vanity Fair, March 29, 2017. Publishing wasn’t unusual in its treatment of women. Office culture was very sexualized in the United States in the 1950s. Julie Berebitsky writes, “A young man desperate to advance might send his wife into the arms of his superior or convince her that his affair with a wealthy woman could help him make contacts. Sometimes a man traveled on business and found himself ‘entertained’ by the secretary of the man he was in town to see, in which case he might ‘be tempted beyond his resistance.’ ” Encouraged especially by Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962), some women aimed to turn their sexualization at the office to their advantage, with all the challenges that entailed. See Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 163, 177–206. David Laskin, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 18–19. Michael Wolff, “Epstein Unbound,” New York Magazine, November 1, 1999. Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (New York: Penguin, 2005), vii–viii. Jaffe, Best of Everything, 29–34, 167–69. See also Lambert, Literary Mafia, 106–10. Bennett Cerf letter to Armand Deutsch, July 22, 1965, Random House records, Box 61 and Folder Cerf-Klopfer Files 1965 A-J, RBML/CUL. Bennett Cerf letter to Olivia de Havilland, November 2, 1965, Random House records, Box 61 and Folder Cerf-Klopfer Files 1965 A-J, RBML/CUL. Bennett Cerf letter to Snoony Lou Randolph, June 4, 1965, Random House records, Box 61 and Folder Cerf-Klopfer Files 1965 A-J, RBML/CUL. The same was true for women in poetry through the 1960s: “misogyny was ambient on the scene.” But by 1976, women in poetry had integrated themselves into elite spaces, which wasn’t true for women in fiction. See Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (New York: Knopf, 2020), 26–28, 123, 308. Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1986, 47. Parul Sehgal, “Reviewing the Book Review,” New York Times, February 26, 2021. Suzanne F. Boswell, “ ‘Whatever It Is That Compels Her to Write So Seldom’: Network Analysis and the Decline of Women Writers in Pulp Science Fiction,” Extrapolation 62, no. 1 (2021): 2. Seghal, “Book Review.” For more on Burgess’s prejudice, see Lennie Goodings, A Bite of the Apple (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 86–87, 243.

3. T r ade (I) 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

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Mark McGurl, Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 48. For an analysis “of studiously neglected or misread postwar fictions written by women who had experiences in or near positions of US editorial influence and who used the form of the novel in subtle, complex ways to report on what they observed,” see Josh Lambert, “Women and Shitty Media Men,” in Literary Mafia, 96–129. McGurl, Program Era, 48. Marjorie Worthington, The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press), 2018, 22. For a smart reading of Prisoner of Sex in the context of Mailer’s celebrity, see Loren Glass, Authors, Inc., 187–91. Joe Moran, Star Authors (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 70, 77. See the first chapter of Worthington, The Story of “Me.” See Myra Bloom, “Sources of the Self(ie): An Introduction to the Study of Autofiction in English,” English Studies in Canada 45, no. 1 (2019): 7. Alison Lurie, “No One Asked Me to Write a Novel,” New York Times, June 6, 1982. Joe Fox to Bennett Cerf, March 23, 1965, Random House records, Box 1083 and Folder A-F 1965, RBML/CUL. Alison Lurie, interview, June 5, 2018. Alison Lurie, Real People (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 37. Lurie, Real People, x, 102. Lurie, Real People, 45, x. “April 25,” Alison Lurie Papers, #14-12-2572, Box 15, Folder 1, Letters from Philip Roth, 1964– 2013, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. “Feb 13,” Alison Lurie Papers. Lurie, Real People. “Dec 6,” Alison Lurie Papers. “Nov 29,” Alison Lurie Papers. Philip Roth to Joe Fox, January 10, 1968, Random House records, Box Cat 37, RBML/CUL. Joe Fox to Philip Roth, August  28, 1968, Random House records, Box  850 and Folder Author Correspondence Fox, RBML/CUL. Lurie, Real People, x. Lurie, Real People, x. John Leonard, “Sex in a Garden of Artists,” New York Times, May 27, 1969. R.A.S., “The Peculiar Experience,” review of A Year in the Dark, by Renata Adler, and Toward a Radical Middle, by Renata Adler, Newsweek, February 2, 1970. Renata Adler, Speedboat (New York: NYRB Classics, 2013), 56–57, 66, 166. Alan Wilde, “Irony in the Postmodern Age: Toward a Map of Suspensiveness,” boundary 2 9, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 35. Adler, Speedboat, 72. Elizabeth Hardwick, “Sense of the Present,” in Collected Essays (New York: NYRB Classics, 2017), 245. Hardwick, “Sense of the Present,” 244, 247. Hardwick, “Sense of the Present,” 245–46. Adler, Speedboat, 162. PEN American Center News Release, Notice of Renata Adler’s P.E.N.’s 1977 Ernest Hemingway Prize, April 27, 1977, Random House records, Box 1224 and Folder Adler Speedboat, RBML/CUL. Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” in Collected Essays (New York: NYRB Classics, 2017), 59.

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Joan Didion, introduction to Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal (New York: NYRB Classics, 2001), xi. Laskin, Partisans, 190. Hardwick, “Subjection of Women,” in Collected Essays, 37. Epstein and Freedgood, “It’s a Tough—but Stimulating—Time.” Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal, 138. Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary, March 1961. Hardwick, “Reflections on Fiction,” in Collected Essays, 186, 176. Geoffrey O’Brien, introduction to Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: NYRB Classics, 2001), vii. Hardwick, Sleepless Nights, 42, 12, 88. Merve Emre, “The Act of Persuasion,” New York Review of Books, April 21, 2022. Hardwick, Sleepless Nights, 8. Hardwick, Sleepless Nights, 3. On Kathy Acker’s very public struggle with herself, or her selves, in her fiction, and how that struggle evolved, see Maggie Doherty, “Kathy Acker’s Art of Identity Theft,” New Yorker, November 28, 2022. Note, too, T. Gertler, whose Elbowing the Seducer—published by Random House in  1984, now out of print—is a roman à clef depicting how sexism made writing difficult for D.  Reeve, thanks especially to a licentious editor who bears a distinct resemblance to Gordon Lish. See Lambert, Literary Mafia. On Kathy Acker at Grove, see Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 215; Jordan S. Carroll, Reading the Obscene (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021), 178–79. For more on Kraus and Native Agents, see Abram Foley, The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 127–61. Joe Fox Memo to Bennett Cerf, July 19, 1962, Random House records, Files Box 565 and Folder Memos, RBML/CUL. Ben Sims to Joe Fox, June 3, 1969, Random House records, Box 1083 and Folder Memos, RBML/ CUL. See Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (New York: Verso, 2021), 187–91. Squires, Marketing Literature, 25. For an account of how authors have internalized the logic of “content” into their work, see Tess McNulty, “Content-Era Ethics,” Post45, April 21, 2021. Christian Lorentzen, “Like Rain on Your Wedding Day: Between the Sentimental, the Gothic, and the Ironic,” Book Forum, June/July/August 2021. Anderson, Lorentzen, and Sarah Wasserman (“No matter how anxious—or anxiously metafictional—autofiction’s subject is, it certainly does not entail the excision of psychology or interiority”) emphasize autofiction’s embrace of the reality of the author, the self, the subject, whereas Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan (“this dereification of the novel . . . allows them to experience writing as a process that is already social and institutional”), Annabel L. Kim (“literature is no longer mimetic, a faithful reproduction of the world, as realism purports to be, but a performance, where what is performed is not the truth—the novel as a source of reliable information about the world it describes—but a subject being constituted discursively”), and Konstantinou instead argue that autofiction reveals the process by which the figure of the author is constructed. Though for Kim, there is a further turn of the screw in which autofiction’s display of the discursive constitution of the subject nevertheless depends on and aims to restore the coherence of the subject. See Annabel L. Kim, “Autofiction Infiltrated: Anne Garréta’s Pas un jour,”

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

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125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

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PMLA 133, no. 3 (2018): 560; Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, “Notation After ‘The Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti,” Representations 125, no. 1 (2014): 88; Sarah Wasserman, “Critical Darlings, Critical Dogs: Joseph O’Neill and What Contemporary Criticism Doesn’t Want,” American Literary History 34, no.  2 (Summer 2022): 561–85. In a related study on literary celebrity, Joe Moran argues that “literary celebrity conforms to Marx’s definition of the fetishized commodity—it works actively to suppress the intricate network of social relations that has produced it.” See Moran, Star Authors, 9. Epstein and Freedgood, “It’s a Tough—but Stimulating—Time.” Bernstein, Speaking Freely, 162. Epstein, Book Business, 91. Ben Libman first situated Sontag and Vidal as staking opposite positions on the U.S. novel in “Susan Sontag and the Americanization of the Nouveau Roman.” Gore Vidal, “American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction,” New York Review of Books, July  15, 1976. Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1999): 665–66. Morton Janklow to Yanou Collart, Random House records, Box 1388 and Folder Editorial Files– Jason Epstein 1962–84, RBML/CUL. Daniel Schreiber, Susan Sontag: A Biography (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 62. “Sontag had influential defenders and patrons in Roger Straus and Elizabeth Hardwick,” wrote a Sontag biographer. “Hardwick always rode to the counter-attack when people started talking about unfavorable reactions to Sontag.” Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 92. “People,” Publishers Weekly 210, no. 17 (October 25, 1976): 31. Bernstein, Speaking Freely, 167. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, 8. See Squires, Marketing Literature, 24; see also Edwin McDowell, “Book Packagers Come of Age,” New York Times, July 20, 1981. Epstein, Book Business, 6. Bernstein, Speaking Freely, 77, 227. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, 373. Fleischer, “Decade of the Big Deal.”

4. Trade (II): How Literary Writers Embraced Genre 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Pranay Gupte, “The CEO Credited With Inventing the Author’s Tour,” New York Sun, August 22, 2005. Al Silverman, The Time of Their Lives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 332. Edward Wyatt, “Michael Crichton? He’s Just the Author,” New York Times, February 6, 2005. Edwin McDowell, “Publishing: Rising Importance of Book Publicity,” New York Times, October 7, 1983. Anne Patchett, “My Life in Sales,” The Atlantic, Summer 2008. “Newhouse Group to Buy Random House,” Publishers Weekly 217, no. 6 (February 1980): 36. Robert L. Bernstein, Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights (New York: The New Press, 2016), 226, 172. Linda Sunshine, “The Videocassette Business: Is There a VCR in Your Future?,” Publishers Weekly 227, no. 15 (February 1985): 39.

26 0 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

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Joanne Tangorra, “Video and Audio: The New Bestsellers,” Publishers Weekly 227, no.  25 (June 1985): 52. Thomas Weyr, “Publicity’s New Punch,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 46 (November 16, 1990): 15. Edwin McDowell, “Publishing: Rising Importance of Book Publicity,” New York Times, October 7, 1983, C26. Weyr, “Publicity’s New Punch.” Judith Rosen, “Are Mega-Tours Over?,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 46 (November 16, 1998): 23. McDowell, “Publishing.” More than the rise of marketing and publicity feminized publishing. In the 1980s and 1990s, more women became editors. Sarah Brouillette explains the change in terms of broader economic trends. See Brouillette, “Wattpad’s Fictions of Care,” Post45, July 13, 2022. John F. Baker, “Stephen King,” Publishers Weekly 211, no. 3 (January 17, 1977): 12. Stephen King, On Writing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 87. Harold Bloom, “Dumbing Down American Readers,” Boston Globe, September 24, 2003. Angela S. Allan, “Stephen King, Incorporated: Genre Fiction and the Problem of Authorship,” American Literary History (February 2021): 7. Allan, “Stephen King,” 8, 11. Stephen King, The Dark Tower 8-Book Boxed Set (New York: Scribner, 2016). Allan, “Stephen King,” 17. Allan, “Stephen King,” 14, 18, 17, 15. Underwood, Bammon, and Lee, “Transformation of Gender.” I came to this conclusion through data gleaned from the Book Review Index. Kristen Hogan, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 33. Hogan, Feminist Bookstore Movement, xviii, 43. Hogan, Feminist Bookstore Movement, 48, 40, 6, 5, 64, 53. Beverly Haviland, interview, April 1, 2022. Carol Bemis, interview, May 9, 2022. Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek, “Just How White Is the Book Industry?,” New York Times, December 11, 2020. Lisa Genasci, “Blazing Trails in Ethnic Literature,” Los Angeles Times, August 22 1995. Bernstein, Speaking Freely, 85. Hilton Als, “Toni Morrison and the Ghosts in the House,” New Yorker, October 19, 2003. Toni Morrison Memo to Jim Silberman, Box 1270, Random House records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library [RBML/CUL]. She also fought on behalf of those who worked under her. On September 13, 1973, she wrote to her boss, Jim Silberman, on behalf of her assistant: “I want you to do something wonderful $$ for Roberta Moore—a significant raise! She performs routinely above and beyond the call, but this summer she exercised fantastic administrative ability and editorial responsibility. She is exceptional and we should recognize it.” Toni Morrison Memo to Jim Silberman, September 13, 1973, Box 1270, Random House records, RBML/CUL. For more on Black World and the rise and fall of the black press in the 1960s and 1970s, see Kinohi Nishikawa, “From the Ground Up: Readers and Publishers in the Making of a Literary Public,” in Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights, ed. Robert J. Patterson (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 202–24. Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 38, 39. Toni Morrison to James Baldwin, December, 14, 1973, Box 1270, Random House records, RBML/ CUL.

4 . T r ade (I I) 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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Madalynne Reuter, Kenneth C. Davis and John F. Baker, “Writers in a Fighting Mood,” Publishers Weekly 220, no. 18 (October 1981): 27. Reuter, Davis and Baker, “Fighting Mood,” 27. Evan Brier, in an extended analysis of Morrison’s editorial career and its implications for how we think about literary history, proposes that, in lamenting a “now” when editors had lost some autonomy to economic rationalization, Morrison was implicitly looking back not to a pre–conglomerate era golden age, but to her own early days as an editor in the 1970s when she was freer to pursue her purposes. Evan Brier, “Unliterary History: Toni Morrison, The Black Book, and ‘Real Black Publishing,’ ” American Literature, November 15, 2022. Reuter, Davis and Baker, “Fighting Mood,” 27. Toni Morrison, preface to Beloved (London: Longman, 1998), ix. Morrison, preface, ix. So, Redlining Culture, 170. Kinohi Nishikawa, “Morrison’s Things: Between History and Memory,” Arcade (blog), https:// arcade.stanford.edu/content/morrison%E2%80%99s-things-between-history-and-memory. Morrison, preface, xv. Morrison, Beloved, 165. Morrison, Beloved, 228, 320. So, Redlining Culture, 38. Morrison, preface, xix. Andrew Ng, “Theologizing Horror: Spirituality and the Gothic,” Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory, ed. Cassandra Falke (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 135–47; Grady Hendrix, “Beloved: The Best Horror Novel the Horror Genre Has Never Claimed,” Tor, February 18, 2016. See Andrew Hoberek, “Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion,” American Literary History 23, no. 3 (Fall 2011); Jeremy Rosen, “Literary Fiction and the Genres of Genre Fiction,” Post45, August 7, 2018. Hoberek, “Cormac McCarthy,” 484. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 217. Denise Hardesty Sutton, “Marketing Love: Romance Publishers Mills & Boon and Harlequin Enterprises, 1930–1990,” Enterprise & Society, January 19, 2021, 7. Rosen, “Literary Fiction.” Joan Didion, “The Art of Fiction No.  71,” interview by Linda Kuehl, Paris Review 74 (Fall– Winter 1978). Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 116. Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue,” Vogue, October 22, 2014. Joan Didion, “Finally (Fashionably) Spurious,” review of Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, National Review 11, no. 20 (1961): 341–42. Stephen Schryer, “Writers for Goldwater,” Post45, no. 4 (January 2020). Joan Didion, “The Women’s Movement,” New York Times, July 30, 1972. Didion, “Women’s Movement.” Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1. Elizabeth Hardwick, “In the Wasteland,” review of The Last Thing He Wanted, by Joan Didion, New York Review of Books, October 31, 1996. Nelson, Tough Enough, 3.

262 68. 69. 70. 71.

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Lisa See, “Kate Braverman,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 45 (November 9, 1990): 45. Daugherty, Last Love Song, 488, 489. Joan Didion, Last Thing He Wanted (New York: Vintage, 1997), 74. Few have written as insightfully about the aesthetic uses of time—its speeding up and slowing down—against the context of technology, communicative and otherwise, than Mark Goble: “With billions of years of history—both in the past and in the future—now bearing on the present, writers like Richard McGuire, Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, and William Gibson are finding ways to make their novels go fast and slow at the same time, which is how so many of us experience a modern world that feels like it is accelerating and going nowhere all at once.” Mark Goble, “Convergence,” The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction, ed. Joshua Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 218–19. See also Mark Goble, “Obsolescence,” A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 146–68; Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Hardwick, “Wasteland.” Ann Hulbert, “The Last Thing We Expected,” review of The Last Thing He Wanted, by Joan Didion, Slate, September 10, 1996. When it comes to recognized literary writers, book reviewers are more attuned to and welcoming of genre than scholars, who, if they register it, have often found it something of an embarrassment. Scholars prefer to call it, after Linda Hutcheon, “historiographic metafiction” or a “postmodern novel” or to identify it among Tom LeClair’s subgenre of the postmodern novel, a “systems novel.” See Josh Privett, “Fragments of Literary Modernism in Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted, CEA Critic 81, no. 1 (2019): 61–62; Colin Loughran, “ ‘Counterfeit Machismo’: Joan Didion, American Masculinity, and the Monroe Doctrine,” Critique 54, no. 4 (2013): 432. Samuel Cohen, who reads it alongside Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, writes, “While both are thrillers, building up suspense carefully and self-consciously, they are not formulaic.” See Samuel Cohen, After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 122. Cohen associates Didion’s novel with works by Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison rather than with other thrillers. Caroline to John Baker, Box 1156, Random House records, RBM/CUL. Daniel Robert King, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016), 41–42, 49. Cormac McCarthy to Caroline, Box 1156, Random House records, RBML/CUL. King, McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, 67. “McCarthy to Woolmer, January  27, 1981,” Box  1, Folder 4, Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, Southwestern Writers Collection, Wittliff Collections, Alkek Library, Texas State University–San Marcos [AL/TSU]. “McCarthy to Woolmer, April 8, 1989,” Box 1, Folder 7, Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, AL/TSU. Dianne C. Luce and Zachary Turpin, “Cormac McCarthy’s Interviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968–1980,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 20, no. 2 (2022): 108–35. Lisa Chase, “Binky Urban, ‘Power’ Is a Male Word,” The Cut, October 16, 2018. Elizabeth Manus, “Sonny Mehta, Uneasy King of Knopf,” Observer, October 18, 1999. Madalynne Reuter, “Sonny Mehta Named President of Knopf,” Publishers Weekly 231, no.  4 (January 30, 1987): 289. Roger Cohen, “New Publishing Star, Sonny Mehta, Talks Profits as Well as Art,” New York Times, November 13, 1990. Chase, “Binky Urban.” Chase, “Binky Urban.”

4 . T r ade (I I) 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

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Jason Epstein, Book Business (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 91. Edwin McDowell, “Bantam’s Eclectic New Chief: Alberto Vitale; Weighing Books on Financial Scales,” New York Times, August 17, 1986, 9. Edwin McDowell, “Random House Swept by a Rash of Rumors,” New York Times, November 6, 1989, D8. Joana Costa Knufinke, “Ex-RH CEO Alberto Vitale Still Has a Lot to Say About Publishing,” Publishing Perspectives, June 21, 2012, 91. Knufinkle, “Ex-RH CEO Alberto Vitale,” 91. Cohen, “New Publishing Star.” Gregory Jaynes, “The Knock at the Door,” Time, June 6, 1994. Cohen, “New Publishing Star.” Mary B. W. Tabor, “A Designer Helps Get Books Off Retail Shelves,” New York Times, April 24, 1995, D9. Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 110. Jeff Zaleski, “The High Concept of Michael Crichton,” Publishers Weekly 246, no. 44 (November 1, 1999). Herbert  R. Lottman, “ABA ’94: Frankfurt West?,” Publishers Weekly 241, no.  25 (June  20, 1994): 80 Paul Nathan, “Rights,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 30 (July 27, 1990): 214. Zaleski, “High Concept.” Manus, “Sonny Mehta.” Zaleski, “High Concept.” Bernard Weinraub, “Scarier than Dinosaurs: Men vs. Women,” New York Times, January  5, 1994, C1. Gottlieb, Avid Reader, 108. Michael Crichton, Disclosure (New York: Ballantine, 2012), 5, 61, 184. See Carrie  N. Baker, The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Julie Berebitsky, “Desire or Discrimination? Old Narratives Meet a New Interpretation,” in Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). William Safire argued in the New York Times that Clarence Thomas was “the victim of a late hit by a self-deluded person.” See “The Plot to Savage Thomas,” New York Times, October 14, 1991. It wasn’t only men who disparaged Hill and other women. Real America, Peggy Noonan argued in the Times, knew that “straight shooting” women would kick harassers in the “gajoobies” and immediately take them to court. See Noonan, “A Bum Ride,” New York Times, October 15, 1991. Kathleen Murray, “A Backlash on Harassment Cases,” New York Times, September  18, 1994, sec. 3, 23. Crichton, Disclosure, 75, 120, 243. Real female executives in the 1980s had to contend with the perception of having the qualities of a femme fatale: “the specter of the vamp haunted their every move; now that there was actually a ‘top’ to which women could sleep their way, ambitious women had to monitor their actions to defend against a career-destroying accusation.” Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 252. Crichton, Disclosure, 435, 443. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Sex, Power and a Workplace Reversal,” New York Times, January 6, 1994. Michael Coren, “Office Romance,” National Review 46, no. 3 (1994): 63. For its legal implications, the novel made an appearance in a footnote of an essay in the Harvard Law Review, as an

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example of how “sexual harassment doctrine tends to overvalue men’s dignitary interests.” See Anita Bernstein, “Treating Sexual Harassment with Respect,” Harvard Law Review 111, no.  2 (1997): 476. An essay in the Michigan Law Review called it “a poorly written, improbably thriller” that “marginalizes legitimate claims of sexual harassment brought by women against men and obscures the power imbalances between men and women.” See Maria L. Ontiveros, “Fictionalizing Harassment—Disclosing the Truth,” Michigan Law Review 93, no. 6 (1995): 1373–400. Manus, “Sonny Mehta.” J. M., “Different Look in the Trade Ranks,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 13 (March 30, 1998): 12. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Manus, “Sonny Mehta.”

5. Nonprofits : How Rebels Found Funding and Rejected New York 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

“New Directions Completes Its First Decade,” Publishers Weekly 150, no. 8 (August 24, 1946): 67. See Greg Barnhisel, “New Direction Books,” in Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry, ed. Lise Laillant (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 175–91. As Greg Barnhisel writes, “Laughlin’s fiery protestations against the perfidy of commercial publishers,” quickly encountered “the cold reality that he was, in fact, a capitalist.” See Barnhisel, “New Directions Books,” 183. George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 66. Robert McFadden, “André Schiffrin, Publishing Force and a Founder of New Press, Is Dead at 78,” New York Times, December 2, 2013, A31. John F. Baker and Calvin Reid, “Pantheon Echoes at NBCC Ceremony,” Publishers Weekly, 237, no. 12 (1990): 13. Edwin McDowell, “The Media Business; 40 at Random House Critical of Pantheon,” New York Times, March 13, 1990, D23. Robin Desser, “Letter to Scott Walker, 13 March 1990,” Correspondence, 1990—Scott Walker, Box 04 Correspondence, Graywolf Press Records (Mss095), Upper Midwest Literary Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota [UML]. Robin Desser, “Letter to Scott Walker, 13 March 1990.” Carver and Lish previously worked together at Esquire, where Lish had been the fiction editor. For an account of Carver’s fiction at Esquire, see Brad Congdon, Leading with the Chin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 91–111. Groenland, Art of Editing, 65, 67, 64, 91, 88. Barnhisel, “New Direction Books,” 176. Scott Walker, preface to The Graywolf Silver Anthology (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1999), xiii. For a broader history of letterpress publishing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with particular attention to gender, see Claire Battershill, Women and Letterpress Printing: 1920–2020: Gendered Impressions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). See Jenny Westdal, The Printed Word in Port Townsend Literary Presses of the 1970s and 1980s (Port Townsend, WA: Jefferson County Historical Society, 2016), 1. Westdal, Printed Word, 13. U.S. Census Bureau, “Decennial Census by Decade: 1980,” https://www.census.gov/programs -surveys/decennial-census/decade.1980.html#list-tab-693908974. Bob DeWeese, interview, July 2, 2022. John Lane, interview, May 19, 2021.

5. Non profits 20.

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David Romtvedt, interview, June 23, 2021. The term “Bear Shit in the Woods School” or, elsewhere, the “Bearshit School,” was coined by Kenneth Rexroth “for himself, Gary Snyder, and other writers influenced by nature.” See Westdal, Printed Word, 31. David Romtvedt, interview, June 23, 2021. On March 28, 1990, Romtvedt wrote Walker a letter, updating him on his life and asking about the status of a book of his that Graywolf had published. He included a note on the recent firing of Schiffrin: “So much weirdness (as usual) in publishing . . . Pantheon going somewhere weird and sad.” See David Romtvedt, “Letter to Scott Walker.” Claire Kirch, “Graywolf Press Celebrates Success,” Publishers Weekly, March 26, 2004. Scott Walker, “Letter to James Laughlin, 24 February, 1989,” James Laughlin—Pound as Wuz— Reviews, Correspondence, Box 13 Editorial, Graywolf Press Records, UML. Bob DeWeese, interview, July 2, 2022. Wallace Stevens was early to recognize the complications that would ensue were literature to ally with philanthropic foundations, namely its “taking on the burden of having to justify itself, having to make a ‘special claim’ for its preeminent cultural status, and not just to an amorphous public but to a small number of donors who possess the economic capital necessary to underwrite literary activity on this vast scale. Literature could perhaps become big without selling out to the market, but at the cost of making itself explicable, rationalizable, justifiable, accountable—an object, that is, of perpetual critique.” Evan Kindley, Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 125. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 379–80. Reuter, Davis, and Baker, “Writers in a Fighting Mood,” 27. Jim Sitter, interview, May 10, 2021. Jim Sitter, interview, May 10, 2021. “Bookslinger: A Comprehensive Source,” Publishers Weekly 220, no. 14 (October 2, 1981): 91–92. Jim Sitter, interview by Betty Bright, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, September 30, 2015. Jim Sitter, interview, May 10, 2021. Jim Sitter, interview, May 10, 2021. A culture of patrons raising their own secular status by supporting English-language literature dates back at least to Elizabethan England, though it waxed and waned in subsequent centuries. The 1710 Statute of Anne, meanwhile, gave authors copyright protection and a chance to fund themselves on the market, which, with the rise of capitalism, created the conditions for all future games of status along the axis of popularity and prestige. See Graham Parry, “Literary Patronage,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 124–25; Paul  J. Korshin, “Types of Eighteenth-Century Literary Patronage,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 7, no.  4 (Summer 1974): 453–73. See Paul J. DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston,” in Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint, ed. Paul J. DiMaggio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 46–47. James English discusses the use of prizes to launder fortunes, or intraconvert capital, in the twentieth century in The Economy of Prestige, notably 10–11. Previously museums operated under a for-profit model established by P. T. Barnum, where one might find “a piece of wood from Noah’s ark, wax figures of notable personages, stuffed animals, dinosaur bones, a ‘monstrous tapeworm’ extracted from a human intestine, and mummies alongside masterworks of art.” See Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 110. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 75. See also Joyce Wexler, “Who Paid for Modernism?,” Sewanee Review 94, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 440–49. For more on how collecting shaped modernism, see Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University

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Press, 2013). For analysis of what patrons of modernist authors earned in return, see Aaron Jaffe, “Publication, Patronage, Censorship: Literary Production and the Fortunes of Modernist Value,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker et  al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 315–34. Jodie Medd argues that homosocial bonds between modernist authors and patrons, such as that between Pound and Quinn, generated homophobic anxieties that were “displaced onto misogynist lesbian hate speech.” See Medd, Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 119. See Paul J. DiMaggio, introduction to Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint, ed. Paul J. DiMaggio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3–13. National Endowment for the Arts, How the United States Funds the Arts (Washington, DC: NEA, 2012): 18. Donations already outstripped government funding for the arts in 1980 by about 40 percent, but the difference has become immense in subsequent decades. In 2008, donations outpaced government spending by a factor of almost fifteen: $2.1 billion versus $144 million. See Alan L. Feld, “Revisiting Tax Subsidies for Cultural Institutions,” Journal of Cultural Economics 32, no. 4 (2008): 275–79. For an account of the transition between modernist patronage and postwar philanthropy, with  a  particular focus on the role of poet-critics as bureaucratic administrators, see Kindley, Poet-Critics. Jim Sitter, interview, May 10, 2021. Elizabeth Rader Schwartz, “Putting Coffee House Press on the Map: The Gentrification of Minneapolis’s Warehouse District” (senior thesis, Washington University, 2021). Jim Sitter, interview, May 10, 2021. Jim Sitter, interview, May 10, 2021. “Cross-Currents,” Publishers Weekly 228, no. 23 (December 6, 1985): 18. “The Emergence of Literary Philanthropy,” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 31 (July 1997): 44. Glass, Counterculture Colophon, 204, 213, 215. Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss, 67–68. Glass, Counterculture Colophon, 208. Kinohi Nishikawa, “From the Ground Up: Readers and Publishers in the Making of a Literary Public,” Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights, ed. Robert J. Patterson (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 202–24. Gayle Feldman, Chandler B. Grannis, and Daisy Maryles, “AAUP 1990,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 31 (August 3, 1990): 18. John Mutter and Maureen O’Brien, “ABA 1991,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 28 (June 28, 1991): 19. Its budget had “increased from $257,000 in 1986 to approximately $900,000 in 1991.” See “Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Proposal,” Marketing Plan Proposal—(1991) Phase 1, Box 05 Marketing, Graywolf Press Records, UML. “Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Proposal,” Marketing Plan Proposal—(1991) Phase 1, Box 05 Marketing, Graywolf Press Records, UML. Edwin McDowell, “B. Dalton Opening 2 Stores in ‘Village’ and Grand Hyatt,” New York Times, April 28, 1981, C9. Jim Sitter, interview by Betty Bright, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, September 30, 2015. John Mutter, “Barnes & Noble Goes on the Road,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 50 (December 14, 1990): 37. Fiona McCrae/Page Cowles, “Memo 17 October 1994,” Graywolf, 1994—Scott Walker Registration Transition, Box 04 Administrative, Graywolf Press Records, UML. “9 September 1991 Memo,” Marketing Plan Proposal—(1988–1991), Box 05 Marketing, Graywolf Press Records, UML.

5. Non profits 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

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“Long Range Planning—Staff 06/91,” Goals and Priorities, 1991–1992, Box 03 Administrative, Graywolf Press Records, UML. “Goals and Priorities, 1991,” Goals and Priorities, 1991–1992, Box 03 Administrative, Graywolf Press Records, UML. “8 August 1991 Memo,” Marketing Memorandum—(1991) Marketing, Box 05 Marketing, Graywolf Press Records, UML. “Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Proposal,” Marketing Plan Proposal—(1991) Phase 1, Box 05 Marketing, Graywolf Press Records, UML. “Memo to All, 8 January 1991,” Goals and Priorities, 1991–1992, Box 03 Administrative, Graywolf Press Records, UML. Sherry Kempf, “Funding and Publishing: My Experiences with Graywolf Press,” H–M Miscellaneous 1997—Misc., Box 04 Correspondence, Graywolf Press Records, UML. Kempf, “Funding and Publishing.” Allan Kornblum, “Memos/Notes,” Box  5, Marketing and Sales, 2008 ADDENDUM, Toothpaste/Coffee House Press Records, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa [UIL]. “Grants,” Box 4, Financial, 2008 ADDENDUM, Toothpaste/Coffee House Press Records, UIL. “Grants,” Box 4, Financial, 2008 ADDENDUM, Toothpaste/Coffee House Press Records, UIL. For more on Kornblum’s relationship with Asian American literature, see Rei Magosaki, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans: Cross-Cultural Collaborations in Asian American Literary Production (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 84–88. Mark Bauerlein, ed., National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965–2008 (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2008), 18. Ellison, introduction to Buying Time: An Anthology Celebrating 20 Years of the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1985), xix, xx, xxiii. Ellison, introduction, xxiii, xxiv. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 32. See Margaret Doherty, “State-Funded Fiction: Minimalism, National Memory, and the Return to Realism in the Post-Postmodern Age,” American Literary History 27, no. 1 (Spring 2015). Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Contemporary Canon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), forthcoming. Bauerlein, National Endowment, 185. “Emergence of Literary Philanthropy,” 44. “Emergence of Literary Philanthropy,” 44. “Fraser Carpenter Audit,” Financial, 1987—Financial Statements, Box  01 Financial, Graywolf Press Records, UML. Kathleen Norris, “Profile of Coffee House Press,” Poets & Writers (November/December 1992). Mellon Foundation, “Report from January  1, 1991 through December  31, 1991,” (New York: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 1992), 18. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Rachel Newton Bellow to Jim Sitter, private correspondence of Jim Sitter. Mellon Foundation, “Report from January 1, 1991,” 23, 24. William Grimes, “Wallace Fund Quietly Grows Into Nation’s Top Arts Donor,” New York Times, April 2, 1992, C15. Grimes, “Wallace Fund Quietly Grows Into Nation’s Top Arts Donor,” C15. Grimes, “Wallace Fund.” Jacqueline Trescott, “The Fine Art of Giving Away Money,” Washington Post, July 20, 1993. Grimes, “Wallace Fund.”

26 8 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

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Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Joseph Barbato, “The Rise and Fall of the Small Press,” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 31 (1997): 39. Mellon Foundation, “Report from January 1, 1991,” 27–28. Michael Coffey, “Literary Publishers: Now, More Than Ever, in a Fight,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 47 (November 18, 1996): 38. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Frank Conroy, “Letter of Recommendation for Graywolf Press, July 26, 1984,” NEA—(1984) Letter of Support, Box 01 Grants/Development, Graywolf Press Records, UML. Conroy, “Letter of Recommendation.” “Multi-Year Plan for Graywolf Press, 1984 through 1986,” Marketing Plan Proposal—(1988–1991), Box 05 Marketing, Graywolf Press Records, UML. Scott Walker, “Letter to James Laughlin, May  7, 1991,” Correspondence, 1991—Scott Walker, Box 04 Correspondence, Graywolf Press Records, UML. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Maureen O’Brien, “Graywolf Receives Six-Figure Grant from Mellon Foundation,” Publishers Weekly 240, no. 4 (January, 25, 1993): 11. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Kirch, “Graywolf Press,” 15. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Jim Sitter, interview, June 29, 2021. Fiona McCrae/Page Cowles, “Memo 17 October 1994,” Graywolf, 1994—Scott Walker Registration Transition, Box 04 Administrative, Graywolf Press Records, UML. For more on the whiteness of publishing, see Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young, “Literature’s Vexed Democratization,” American Literary History 33, no.  2 (Summer 2021): 298–319; Laura McGrath, “Comping White,” Los Angeles Review of Books, January  19, 2019; Richard Jean So, Hoyt Long, and Yuancheng Zhu, “Race, Writing, and Computation: Racial Difference and the US Novel, 1880–2000,” Cultural Analytics (January 11, 2019); Richard Jean So and Edwin Roland, “Race and Distant Reading,” PMLA 135, no.  1 (January  2020): 59–73. Dan Sinykin and Edwin Roland, “Against Conglomeration,” Post45 7 (April 21, 2021). Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 25. Andrew Piper, Enumerations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 99–100. Morrison, Beloved, 16, 30. Morrison, Beloved, 141, 193. Percival Everett, Frenzy (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1997), 4, 18. Everett, Frenzy, 24–25. Everett, Frenzy, 27, 49, 72, 124, 157. Everett, Frenzy, 2, 97, 110, 148, 154. Everett, Frenzy, 50, 118. Everett, Frenzy, 163. Fiona McCrae, “Frenzy,” Callaloo 28, no. 2 (2005): 329. Percival Everett, Erasure (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2011), 4. Everett, Erasure, 48, 43. Percival Everett, “Letter to Fiona McCrae, 27 March 1997,” Everett, Percival—Frenzy—Financial, Correspondence, Box 05 Editorial, Graywolf Press Records, UML.

5. Non profits 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

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Rone Shavers, “Percival Everett,” Conversations with Percival Everett, ed. Joe Weixlmann (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2013), 49. Shavers, “Percival Everett,” 49. Everett, “Letter to Fiona.” Robert Birnbaum, “Author Interview: Percival Everett,” Identity Theory, May 6, 2003. Manshel, Writing Backwards, forthcoming. Elena Machado Sáez, Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 1. Elaine Castillo, “We Need to Reckon with the Rot at the Core of Publishing,” LitHub, July 26, 2022. David Treuer, “Author Questionnaire,” in “David Truer—Little—Author File,” Box 21 Editorial, Graywolf Press Records, UML. See John Alba Cutler, “Quinto Sol, Chicano/a Literature, and the Long March Through Institutions” American Literary History 26, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 264. Kinohi Nishikawa writes that, despite its “innovation,” “there is scant recognition among critics that a veritable school of black postmodern satire flourished during the late 1960s and early 1970s.” He argues that writers like Kelley and Fran Ross disappeared from literary history because they did not adopt the aesthetics and politics of the Black Arts Movement. See Nishikawa, “The Book Reads You: William Melvin Kelley’s Typographic Imagination,” American Literary History 30, no. 4 (2018): 732–33. Michael Coffey, “Growing Up Small Press,” Publishers Weekly, November 1, 2010. Kandice Chuh, “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World,” American Literary History 18, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 620. Rachel Lee, “Asian American Cultural Production in Asia-Pacific Perspective,” boundary 2 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 233. “Grants,” Box 4, Financial, 2008 ADDENDUM, Toothpaste/Coffee House Press Records, UIL. Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997), 140, 20, 21, 110, 111. James Kyung-Jin Lee writes that Yamashita critiques “an abstract notion of cultural difference that always demands the sameness produced by the silencing of stories of violence and exclusion. As such, an embrace of multiculturalism would be Asian America’s ultimate undoing, as our allegiance to ignore the suffering of others inevitably prevents us from confronting the suffering within.” Lee, “Multiculturalism,” Keywords for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy  J. SchlundVials, Linda Trinh Võ, and K. Scott Wong (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 249. Yamashita, Tropic of Orange, 222, 225. A. Robert Lee, “Speaking Craft: An Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita,” Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory, ed. A. Robert Lee (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2018), 179. Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2010), 620. I thank one of the manuscript’s anonymous readers for helping me see this point. Yamashita, I Hotel, 244–45, 248–50. Yamashita, I Hotel, 246, 247. Yamashita, I Hotel, 321. For an account of how the discipline of Asian American Studies emerged from the coining of the term Asian American and the consequences thereof, see Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2009). I thank an anonymous reviewer for this formulation. Systematic sales figures are extremely difficult if not impossible for scholars to acquire, but, thanks to reporting around the 2022 Department of Justice v. Penguin Random House trial, a staff member from NPD BookScan dropped some data in the comments section of a post from

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Lincoln Michel’s Substack site. There the staffer revealed that of the 45,571 frontlist books published by the ten largest publishers in the year ending on August 24, 2022, 87.7 percent sold fewer than five thousand copies. These data are not complete. They include only sales from trade bookstores within NPD BookScan’s system, and thus exclude, for example, various forms of direct sales, eBooks, and much self-publishing and platform publishing. They also measure all books, not just fiction. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that most fiction does not sell enough to provide most fiction writers a living wage. Gerald Howard, “Mistah Perkins—He Dead: Publishing Today,” American Scholar 58, no.  3 (Summer 1989): 355–69. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 20, 2015. Grossman, Young, and Spahr, “Who Gets to Be a Writer?” Thanks to Matt Hart for this insight. I borrow the phrase “problems of abundance” from Jordan Pruett’s dissertation, who transfers it from a justification for the field of cultural analytics, for which Matthew Wilkens coined it, to a concern internal to literary history itself, from an “epistemological” to a “historical” problematic. See Pruett, “Managed Abundance: A Quantitative History of American Fiction, 1931–2009” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2022). I draw from developments in the sociology of culture. Clayton Childress writes, “until quite recently the underlying premise of field theory has presupposed that actors within fields are mostly operating on autopilot; preprogrammed through their positions and habitus, they follow their scripts.” Childress instead argues, “down in the dirt, rather than action in any given situation always being automatic, to participate in a field requires deliberation: people have to figure out if the rules apply to a situation, and if they do, which of the rules are the ones that apply, and how they apply or do not.” Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 9. See Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020). “Notes for Bush Site Visit, Thursday December  11, 2001,” Farrar, Straus Giroux Transition—(2001) Marketing, Box 06 Marketing, Graywolf Press Records, UML.

6. Independents : How W. W. Norton Stayed Free and Housed the Misfits 1. 2. 3. 4.

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Calvin Reid, “André Schiffrin Returns, with New Ideas and a New Press,” Publishers Weekly 239, no. 3 (January 13, 1992): 8. Reid, “André Schiffrin Returns,” 8. David Streitfeld, “Black Ink; Author Gives Baltimore Publisher a Boost,” Washington Post, March 29, 1997, C1. The house reissues classics from Grove’s backlist alongside frontlist titles from Entrekin authors such as Sherman Alexie, Robert Olen Butler, Charles Frazier, Francisco Goldman, Barry Hannah, and Jim Harrison. Calvin Reid, “Tuttle Deal Off, Entrekin Buys Atlantic Monthly,” Publishers Weekly 238, no.  41 (September  13, 1991): 8; “Grove and AMP Merge; Entrekin to Run Combo” Publishers Weekly 240, no. 7 (February 15, 1993): 13. Donald Lamm, “The Rise of the Conglomerates in American Publishing,” Logos 17, no. 1 (2006): 25–26. André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2001), 160.

6. I n depen den ts 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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“W. W. Norton Dead; Book Publisher, 54,” New York Times, November 9, 1945, 15. Harry Kreisler, “Donald Lamm,” Conversations with History, Institute of International Studies (Berkeley: University of California, 1998). Kreisler, “Conversations with History.” Sean Shesgreen, “Canonizing the Canonizer: A Short History of the Norton Anthology of English Literature,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 293–318. Donald Lamm, “A Conversation with M. H. Abrams,” CornellCast, July 27, 2012. Shesgreen, “Canonizing the Canonizer,” 303, 305–306. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. “Between Issues,” The New Leader 84, no. 6 (November-December 2001): 2. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Jack Hoeft, Nansey Neiman, Peter Mayer, Roger W. Straus Jr., Janet Schulman, and Lawrence Hughes, “Learning the Lessons of ’89,” Publishers Weekly 236, no. 1 (January 5, 1990): 40. Donald  S. Lamm, “Libraries and Publishers: A Partnership at Risk,” Daedalus 125, no.  4 (Fall 1996): 127–46. Bruce Strauch and Caroline Hunt, “Publishing, Economics, and the Academy: Faculty Perspectives on the Bottom Line,” The Bottom Line 9, no. 2 (1996): 6–9. Kreisler, “Donald Lamm.” Gerald Howard, “On the Glory Days of the Great American Trade Paperback,” LitHub, December 15, 2020. On the importance of buzz, see Simone Murray, “ ‘Selling’ Literature: The Cultivation of Book Buzz in the Digital Literary Sphere,” Logos 27, no. 1 (2016): 11–21; Clayton Childress, Under the Cover, 174–82. Stephen Usery, “A Very Close Deal,” Chapter 16, April 3, 2013. “24 Hours in the Life of the City,” as Told to Caroline Bankoff, Heather, Corcoran, Nancy Hass, and M. H. Miller, T Magazine, April 22, 2018, 68. Nashville Public Television (NPT), “Gary Fisketjon,” A Word on Words, no. 3621, April 4, 2008, American Archive of Public Broadcasting, https://americanarchive.org /catalog /cpb-aacip-524 -2j6833nt63. Trish Todd, “Fiction’s New Look,” Publisher’s Weekly 231, no. 5 (February 7, 1987): 30. NPT, “Gary Fisketjon.” Todd, “Fiction’s New Look,” 30. Joann Davis, “A Talk With Gary Fisketjon,” Publishers Weekly 226, no. 12 (September 21, 1984): 68. Stephanie Girard argues for extensive parallels between Bright Lights and Catcher, from a visual allusion in the former’s cover to the provenance of their titles in songs, to their plots, in a Bourdieusian reading of McInerney’s novel and its reception that places it between the poles of restricted and large-scale production. See Stephanie Girard, “ ‘Standing at the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk’: Vintage Contemporaries, Bright Lights, Big City, and the Problems of Betweenness,” American Literature 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 171–72. “Back to Press,” Publishers Weekly 228, no. 23 (December 6, 1985): 50. Todd, “Fiction’s New Look,” 30. Rick Lovell, “Vintage Contemporaries,” ed. Sean Manning, Talking Covers, September 12, 2012. Sean Manning, “Vintage Contemporaries,” Talking Covers, September 12, 2012. David Streitfeld, “Book Report,” Washington Post May 21, 1989, 15. Gerald Howard, “The Open Refrigerator,” The Millions, February 23, 2016. Gerald Howard, “Mistah Perkins—He Dead,” Editors on Editing, ed. Gerald Gross (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 61–62. Starling Lawrence, interview, February 10, 2021. Louise Brockett, “Editor Helped Poets, Writers,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2008.

272 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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Starling Lawrence, interview, February 10, 2021. Starling Lawrence, interview, February 10, 2021. Herbert Mitgang, “Publishing: Taking a Chance on First Novels,” New York Times, January 13, 1978, C20. Ellan Bryant Voigt, “Carol Houck Smith: An Editor Remembered,” Blackbird 7, no. 2 (Fall 2008). “Medina Wins Klein Editing Award,” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 9 (March 3, 1997): 19. Starling Lawrence, email correspondence, February 2, 2021. Mark Horowitz, “Patrick O’Brian’s Ship Comes In,” New York Times, May 16, 1993, sec. 6, 31. Horowitz, “Patrick O’Brian’s Ship,” 31. Richard Snow, “An Author I’d Walk the Plank For,” New York Times, January 6, 1991, sec. 7, 1. Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 95. Horowitz, “Patrick O’Brian’s Ship,” 31. Horowitz, “Patrick O’Brian’s Ship,” 31. Heather Vogel Frederick, “Book Beat: New Shipshape Category: Sailing After Patrick O’Brian,” Publishers Weekly, June 1, 1998. Horowitz, “Patrick O’Brian’s Ship,” 31. Bill Richards, “Saga of the Sea Finds Following in Cyberspace,” Wall Street Journal, April 1996, B1. Horowitz, “Patrick O’Brian’s Ship,” 31. Marisa Pagano, editorial note to author. Star Lawrence’s description of O’Brian’s readers. Richards, “Saga of the Sea.” Maria Simson, “Patrick O’Brian: Full Speed Ahead at Norton,” Publishers Weekly 239, no.  47 (October 26, 1992): 30. Patrick O’Brian Newsletter 4, no. 2. Richards, “Saga of the Sea.” Doreen Carvajal, “Armchair Sailors on the Seven Seas,” New York Times, August  16, 1998, sec. 6. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Calvin Reid, “Houses with No Doors,” Publishers Weekly 241, no. 21 (May 23, 1994): 62–66. Reid, “Houses with No Doors,” 62–66. André Schiffrin, “Bucking the Monoliths: Publishing with a Mission,” American Libraries 30, no. 5 (May 1999): 44–46. So, Redlining Culture, 29–30. Nishikawa, “From the Ground Up,” 221. Mel Watkins, “Hard Times for Black Writers,” New York Times, February 22, 1981. Kinohi Nishikawa, “Driven by the Market: African American Literature after Urban Fiction,” American Literary History 33, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 321. Nick Chiles, “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut,” New York Times, January 4, 2006. See Nishikawa, “Driven by the Market.” Chiles, “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut.” Nishikawa, “Driven by the Market.” Childress, Under the Cover, 96. David Streitfeld, “A Work of Progress; Authors, Editors Celebrate Anthology of African American Literature,” Washington Post, December 31, 1996, D1. Judith Wilson, “A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 133. So, Redlining Culture, 11. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021.

6. I n depen den ts 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

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I learned about Bergholz’s representation of various Latinx authors from Manshel’s Writing Backwards, forthcoming. John G. Cawelti, “Leon Forrest at the University of Kentucky,” in Conversations with Leon Forrest, ed. Dana A. Williams (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 84. Toni Morrison to Jason Epstein, April 26, 1982, Random House records, Box 1645 and Folder Forrest, Leon Two Wings to Veil My Face, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. Stanley Crouch, “The Soul of Joubert Jones,” New York Times, July 25, 1993, sec. 7, 14. Calvin Reid, “Leon Forrest’s Chicago,” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 48 (November 24, 1997): 19. Reid, “Leon Forrest’s Chicago,” 19. John Marr, “The Long Life and Quiet Death of True Detective,” Gizmodo, August 19, 2015. Marr, “The Long Life .” Marc Gerald, “Old School Noir,” Salon, March 7, 1997. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Streitfeld, “Black Ink.” Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Streitfeld, “Black Ink.” Reid, “Houses with No Doors,” 62–66. Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 1, 9. Streitfeld, “Black Ink.” Starling Lawrence, interview, February 10, 2021. Geoffrey Jacques, “A Mix of Feast and Famine for African Americans,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 50 (December 11, 1995): 38. “ ‘If he didn’t initially start out as a mystery writer, it would have been difficult to get white readers,’ says Howard, who is Mosley’s editor. Though Mosley’s popularity is ‘primarily related to his gifts as a writer and storyteller,’ it doesn’t hurt, adds Howard, that he writes in a commercially popular form.” From Jacques, “Mix of Feast and Famine,” 38. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Ron McKay, “Would the Real Irvine Welsh Shoot Up?,” The Guardian, February 4, 1996. Squires, Marketing Literature, 122. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. “The Acid House: Stories,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 10 (March 6, 1995): 69. Sarah Ferguson, “In Short,” New York Times, April 16, 1995. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Starling Lawrence, interview, February 10, 2021. Squires, Marketing Literature, 123. Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 26. Elizabeth Young, “Blood on the Tracks,” The Guardian, August 14 1993, B8. Squires, Marketing Literature, 123. Squires, Marketing Literature, 123. Squires, Marketing Literature, 123. Squires, Marketing Literature, 123. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 31. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 43, 80. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 215. Several scholars have addressed the queerness of Fight Club. Teresa Heffernan argues that the film is plotted such that the protagonist can defeat his queerness and reclaim his “heteronormative

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‘masculinity.’ ” See Teresa Heffernan, “When the Movie Is Better than the Book,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 57, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 99. Mark Ramey notes that “a barely disguised homoerotic tension pervades the film,” only to reject the notion that the film is a repressed gay fantasy. See Mark Ramey, “Interpreting Fight Club,” in Studying Fight Club (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 85–86. Jason Dodge observes that the novel’s protagonist “tends to oscillate between queer possibility and hypermasculine rejection,” finally rebelling, though, “against anything that threatens masculine expression,” including queerness. See Dodge, “Spaces of Resistance: Heterotopia and Transgression in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 26, no. 4 (2015). Thomas Peele argues that the novel “both reinforces heteronormativity by using homoeroticism to represent self-destruction, but also makes available some queer representations of masculinity that subvert heteronormativity.” See Peele, “Fight Club’s Queer Representations,” JAC 21, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 863. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 77, 208 Starling Lawrence, interview, February 10, 2021. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 200. Palahniuk, Fight Club, 213, 215, 214. Gerald Howard, interview, January 22, 2021. Laura McGrath explains how comps work and how they lead to the perpetuation of white hegemony in publishing in “Comping White.” Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 216. Robert Weil, “An Executive Editor Speaks His Mind about Publishing Quality Books in a Mass Market Climate,” Washington Post, February 8, 2004. Lili Anolik, “The Secret Oral History,” Esquire, May 28, 2019. Gerald Howard, “I know why Bret Easton Ellis hates David Foster Wallace,” Salon, September 7, 2012. Madalynne Reuter, “Vintage to Issue Controversial Ellis Novel after S & S Cancellation,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 48 (November 30, 1990): 10. Edwin McDowell, “Book Notes,” New York Times, October 24, 1990, C18. R. Z. Sheppard, “Books: A Revolting Development,” Time, October 29, 1990. Edwin McDowell, “The Killing of a Violent New Novel,” New York Times, November 16, 1990, C40. Cohen, “Profits.” Roger Rosenblatt, “See Dick Run, Again,” New York Times, October 1, 1995. Cohen, “Profits—Dick Snyder’s Ugly Word,” 1. Cohen, “Profits—Dick Snyder’s Ugly Word,” 1. Cohen, “Profits—Dick Snyder’s Ugly Word,” 1. Michael Coffey, “S & S Dismisses Peacock Amid Author Protests,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 47 (November 23, 1990): 15. Madalynne Reuter, “Vintage to Issue Controversial Ellis Novel After S&S Cancellation,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 48 (November 30, 1990): 8. Robin Desser, “Letter to Scott Walker, November  19, 1990,” Correspondence, 1991—Scott Walker, Box  04 Correspondence, Graywolf Press Records (Mss095), Upper Midwest Literary Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota [UML]. Maureen O’Brien, “Bookends,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 2 (January 11, 1991): 22. Daisy Maryles, “Behind the Bestsellers,” Publishers Weekly 247, no. 17 (April 24, 2000): 26. Robert Brian Brissey Jr., “Marked: Masculine Performativity in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho” (MA thesis, Clemson University, 2017); K. Koëter, “Protagonists Fighting for Their Identity in Fight Club and American Psycho” (MA thesis, Utrecht University, 2019); Paul  J. Kennett, “Simulations of Paternal Significance in Bret Easton Ellis’s

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144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

158. 159. 160. 161.

162. 163. 164.

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American Psycho and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club” (MA thesis, University of Calgary, 2004); April M. Davis, “American Psychosis: Violence and the White Male Oppression Narrative” (MA thesis, University of Houston, 2006). Irvine Welsh, “My 10 Favorite Books: Irvine Welsh,” New York Times, March 17, 2017. Reuter, “Vintage to Issue,” 10. Doreen Carvajal, “A Publisher’s Trademark: Low Advances and High Prestige,” New York Times, September 23, 1996, D1. Robert A. Carter, “Outliving the Bastards,” Publishers Weekly 230, no. 20 (November 14, 1986): 25. Ian Parker, “Showboat,” New Yorker, March 31, 2002. Carter, “Outliving the Bastards,” 26. Boris Kachka, Hothouse, 10. During these years, Roth was publishing Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Yugoslavian writers in the United States through Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series, which Roth edited. The series lasted from 1975 to 1989. See Brian  K. Goodman, The Nonconformists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023), 182. Roth’s trajectory in his FSG years aligns him well with Sontag’s position-taking vis-à-vis the importation of European aesthetics to renew the U.S. novel. See Libman, “Susan Sontag and the Americanization of the Nouveau Roman,” Post45, August 29, 2022. See also discussion of Sontag, Straus, and FSG in chapter 2. Michael Coffey, “House of Galassi,” Publishers Weekly 253, no. 30 (July 31, 2006): 26. Edwin McDowell, “An Independent Publisher Slowly Changes Its Ways,” New York Times, February 18, 1987, C17. Kachka, Hothouse, 224. Carter, “Outliving the Bastards,” 27–28. Jonathan Bing, “A Golden Anniversary for Farrar, Straus & Giroux,” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 37 (September 9, 1996): 24. There is a story to be told about what the contemporaneous publication of The Bonfire of the Vanities at FSG and Toni Morrison’s Beloved at Knopf meant for the ongoing rivalry between the two houses (Knopf being an imprint at Random House)—not least because they became the two most important novels for political arguments about literature at the time, which took the form of the canon wars. See Bryan M. Santin, Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 199–239. Kachka, Hothouse, 248. Steven Zeitchik, “Galassi Named FSG President,” Publishers Weekly 249, no.  4 (January  28, 2002): 135. Carvajal, “Publisher’s Trademark.” Janny Scott, “How to Persuade with a Feather (or a Quill); An Editor with an Instinct for the Jugular and the Diplomatic,” New York Times, January 20, 1999, E1. Galassi later wrote a roman à clef, Muse, that featured a lightly fictionalized Roger Straus who staffs his house with employees that he scooped, “always at a considerable discount, after they’d been let go by more hard-nosed mainstream houses.” Galassi’s avatar, Paul Dukach, “had lucked into a sweet spot” at the house. “He was unthreatening enough—‘ductile’ was the term one of the shrewder authors had used— that Homer could let his guard down and allow the younger man to explore his own independent editorial interests without feeling mortally threatened.” Jonathan Galassi, Muse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 16–17, 20. Calvin Reid, “National Poetry Month Set for April,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 42 (October 16, 1995): 14. Kachka, Hothouse, 248. Jeff Shotts, “Report: NORTH STREET by Jonathan Galassi (poems),” A– G Miscellaneous 1997—Misc., Box 04 Correspondence, Graywolf Press Records, UML.

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Fiona McCrae, “Letter to Jonathan Galassi, 16 March 1999,” A– G Miscellaneous 1997—Misc., Box 04 Correspondence, Graywolf Press Records, UML. “Latin Writers,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 6 (February 1, 1991): 18. “Cross Currents,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 36 (August 9, 1991): 14. Publishers Weekly 244, no. 31 (August 4, 1997): 54. Bing, “Golden Anniversary.” “It’s Official: FSG to Join Holtzbrinck,” Publishers Weekly 241, no. 45 (November 7, 1994): 15. Steven Zeitchik, “Galassi Named FSG President,” Publishers Weekly 249, no.  4 (January  28, 2002): 27. Kachka, Hothouse, 287 Zeitchik, “Galassi Named FSG President,” 29. Coffey, “House of Galassi,” 30. Kachka, Hothouse, 327. Zeitchik “Galassi Named FSG President,” 27. Kachka, Hothouse, 287, 335. Michael Coffey, “Jonathan Franzen,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 53 (December 6, 1991): 54. Kachka, Hothouse, 242–43. Jonathan Franzen, “Mr. Difficult,” New Yorker, September 30, 2002. Coffey, “Jonathan Franzen,” 55. Kachka, Hothouse, 293. Michiko Kakutani, “Books of The Times; Politics and Social Conflict in a Mythical St. Louis,” New York Times, August 17, 1988, C21. Childress, Under the Cover, 155. Kachka, Hothouse, 295. Parker, “Showboat.” Hensley, “The World We Live In.” Liesl Schillinger, “In This Galaxy, One Star Shines Brightest,” New York Times, September  8, 2010. John F. Baker and Jim Milliott, “Bertelsmann Decision to Buy Random House Stuns Industry,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 13 (March 30, 1998): 10–14. J. M., “Different Look in the Trade Ranks,” 12. Doreen Carvajal with Geraldine Fabrikant, “Random House Sale Shakes Up Literary World,” New York Times, March 25, 1998. Gayle Feldman, “Seventy-Five Years of Norton’s ‘Books That Live,’ ” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 26 (June 29, 1998): 18. Calvin Reid, “Robert Weil and the Music of Editing,” Publishers Weekly 258, no.  28 (July  8, 2011): 10. Mario Materassi and V. R., “On Henry Roth: An Interview with Mario Materassi,” Salmagundi 153/154 (Winter-Spring 2007): 74. Reid, “Robert Weil.” Doreen Carvajal, “Outlook ’98: Media & Technology; In the Publishing Industry, the HighTechnology Plot Thickens,” New York Times, January 5, 1998. Doreen Carvajal, “Booksellers Grab a Young Wizard’s Cloaktails,” New York Times, February 28, 2000. Trudi M. Rosenblum, “Audiobooks ’99,” Publishers Weekly 246, no. 23 (June 7, 1999): 44. Weil, “An Executive Editor Speaks His Mind.” Raymond Carver, “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk,” New York Times, February 15, 1981, sec. 7, 9. Alex Abramovich, “Towering Babel,” Slate, October 29, 2001.

166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201.

6. I n depen den ts

6. I n depen den ts 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215.

216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234.

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Cynthia Ozick, introduction to The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 13. Nathalie Babel, preface to Babel, Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 20. Peter Constantine, acknowledgments to Babel, Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 37. Richard Bernstein, “Stabbing the Heart and Soul With the Savagery of Truth,” New York Times, November 14, 2001. Robert Weil, “Primo Levi in America,” in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein (New York: Liveright, 2015), 2803. Ann Goldstein, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Complete Works of Primo Levi, xvi. Edward Mendelson, “The Complete Works of Primo Levi,” New York Times Book Review, November 23, 2015. James Wood, “The Art of Witness,” New Yorker, September 28, 2015. Robert Weil, “The Future That Had Arrived,” Artforum 28, no 2 (October 2009): 200–207. Ronald  K. L. Collins, “An Interview with Robert Weil,” Washington Independent Review of Books, April 5, 2016. Collins, “An Interview with Robert Weil.” Calvin Reid, “For Liveright, Good Editing Is Good Business,” Publishers Weekly, July 30, 2021. Martin Pederson, “Still Growing,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 24 (June 12, 1995): 35. For an account of the historical and theoretical questions raised by reading graphic novels in general and Watchmen in particular as literature, see Andrew Hoberek, Considering Watchmen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 3–33. Beth Levine, “Graphic Novels: The Latest Word in Illustrated Books,” Publishers Weekly 231, no. 20 (May 22, 1987): 45. Heather Vogel Frederick, “Cartoon Books Hit the Far Side,” Publishers Weekly 241, no.  12 (March 21, 1994): 40. Paul Bennett, “Trading on Comics,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 33 (August 17, 1998): 34. Calvin Reid, “Manga Comics,” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 26 (June 30, 1997): 52. Douglas Wolk, “Comics: Not Just for Specialty,” Publishers Weekly 247, no.  42 (October  16, 2000): 40. Bennett, “Trading on Comics,” 34. Wolk, “Comics: Not Just for Specialty.” Tom Spurgeon, “New and Ominous Century,” in We Told You So: Comics as Art (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2016), 482, 483. Charles Brownstein, “25 Years of Fantagraphics,” Publishers Weekly 248, no. 52 (December 24, 2001): 28. Douglas Wolk, “Comics at BookExpo,” Publishers Weekly 248, no. 26 (June 25, 2001): 33 Calvin Reid, “PW Talks with Dan Frank,” Publishers Weekly 247, no. 36 (September 4, 2000): 88. “Comics.” Publishers Weekly 239, no. 44 (November 4, 2002): 36. Casey E. Brienza, “Books, Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States,” Publishing Research Quarterly 25 (2009): 101–17. Heidi MacDonald, “Growth of Graphic Novel Sales,” Publishers Weekly 251, no.  11 (March  15, 2004): 7. Heidi MacDonald, “Comics Publishers Look Ahead,” Publishers Weekly 251, no. 42 (October 18, 2004): 26. “How to Cartoon,” Publishers Weekly 253, no. 47 (November 27, 2006): 16. Kachka, Hothouse, 328–29. John Glusman, interview, February 22, 2021. Collins, “An Interview with Robert Weil.”

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Reid, “Robert Weil.” Teresa Mendez, “The Publisher as Protagonist,” Christian Science Monitor, January 14, 2004.

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Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

“Global Publishing Leaders 2017: Penguin Random House,” Publishers Weekly, August 25, 2017. Sara Nelson, “Stop the Presses?,” Publishers Weekly 255, no. 24 (December 1, 2008): 11 Jim Milliott, “Stocks Plunged in 2008,” Publishers Weekly 256, no. 1 (January 5, 2009): 8. Jim Milliott, “As Bad as It Gets? Horrific Third Quarter Could Lead to Decline for Full Year for Chains,” Publishers Weekly 255, no. 48 (December 1, 2008): 10. Jim Milliott, “Jeff Bezos,” Publishers Weekly 255, no. 48 (December 8, 2008): 24. Alexandra Alter, “Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They’re Best Sellers,” New York Times, September 19, 2020. Michael Coffey, with Claire Kirch, Andrew Albanese, and Shannon Maughan, “They Made a Difference: 25 Book Business Change Makers,” Publishers Weekly, April 19, 2022. Alter, “Best Sellers Sell.” John B. Thompson, The Book Wars (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), 26–27. Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). Thompson, Book Wars, 53. Thompson, Book Wars, 357–59. Craig Morgan Teicher, “Donald Katz,” Publishers Weekly 256, no. 36 (September 7, 2009): 14. “Amazon Buying Audible,” Publishers Weekly 255, no. 5 (February 4, 2008): 2. Jeff Bezos, “2013 Annual Report,” Amazon.com, https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData /AnnualReportArchive/a/ NASDAQ _ AMZN_2013.pdf. Speechki advertisement, “Will You Be Part of the Audiobook Goldrush?,” Publishers Weekly, September 27, 2021, 41. Sheri-Marie Harrison, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: An Ode to the Audiobook,” Post45 Contemporaries, August 31, 2020. Harrison, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.” Thompson, Book Wars, 179. Clayton Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 164–69. Thompson, Book Wars, 204. Elizabeth A. Harris, “How Crying on TikTok Sells Books,” New York Times, March 20, 2021. Michael Cader, “Early 2022 Sales Led by BookTok Fiction and Southern Migration,” Publishers Lunch, April 28, 2022. Sophia Stewart, “TikTok Booms,” Publishers Weekly, September 6, 2021, 6–8. Simone Murray, The Digital Literary Sphere (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 35; see also Rachel Noorda, Entrepreneurial Identity in US Book Publishing in the TwentyFirst Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Murray, Digital Literary Sphere, 35. Thompson, Book Wars, 397, 395, 398. Sarah Brouillette, “Wattpad’s Fiction of Care,” Post45, July 13, 2022. Thompson, Book Wars, 259–65. Thompson, Book Wars, 280.

Con clusi on 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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Alexandra Alter, “A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question,” New York Times, May 23, 2020. Christian Peukert, “Digitization Can Support Publishers with Decision Making,” Publishers Weekly, January  28, 2022, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs /soapbox/article/88406-digitization-can-support-publishers-with-decision-making.html. The fever for young adult fiction spawned another genre, new adult fiction, launched by St. Martin’s in 2009. See Jodi McAlister, New Adult Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Andrew Albanese, Neill Denny, and Ed Nawotka, “At the Frankfurt Book Fair, a New Normal,” Publishers Weekly, October 21, 2019, 4. Elizabeth A. Harris, Alexandra Alter, and Adam Bednar, “A Trial Put Publishing’s Inner Workings on Display. What Did We Learn?,” New York Times, August 19, 2022. Harris, Alter, and Bednar, “A Trial.” John Maher, “DOJ v. PRH: Markus Dohle’s Silicon Valley of Media,” Publishers Weekly, August 5, 2022, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news /article/90029-doj-v-prh-markus-dohle-s-silicon-valley-of-media .html. James Tager, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing,” PEN America, October  17, 2022, https://pen.org /report/race-equity-and-book -publishing/. Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek, “Just How White Is the Book Industry?,” New York Times, December 11, 2020. India Downes-Le Guin, “Amber Oliver,” Tin House, https://tinhouse.com/th _ post_ faculty /amber-oliver/. Danny Vasquez, “Meet the Publishing Team at Astra House,” https://astrapublishinghouse.com /meet-the-publishing-team-at-astra-house/. PW Staff, “PW Star Watch 2020: Honorees,” October 9, 2020, https://www.publishersweekly .com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/people/article/84588-pw-star-watch-2020-honorees.html. Katie Salisbury, “The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Vivian Lee,” The Rumpus, April  2, 2016, https://therumpus.net/2016/04/02/the-saturday-rumpus-interview-vivian-lee/. Craig Morgan Teicher. “Fiona McCrae,” Publishers Weekly 256, no. 9 (March 2, 2009): 16. Gabriella Page-Fort, “Why Do Americans Read so Few Books in Translation,” Literary Hub, August 3, 2018, https://lithub.com/why-do-americans-read-so-few-books-in-translation/. Penguin Random House (PRH), “Random House Launches New Imprint, Random House Worlds,” News release, May 17, 2022, https://global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements /random-house-launches-new-imprint-random-house-worlds/. PRH, “Random House Launches.” James Patterson “has a sixteen-person team solely dedicated to him at his publisher, Little, Brown and Company” and a “stable of about twenty-five coauthors.” He “provides detailed outlines of characters and plots, leaving the writing of the story itself mostly up to them.” See Childress, Under the Cover, 42. Michael Szczerban, “Agents & Editors: Jordan Pavlin,” Poets & Writers, September 1, 2013. Gayle Feldman, “A Conversation with Susan Petersen,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 2 (January 9, 1995): 36. Putnam was sold to Penguin in 1996, which then merged with Random House in 2013. Geoffrey Kloske has run Riverhead since 2006 with Sarah McGrath as editor in chief. For more on Aragi, see Laura B. McGrath, “Literary Agency,” American Literary History 33, no. 2 (Summer 2021). Ismail Muhammad analyzes post-2016 fiction from black writers, finding “exhaustion with the tropes” of black fiction and “skepticism about the generalized push for representation” in a time of

28 0

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“a belated embrace of diversity in our culture industry and the products it peddles.” It’s the belated embrace, the intensity of the contemporary push for representation, that in part has changed the circumstances for these writers, two of whom—Zakiya Harris and Raven Leilani—have responded by setting novels among publishers. See Muhammad, “Can Black Literature Escape the Representation Trap,” New York Times Magazine, October 13, 2022.

Glossary of Publishing Figures 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Enid Nemy, “New Yorkers, etc.,” New York Times, February 1, 1984, C12. Radhika Jones, “Uncommon Readers,” Bookforum, December/January 2008. Ligaya Mishan. “Nicole Aragi’s Family History in a Jar,” New York Times, February 29, 2016. Mary B. W. Tabor, “Ian Ballantine, 79, a Publisher Who Led Move into Paperbacks,” New York Times, March 10, 1995, B7. Seth Satterlee, “Meet the Editor: Kathy Belden,” Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2014. Satterlee, “Meet the Editor.” Clayton Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 167. Thomas Weyr, “Ballantine Books at Quarter Century,” Publishers Weekly 212, no. 25 (December 26): 44. “A Big Five for Ron Busch,” Publishers Weekly 224, no. 7 (August 12, 1983): 17. Madalynne Reuter, “Remembering Ron Busch,” Publishers Weekly 232, no.  15 (October  9, 1987): 32. Herbert R. Lottman, “Frankfurt West?,” Publishers Weekly 241, no. 25 (June 20, 1994): 80. Lizette Alvarez, “Born to Read for Fun and Profit,” New York Times, December 26, 1996, C4. Bennett Cerf, “Bennett Cerf Remembers,” Publishers Weekly 212, no. 7 (August 15, 1977): 28. “Desser Newest Knopf Editor,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 27 (July 3, 1995): 13. Dermot McEvoy, “King Baseball,” Publishers Weekly 251, no. 12 (March 22, 2004): 77. “For Marc Jaffe of Bantam Books, All of Publishing Hardcover and Paperback, Is a Continuum— and Flexibility Is the Thing,” Publishers Weekly 209, no. 12 (March 22, 1976): 24. André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2001), 29. Lee Siegel, “The Age of Ettlinger,” New York Times, November 14, 2004. Randy Kennedy, “The Photographer Who Makes Writers Look Like Authors,” New York Times, January 11, 2004. Michael Korda, Another Life (New York: Delta, 2000), 337. Alex Traub, “Dan Frank, Adventurous Book Editor, Is Dead at 67,” New York Times, June 2, 2021. Traub, “Dan Frank.” Calvin Reid, “PW Talks with Dan Frank,” Publishers Weekly 247, no. 36 (September 4, 2000): 88. Al Silverman, The Time of Their Lives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 335. Cara Giaimo, “Edward Gorey, Pack Rat,” Atlas Obscura, April 19, 2017. John Tebbel, A History of Publishing in the United States, vol. 4, The Great Change, 1940–1980 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), 151. Rachel Deahl, “Trident Cofounder Is an Outspoken Champion of Authors’ Rights,” Publishers Weekly, March 9, 2009. Tebbel, History of Publishing, 221. Korda, Another Life, 441. David D. Kirkpatrick, “President and Chief Leaves Penguin Putnam Books,” New York Times, September 25, 2001, C16.

Gl ossary of Publishing Figures 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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Madalynne Reuter, “Basking in the Word: Joni Evans’s New Imprint,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 16 (April 5, 1991): 106. Ronald Sullivan, “RCA Picks Chairman as Griffiths Resigns,” New York Times, January 25, 1981, sec. 1, 1. Neil Baldwin, “In Spite of Economics, Letterpress Just Won’t Quit,” Publishers Weekly 221, no. 23 (June 4, 1982): 54. Tebbel, History of Publishing, 221, 115. Publishers Weekly 187, no. 8 (February 22, 1965): 101. Jim Milliot, “Bookselling Visionary Harry Hoffman Dies at 92,” Publishers Weekly, May  29, 2020. Robert A. Carter, “Marc Jaffe,” Publishers Weekly, 237, no. 34 (August 24, 1990): 33. Morton Janklow to Yanou Collart, Random House records, Box 1388 and Folder Editorial Files, Jason Epstein 1962–1984, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. Danielle Steel, “The Process and the Team,” daniellesteel.net, November 26, 2012. Andrew Cohen, “200 Minority Publishers Confer, Consider ‘Incubator’ Project,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 46 (November 16, 1990): 14. Janet Froelich, “Cover Boy,” New York Times Magazine, November 10, 1996, sec. 6, 50. Calvin Reid, “Designer-Man Wields Pen!” Publishers Weekly 248, no. 44 (October 29, 2001): 33. Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 52. Miriam Berkley, “James Laughlin and New Directions,” Publishers Weekly 228, no. 21 (November 22, 1985): 24. Carla Blumenkranz, “Captain Midnight,” n+1, issue 12. “Media,” Publishers Weekly 178, no. 9 (February 28, 1966): 47. Gary Fisketjon, “Vintage Contemporaries,” Talking Covers, September 12, 2012. “People,” Publishers Weekly 205, no. 21 (May 27, 1974): 28. Colleen Walsh, “If at First You Don’t Succeed Fail, Fail Again,” Harvard Gazette, March 14, 2019. Clare Swanson, “Meet the Editor: Sarah McGrath,” Publishers Weekly, May 2, 2014. Richard Schickel, “Freaked Out on Barthelme,” New York Times, August 16, 1970, 178. Jonathan Bryan Fenderson, “ ‘Journey Toward a Black Aesthetic’: Hoyt Fuller, the Black Arts Movement & the Black Intellectual Community” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, 2011). Michael Szczerban, “Agents & Editors: Jordan Pavlin,” Poets & Writers, September 1, 2013. Alexandra Alter, “Barnes & Noble’s Longtime Leader, Leonard Riggio, Is Stepping Down,” New York Times, April 27, 2016. Lila Freilicher, “Barnes & Noble: The Book Supermarket,” Publishers Weekly 209, no. 3 (January 19, 1976): 71. Edwin McDowell, “Bookstore Behemoths Trade Quips,” New York Times, March 14, 1988. Loren Glass, “Counter-Culture Colophon,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 7, 2011. Rebecca Saletan, “A Thing Meant to Be: The Work of a Book Editor,” Poets & Writers, April 11, 2018. Bruce Weber, “John Sargent, Former Doubleday President, Dies at 87,” New York Times, February 8 2012. Boris Kachka, Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 286. “Obituary: Len Shatzkin,” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 20 (May 20, 2002): 22. Sam Roberts, “James Silberman, Editor Who Nurtured Literary Careers, Dies at 93,” New York Times, August 1, 2020. Korda, Another Life, 364. Kachka, Hothouse, 250.

282 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Roger W. Straus Jr., Book Publisher from the Age of the Independents, Dies at 87,” New York Times, May 27, 2004. Nina Subin, “Taking an Author’s Photo. Is Like Going on a First Date,” LitHub, May 6, 2019. Margalit Fox, “John Tebbel, 91, Writer and Historian of Publishing, Dies,” New York Times, October 15, 2004. Lisa Chase, “To Binky Urban, ‘Power’ Is a Male Word,” The Cut, October 16, 2018. Richard Ford, “Vintage Contemporaries,” Talking Covers, September 12, 2012. Tebbel, History of Publishing, 325. Tebbel, History of Publishing, 202. The nickname has a bit of a mysterious backstory. See John Tierney, “No Jackal Required,” New York Times, June 4, 1995, sec. 6, 24. Frank Bruni, “The Literary Agent as Zelig,” New York Times, August 11, 1996, sec. 6, 26.

Index

Abish, Walter: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions Abrams, M. H.: and the Norton Anthology series, 171, 182. See also W. W. Norton Abramovich, Alex: on The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 204. See also Babel, Isaac; translation; W. W. Norton access: and chain bookstores, 63, 99; and mass-market paperbacks, 26–27, 32, 68–69. See also readership Ace Books, 23 Acker, Kathy, 39; and (masochistic) autofiction, 95; and Grove, 137. See also autofiction Adams, Douglas, 13 Adler, Renata, 86, 90–93, 96, 115–17, 123; and the Book Review Index, 77; and Fox, 13, 79–80; Speedboat, 91–95, 98; Toward a Radical Middle, 90–91, 96. See also Fox, Joe; Speedboat (Adler) advances, large, 53–55, 58, 99, 193, 247n27; Back to Blood (Wolfe), 247n27; Full Disclosure (Safire), 53; The Hotel New Hampshire (Irving), 46; Princess Daisy (Krantz), 55; Ragtime (Doctorow), 29, 55, 173, 247n27; Twenty-Seventh City (Franzen), 200 advances, small: Fight Club (Palahniuk), 191, 193 African American literature, 182–88; and Beloved (Morrison), 111; and Coffee House, 158; vs. Everett, 155; and Morrison’s editorial work, 108–9; and Mosley, 187–88; and New American Library, 30; and Norton, 182;

and Playing in the Dark (Morrison), 168; and street lit, 67. See also Black Arts Movement; Black Classic Press; Coffee House Press; Morrison, Toni; Mosley, Walter; New American Library; street lit agents, 3, 6, 11–12, 20, 28, 53–55, 58, 87, 96, 99, 103, 116, 122, 150, 152, 208; as anonymous, 54; and “corporate taste” (McGrath), 67; as editors, 11, 54; and gatekeeping, 163. See also Bookman, Robert (“Bob”); Nadell, Bonnie; Janklow, Morton; Nesbit, Lynn; Urban, Amanda (“Binky”) Alexander, Michelle: The New Jim Crow, 21. See also New Press Alexie, Sherman, 270n4. See also Grove: Grove Atlantic Ali, Muhammad: and Morrison, 109. See also Morrison, Toni alienation, readerly, 13, 16 Allan, Angela: on King’s popular novels, 104–5. See also King, Stephen Allen, Charles, 74, 76. See also Random House Allen, Jeffery Renard, 165 Als, Hilton, 109; on Hardwick, 93. See also Hardwick, Elizabeth All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy), 13, 120–21, 124; film version, 121. See also McCarthy, Cormac Altman, Robert: and Doctorow’s Ragtime, 35. See also Ragtime (Doctorow) Alvarez, Julia, 158; How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 184

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Amazon, 203, 207, 210, 212, 215–16; algorithm, 63; AmazonCrossing; and Audible, 214; Kindle, 21, 69–70, 212–14. See also Bezos, Jeff; Kindle, Amazon American Academy of Arts and Letters award, 118. See also prizes, literary American Booksellers Association, 7, 42, 138, 148 American Psycho (Ellis), 193–96. See also Ellis, Bret Easton Amis, Martin, 15–16 Anchor Books, 193; and the trade paperback, 75; and Vintage, 152. See also Doubleday Anders, Lou, 60. See also science fiction Anderson, Perry: on historical novels, 40. See also historical fiction Angel, Mitzi: and autofiction, 223. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Another Chicago Press, 184 Anthony, Piers, 61–62; critical response to, 61; and mass-market publishing, 28; Xanth series, 10, 24, 61–62 antitrust law, 5–7, 211–12. See also Department of Justice; Penguin Random House Applebaum, Irwyn: on mass-market sensibility, 68. See also Bantam; mass-market publishing Aragi, Nicole, 223. See also Whitehead, Colson Arbor House, 103 Archipelago Books, 165, 221. See also nonprofits; translation Archive of Our Own (AO3), 70, 218. See also fan fiction Arendt, Hannah, 82, 92, 115 Arte Público Press, 135, 149, 165, 199. See also nonprofits Ashbery, John: and Epstein, 75; and Lurie, 86. See also Epstein, Jason; Lurie, Alison Asian American literature, 138, 140–41, 159, 161–62; Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of AsianAmerican Writers, 161; Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 220; Kundiman, 220. See also Yamashita, Karen Tei Astra House, 220–21 Atheneum, 79 Atlantic Monthly Press, 120, 137, 148, 169; Grove Atlantic, 137, 169, 179, 216 Atwood, Margaret: and Port Townsend, 129; and social media, 216. See also Port Townsend Atxaga, Bernardo, 165 Auden, W. H., 75

Audible, 214–15. See also audiobooks audiobooks, 101, 103, 119, 179, 203, 212–15; and intimacy, 215. See also voice Auel, Jean, 13, 20, 26, 65 Austen, Jane, 32, 178; desk of, 9; and free indirect discourse, 38 Auster, Paul: New York Trilogy, 113 authenticity, 40, 51, 90, 93; of culture, 84; performances of, 157, 164; and profit, 126, 155 author tours, 3, 65, 110, 139, 159, 187; and wholesalers, 102 Authors Guild, 194; as against conglomerates, 6–7, 194, 212 authorship: and agency, 16, 51, 53, 85, 96–97, 103, 125, 128; collective, 70, 217–18, 240n20, 241n32, 243n44; conglomerate, 8–12, 17–18, 28, 99, 103, 105, 124–25, 150, 168–69, 208, 212, 223, 244n71; and copyright, 3, 218, 240n18; disavowal of, 117; distributed, 240n18, 241n22; as emergent, 12, 244n71; in film, 244n71; public, 85, 96; romantic author, 8, 25, 52, 105; and Steel, 51–52; systemic, 103. See also ghostwriting autofiction, 14, 17–18, 44, 103, 212, 216, 222–23, 245n77, 258n124; masochistic, 95; and women, 20, 84–86, 94–97, 116–17 automatic writing, 9. See also authorship Avon Books: and romance, 50–51. See also romance awards, literary. See prizes, literary B. Dalton, 24, 41, 56, 62–63, 99, 135, 138; and computers, 63; decline of, 66. See also chain bookstores Babel, Isaac: The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 20, 203–4, 210; death of (by firing squad), 203; Red Cavalry, 203. See also W. W. Norton Babel, Nathalie: and The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 203–4. See also Babel, Isaac; W. W. Norton Bachman, Richard. See King, Stephen Bagdikian, Ben: on the rejection of Dowie’s Corporate Murder by Richard Simon, 254n5 Baldwin, James, 87; and Dial, 34, 80; If Beale Street Could Talk, 110; and mass-market publishing, 27; and Morrison, 109–10; and New American Library, 30 Ballantine, 53; and fantasy, 23–24, 61; and multiculturalism (One World), 168; and

i n dex Random House, 125, 201. See also Ballantine, Ian; fantasy Ballantine, Ian: on mass-market sensibility, 68. See also Ballantine; mass-market publishing Ballard, J. G., 207; The Atrocity Exhibition, 205. See also Doubleday; W. W. Norton Balzac, Honoré de, 107, 162 Bambara, Toni Cade: and Morrison, 109; and Random House, 181. See also Morrison, Toni Bambi (Salten), 28 Bantam, 2, 4–5, 43, 68, 100, 125; and blockbusters, 46, 55; colophon of, 4; and IFI, 5, 36, 41; and mass-market publishing, 4, 19, 29–30, 32, 36–37, 50; publicity department of, 102; and Ragtime, 36–37, 46; and romance, 50. See also Bantam Doubleday Dell Group; mass-market publishing; Ragtime (Doctorow) Bantam Doubleday Dell Group, 69, 213. See also Bantam; Dell; Doubleday Barg, Barbara: The Origin of Species, 95 Barker, Pat, 210 Barnes & Noble, 17, 24–25, 66–68, 139, 201; and Graywolf Press, 139. See also chain bookstores; Hensley, Sessalee Barnhisel, Greg: on Laughlin, 264n3. See also Laughlin, James Barnum, P. T.: and for-profit museums, 265n35 Baron, Carole: and Steel, 52. See also Steel, Danielle Barrett, A. Igoni, 165 Barrett, Andrea, 177; The Voyage of the Narwhal, 179. See also seafaring literature Barry, Kevin, 210 Barth, John, 39–40, 79–80, 97; and autofiction, 84–85; Chimera, 85 Barthelme, Donald, 53, 79–80, 92, 97, 162, 197, 200; and creative writing programs, 199. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Barthes, Roland: on the death of the author, 9. See also authorship Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 173 Bass, Rick, 176 Baumbach, Jonathan: and the Fiction Collective (2), 137 Bausch, Richard, 195 Baxter, Charles, 176 Beagle, Peter S.: The Last Unicorn, 61 Bear Shit in the Woods School, 130, 265n20. See also Port Townsend; Rexroth, Kenneth

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Beattie, Ann, 39–40, 103, 163, 200; and Evans, 13; and minimalism, 143. See also Evans, Joni Beatty, Paul, 164 Beauvoir, Simone de, 167, 178; The Second Sex, 93–94 Bechdel, Alison 26 Beck, Ulrich, 17 Becker, Howard: on collective authorship, 241n32. See also authorship Before Columbus Foundation fiction and poetry anthologies, 183. See also W. W. Norton Bellow, Rachel Newton: and the Mellon Foundation, 144–46; and Walker, 145, 148. See also Mellon Foundation; Walker, Scott Bellow, Saul, 86–87, 88, 118, 144, 200; Babel’s influence on, 203; as bestseller, 46; Herzog, 79. See also Babel, Isaac Beloved (Morrison), 10, 17, 45–46, 110–13, 124–25, 152, 157, 182–83, 275n157; as award-winning, 45, 110–11, 157, 168; as (also) about publishing, 111–12, 152; as snubbed by the National Book Award, 45, 168. See also Morrison, Toni Bemis, Carol: and Random House, 108. See also Random House Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 21. See also New Press Berebitsky, Julie: on sex and the office, 256n57, 263n110. See also sexism; sexual harassment Berger, John: G., 1 Berger, Thomas: The Feud, 45 Bergholz, Susan, 183–84. See also agents Berkley, 2 Bernstein, Richard: on The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 204. See also Babel, Isaac; translation; W. W. Norton Bernstein, Robert, 96–99, 119–20, 197; and editorial independence, 96; as firee, 58, 73, 101, 119–20, 222; as firer, 120; as hiree, 78; and Mehta, 119; and Morrison, 78, 109. See also Random House; RCA Berryman, John, 77; and FSG, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Bertelsmann: and Bantam, 68, 201; Doubleday acquisition, 7, 69, 201; Random House acquisition, 2, 7, 69, 73, 124–25, 201–2, 209. See also Bantam; Doubleday; Random House; Simon & Schuster; Viking Bestler, Emily, 208. See also Glusman, John; Simon & Schuster

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Bezos, Jeff, 213; on audiobooks, 214. See also Amazon; audiobooks Bialosky, Jill: and Norton, 202. See also W. W. Norton Bishop, Elizabeth: and Galassi, 198. See also Galassi, Jonathan Birstein, Ann: Dickie’s List, 84 Biss, Eula, and autofiction, 95. See also autofiction Bissell, Tom: and Fox’s Desperate Characters, 202. See also Fox, Paula; W. W. Norton Black Arts Movement, 158, 181, 269n135 Black Classic Press: and Mosley, 187. See also Mosley, Walter Blackwell, Frank: Western Story Magazine, 59 Black World: and Dumas, 109 Blood Meridian (McCarthy), 13, 118, 120–21. See also McCarthy, Cormac Bloom, Harold: on King’s writing (as “immensely inadequate”), 104. See also King, Stephen Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 52, 109, 125, 215. See also Morrison, Toni blurbs, 4, 73, 92, 109–10 Boas, Franz, 171 body, the: fiction and, 151–56; writing and, 51–52, 82 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 197, 201, 275n157. See also Wolfe, Tom Boni, Albert: Boni & Liveright, 30, 209. See also Liveright, Horace Boni & Liveright, 30, 209 bookbuyers, 12, 17, 20, 66–68, 96, 99, 103, 107, 131–32, 207–8. See also chain bookstores book clubs, 24, 41, 44–45, 251n39; and Doubleday, 74; and historical fiction, 157; Oprah’s Book Club, 121, 201–2, 251n39 Booker Prize, 40–41, 44, 153, 190 Bookman, Robert (“Bob”): and Crichton, 122. See also Crichton, Michael Book Review Index, 77 BookScan (Nielsen/NPD), 67, 193, 219, 269n150. See also rationalization Bookslinger, 132, 134, 139. See also Sitter, Jim Bookstop, 66–67. See also Barnes & Noble; chain bookstores bookstores. See chain bookstores BookTok, 216. See also social media BookTube, 216. See also social media Borders, 17; closing of, 213; and graphic novels, 207; under Kmart, 66; and small-press books, 139. See also chain bookstores

Borges, Jorge Luis: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions Bourdieu, Pierre: on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and autofiction, 18; on taste and class, 26 Bradford, Gigi: and the NEA, 149. See also National Endowment for the Arts Brand, Max: and Pocket Books, 32. See also Pocket Books brand-name authors, 6, 20, 27, 43, 58, 99, 104, 150, 219, 223, 250n18, 251n25; and ghostwriting, 242n36. See also Auel, Jean; Clancy, Tom; Grisham, John; King, Stephen; Koontz, Dean; Krantz, Judith; Patterson, James; Sandford, John; Steel, Danielle Brautigan, Richard, 80 Braverman, Kate: on constraints placed on women writers, 115 Bread and Puppet Theater, 145–46 Brier, Evan: on editorial invisibility, 240n21; on Morrison’s editorial career, 261n41. See also editors; Morrison, Toni Bright Lights, Big City (McInerney), 66, 173–74, 271n28. See also McInerney, Jay Brinkley, Jamel, 165 Brockett, Louise: and Norton, 180, 208. See also publicists; W. W. Norton Brockway, George: and W. W. Norton, 171–72, 175–76. See also W. W. Norton Brodkey, Harold, 173 Brodsky, Joseph, 198–99 Bronk, William: and Graywolf Press, 128. See also Graywolf Press Brontë, Charlotte, 200; on writing vs. femininity, 87, 90; Wuthering Heights, 28, 31, 36 Brooks, John: on conglomerates, 6. See also Authors Guild Brooks, Terry: and Del Rey, 24. See also Del Rey Brouillette, Sarah: on Wattpad, 217; on women editors, 260n15. See also Wattpad Brown, Dan: The Da Vinci Code, 67 Brown, Helen Gurley: and Krantz, 55–57; Sex and the Single Girl, 256n57. See also Krantz, Judith Brown, Jerry, 53 Brown, Marie: and Doubleday, 108. See also Doubleday Buchwald, Emilie, 149; on funders, 146; and Sitter, 144. See also Milkweed Editions; nonprofits; Sitter, Jim

i n dex Buckley, Christopher, 113 Buckley, William F., 113–14; and the National Review, 114; spy novels of, 113 Bulosan, Carlos, 32 Burgess, Anthony, 176; A Clockwork Orange, 180; and women writers, 84. See also sexism Burns, Anna: and Graywolf Press, 135. See also Graywolf Press Busch, Frederick: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions Busch, Ron: on the paperback business in 1982, 43. See also mass-market publishing; Pocket Books Bushnell, Candace: and Schiffrin, 22; Sex and the City, 22, 82. See also Schiffrin, André Butler, Robert Olen, 270n4. See also Grove: Grove Atlantic Butler, Samuel, 31 Buurma, Rachel Sagner: on autofiction, 258n124. See also autofiction Byatt, A. S.: Possession, 39, 113 Byng, Jamie, 186 Cage, John: and the aleatory, 92. See also randomness Cain, Addison, 218. See also copyright; fan fiction Caldwell, Erskine, 31–32 Calvino, Italo: and Levi, 204. See also Levi, Primo Campbell, John, 60. See also science fiction Campbell, Maria: and Jurassic Park, 122; Maria B. Campbell Associates, 22 canon: contemporary, 26, 45, 137, 140, 168. See also whiteness Canongate Books, 186 Capel, Georgina: and Welsh, 188–89. See also Welsh, Irvine Capote, Truman, 88, 118; In Cold Blood, 80; and mass-market publishing, 27; and New American Library, 31; and Random House, 78–80 Carlyle, Jane, 93 Carmichael, Stokely: and Random House, 181 Carter, Jimmy: and the NEA, 143. See also National Endowment for the Arts Carver, Raymond, 39–40, 119–20, 128, 135, 143, 173–74; on Babel, 203; and creative writing programs, 45, 163, 173; and Graywolf Press, 144, 147; and Lish, 128, 242n36, 249n88, 264n10; What We Talk About When We Talk

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About Love, 128, 242n36. See also Babel, Isaac; Gallagher, Tess; Lish, Gordon Castaneda, Carlos, 245n6 Castillo, Ana, 170: So Far from God, 183–84, 210 Castillo, Elaine: on why readers come to writers of color, 157 Catapult, 220 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 23–24, 197, 271n28. See also Salinger, J. D. category books. See genre fiction Cave Canem Foundation, 220 CBS, 54; and Fawcett, 5, 41, 69; and Pocket, 69; and Simon & Schuster, 69. See also Fawcett; Pocket Books; Simon & Schuster; Viacom celebrity memoirs, 65; as a sure bet, 6, 239n12 censorship: corporate, 72, 127; marketplace, 69; self-, 87, 89; Soviet, 142 Cerf, Bennett, 209; and Random House, 74–76, 78, 99, 124, 137, 213, 219; sexism(!) of, 83, 100. See also Random House Cerf, Christopher, 88 Chabon, Michael, 73 chain bookstores, 62–68, 99, 151, 207; and access, 63, 99; and agents, 54, 63; and bookbuyers, 12, 17, 20, 66–68, 96, 99, 103, 208, 107, 207; and “cooperative advertising,” 65; and the financial crisis, 213; and genre fiction, 62–65, 113; and graphic novels, 206; vs. literary fiction, 65–66; and publisher decisions, 60; and small-press nonprofits, 138; rise of, 41–43, 63; and technology, 63, 67. See also B. Dalton; Barnes & Noble; Bookstop; Borders; rationalization; Waldenbooks Chandler, Raymond, 159, 186; The Big Sleep, 59; and detective fiction, 59–60 Chang, Lan Samantha, 202 Cheever, John, 80, 103; and the Book Review Index, 77 Chekhov, Anton, 32 chick lit, 67. See also lad lit; Picoult, Jodi Child, Julia: and the author tour, 100–101; Mastering the Art of French Cooking, 100–101; The Way to Cook by Julia Child (video series), 101. See also author tours; cookbooks; television children’s literature: and FSG, 197; and women, 81, 95, 106–7; and videobooks, 101. See also young adult fiction

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Childress, Clayton: on collective authorship, 243n44; on field theory, 270n156; on “name-economy” authors, 250n18, 251n25; on narratives of novelists’ loneliness, 241n22; on the power of Sessalee, 253n99. See also authorship; brand-name authors; Hensley, Sessalee; loneliness Childs, Faith: and Forrest, 184. See also agents; Forrest, Leon Chin, Frank, 182; Donald Duk, 161–62; Gunga Din Highway, 162; and Kingston, 161–62. See also Kingston, Maxine Hong Chomsky, Noam: Counter-Revolutionary Violence, 254n5 Christensen, Jerome: on authorship in film, 244n71. See also authorship Christie, Agatha: and Pocket Books, 32 Chuh, Kandice: on Yamashita’s work, 159. See also Yamashita, Karen Tei Cisneros, Sandra, 26, 40, 73, 150, 157, 183; The House on Mango Street, 184; Woman Hollering Creek, 184. See also multiculturalism Clancy, Tom, 20, 26–27, 46, 65, 99, 178–79; and ghostwriting, 242n36. See also ghostwriting; middlebrow Clark, Mary Higgins, 194 class: domination, 35; and Palahniuk’s Fight Club, 191–92, 223; and taste, 26 Clifton, Lucille: and Morrison, 109. See also Morrison, Toni Clinton, Bill: as fan of Mosley’s work, 186. See also Mosley, Walter Clowes, Daniel, 206–7; and Fantagraphics, 206. See also Fantagraphics; graphic novels Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 187 Coates, W. Paul: and Mosley, 187. See also Mosley, Walter Coffee House Press, 20, 127, 134–35, 139–41, 144, 149, 152, 161, 165; and multiculturalism/ diversity, 140–41, 158–62, 165; and Sitter, 132, 139, 144. See also Kornblum, Allan; Kornblum, Cinda; nonprofits; Sitter, Jim Cohen Samuel: on Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted, 262n73. See also Didion, Joan; genre fiction Cohn, Roy, 101. See also Newhouse, Si; Trump, Donald Collier, 208. See also Macmillan

Collins, Jackie, 131 colophon, 2–4; vs. author name, 8; as distraction, 24 Columbia University Press: colophon of, 3 Commins, Saxe: and Michener, 77. See also Michener, James comparative titles (comps), 11, 67, 192–93, 196, 219; whiteness of, 242n40, 274n124 Complete Works of Isaac Babel, The (Babel), 20, 203–4, 210. See also Babel, Isaac; W. W. Norton Complete Works of Primo Levi, The (Levi), 20, 170, 204–5, 210. See also Levi, Primo; W. W. Norton Condé Nast, 7, 30, 101 Connor, J. D., on authorship in film, 244n71. See also authorship Conrad, Joseph, 32 Conroy, Frank: on Graywolf, 147. See also Graywolf Press; Iowa Writers’ Workshop; National Endowment for the Arts Conroy, Pat, 24–25 Constantine, Peter: and The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 203–4. See also Babel, Isaac; translation; W. W. Norton content: books as, 8, 97, 240n17 Cook, Gareth: Verto Literary, 242n36 cookbooks: and chain bookstore anterooms, 24; and Julia Child, 100–101; as “exciting,” 64–65; as a “sure bet,” 6, 239n12 Cooper Jr., Clarence, 185 Coover, Robert, 39; on the firing of Allen Peacock, 195 Copper Canyon Press, 128, 149–50. See also Port Townsend copyright, 6, 8, 11, 218, 265n34; and authorship, 3, 218, 240n18. See also public domain; subsidiary rights Coren, Michael: on Crichton’s Disclosure, 123. See also Disclosure (Crichton) Corin, Lucy, 165 Corrections, The (Franzen), 67, 201. See also Franzen, Jonathan Cortazar, Julio: Hopscotch, 1 Council of Literary Magazine and Presses (CLMP), 135, 144–45, 148. See also nonprofits; Sitter, Jim Court, Kathryn: and paperback originals, 65–66, 120, 172–75. See also Penguin

i n dex cover design, 3–4, 174, 271n28; by Gorey, 75; by Kidd, 120; of mass-market paperbacks, 26, 29; at Norton, 185–86; of trade paperbacks, 174; uniformity of, 174 Coward McCann, 86, 103. See also Putnam Cowles, Page: and Graywolf Press, 148–49. See also Graywolf Press Cowley, Malcolm: on “serious writing” vs. “best-sellers,” 26. See also popularity vs. prestige creative writing programs, 17–19, 28, 34–40, 44–45, 57, 199; and author sorting, 163; and minimalism, 45; and modernism, 19 Creeley, Robert, 86–87 Crichton, Michael, 24, 26–27, 46, 53, 113, 117; Airframe, 122; The Andromeda Strain, 121; Disclosure, 17, 121–24, 223, 263n113; and Gottlieb, 121–22; Jurassic Park, 122; The Lost World, 122; and Mehta, 122, 124; and Nesbit, 122; and Random House, 122; Rising Sun, 122; Timeline, 122. See also Gottlieb, Robert; Mehta, Sonny; Nesbit, Lynn Crichton, Sarah: and FSG, 199. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Crouch, Stanley: on Forrest’s Divine Days, 184. See also Forrest, Leon Crown, 2, 15, 52, 208; and Random House, 13, 125, 201 Crumb, R., 206–7, 209; and Fantagraphics, 206; Fritz the Cat, 55; and Norton, 20, 207. See also graphic novels; W. W. Norton Cummins, Jeanine: American Dirt, 242n40 Cunningham, Merce: and the aleatory, 92. See also randomness Cusk, Rachel: and autofiction, 18–19, 95, 223. See also autofiction Dalkey Archive, 135, 149, 165, 221; under Deep Vellum, 165. See also Deep Vellum; nonprofits Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 165 Danticat, Edwidge, 157–58, 223 Dark Tower, The (series), 105–6, 110; See also King, Stephen Davis, Angela: and Morrison, 109. See also Morrison, Toni Davis, Kathryn, 165 Davis, Lydia, 199 Davis, Martin: and Ellis’s American Psycho, 194–95. See also Paramount Communications; Simon & Schuster

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DAW Books, 60 Dayton Hudson Foundation, 140. See also nonprofits DC Comics, 56, 206, 207. See also graphic novels Deep Vellum, 165, 221. See also Dalkey Archive; nonprofits; translation de Graff, Robert, 32. See also Pocket Books de Havilland, Olivia: and Cerf, 83; See also Cerf, Bennett; sexism Delacorte, 80 Delany, Samuel, 60; and nonprofits, 137–38 De Laurentiis, Dino: and Doctorow’s Ragtime, 35. See also Ragtime (Doctorow) DeLillo, Don, 16, 26, 39–40, 80, 120, 249n88; The Names, 112–13; Ratner’s Star, 80 Dell, 2, 46, 52, 69, 125, 242n36; and mass-market publishing, 4, 29–30, 32, 34, 59; and Steel, 47, 49–50, 52. See also Bantam Doubleday Dell Group; Dial; Doubleday; mass-market publishing; Steel, Danielle Delphinium, 103 Del Rey, 10, 24, 61–62, 221. See also fantasy del Rey, Judy Lynn: and fantasy books, 24, 61, 221. See also Del Rey; fantasy del Rey, Lester: and fantasy books, 10, 24, 61–62, 221. See also Del Rey; fantasy democracy: Democracy (Didion), 115, 117; and mass-market paperbacks, 26; and the NEA, 142, 150. See also National Endowment for the Arts Department of Justice, 6; v. Penguin Random House, 211–12, 219, 269n150. See also antitrust law; Penguin Random House Derrida, Jacques, 9 Desser, Robin: on American Psycho, 195; on the mass quitting after Schiffrin’s firing, 127. See also Random House; Schiffrin, André detective fiction, 20, 59–60, 174, 186–87, 242n36. See also genre fiction Deutsch, Armand, 83 Devil in a Blue Dress (Mosley), 186–87, 210. See also Mosley, Walter DeWeese, Bob: and Port Townsend, 129–30; on Walker, 130. See also Port Townsend; Walker, Scott Dewey, John, 171 DeWitt, Helen: and autofiction, 18–19. See also autofiction Dial Press, 2, 34, 37, 47, 80

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Díaz, Junot, 158, 164–65, 222–23 Dick, Philip K., 60, 80 Dickens, Charles, 200 Dickey, Eric Jerome, 181 Dickinson, Emily: fascicles of, 9 Didion, Joan, 53, 79–80, 114–17, 124, 197, 200; and autofiction, 116–17; After Henry, 116; A Book of Common Prayer, 115; Democracy, 115, 117; and feminism, 114, 119; and genre fiction, 10, 20, 73, 114–17, 188, 262n73; “Goodbye to All That,” 114; and Hardwick, 115; on Hardwick, 93; and honesty/truth, 114–15, 117; “Insider Baseball,” 115; The Last Thing He Wanted, 10, 17, 113, 115–17, 124, 223, 262n73; Miami, 115; and the National Review, 114; and Nesbit, 116; and The New York Review of Books, 115; Play It as It Lays, 79, 98, 115; and Robbins, 115–16; Run River, 114; Salvador, 115; Slouching Toward Bethlehem, 114–15. See also autofiction; genre fiction; Hardwick, Elizabeth; Nesbit, Lynn; Robbins, Henry Disclosure (Crichton), 17, 121–24, 223, 263n113; film version, 122. See also Crichton, Michael diversity, 21–22, 220; belated embrace of, 279n53; and Graywolf, 140, 154–56, 165; and the NEA, 44–45, 140–41, 143, 146, 157; and Random House (Bernstein/Morrison), 78, 109. See also multiculturalism; National Endowment for the Arts; whiteness Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Wells), 192 DK, 2 Doctorow, E. L., 28–29, 93, 196; and autofiction, 28, 86; Big as Life, 29, 35; Billy Bathgate, 10, 71–72; The Book of Daniel, 34, 37–38; and the Book Review Index, 77; on conglomerates, 7, 69; and creative writing programs, 34, 57; and Dial, 24, 37, 47, 80; and Epstein, 71, 73, 77–78, 80; on Flaubert’s fiction, 39; and genre fiction, 10, 29, 35, 71–72; Loon Lake, 45, 248n67; and mass-market publishing, 20, 28–29, 36–37, 69; and New American Library, 20, 29, 32–34, 36–37, 78, 175; on the political quietism of the American novel, 38, 45; Ragtime, 20, 29, 34–36, 40–41, 46, 55–58, 71, 173, 247n27; and Random House, 36–37, 71, 86, 98; on Schiffrin’s firing, 71, 127; Welcome to Hard Times, 29, 35; World’s Fair, 57, 71, 78 Dodge, Jason: on queerness in Fight Club, 273n118. See also Fight Club (Palahniuk)

Doherty, Maggie: on the NEA, 142–43. See also National Endowment for the Arts Dohle, Markus: on publishing (in 2019), 219; and Random House, 213. See also Penguin Random House; Random House Donadio, Candida: and Lurie, 87. See also Lurie, Alison Donaldson, Stephen: and Del Rey, 24. See also Del Rey Dos Passos, John, 38–39, 248n67 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 32, 200, 209 Doubleday, 2, 4–5, 7, 74–75, 79–80, 102–3, 108, 125, 181, 194, 197, 205, 213, 223; acquisition of, 7; acquisitions of, 5, 41, 47, 69, 125, 193; colophon of, 4; and the trade paperback, 20, 173. See also Bantam Doubleday Dell Group; Dell; Random House Doubleday, Nelson: and Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, 205. See also Doubleday Douglas, Michael: and Disclosure, 122. See also Crichton, Michael Dove, Rita, 177 Dowie, Mark: Corporate Murder (as rejected by Richard Simon), 254n5. See also Simon & Schuster Dragon Gate, 129. See also Port Townsend Dreiser, Theodore, 36, 38–39, 248n67. See also E. L. Doctorow Dubie, Norman: Popham of the New Song, 132. See also Graywolf Press Dubus III, Andre: The House of Sand and Fog, 202 Dumas, Henry: and Morrison, 109. See also Morrison, Toni Dunn, Stephen, 177 Duras, Marguerite, 21; The Lover, 1. See also New Press Dutton, 2, 52 Dybek, Stuart, 163 Dyer, Geoff: and Graywolf Press, 135. See also Graywolf Press Dystel, Oscar: on the financial vs. editorial in the book business, 43. See also Bantam; genre fiction Eberhart, Mignon, 81 ebooks, 203, 212–15, 218, 269n150. See also Kindle, Amazon Ecco Press, 222

i n dex Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose, 113 editors, 11–12, 99, 150, 222; aggressive/activist, 16–17, 128, 242n36; agents as, 11, 54; as anonymous/invisible, 8, 240nn20–21; and chain bookstores, 63; and connections, 77; as (mostly) incompetent idiots (for Anthony), 61; professional vs. textual, 242n41; taste of, 6, 13; women, 81–82; 108–10, 176, 260n15 Egan, Jennifer, 196; The Keep, 222 Eggers, Dave: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 18. See also autofiction Ehrenreich, Barbara: and Schiffrin, 1. See also Schiffrin, André Einaudi: and Levi’s works, 204. See also Levi, Primo Eisenbarth, Nancy: as Steel’s researcher, 52. See also Steel, Danielle Eisenberg, Deborah, 163 Eisner, Will: Contract with God, 205; and Norton, 207. See also graphic novels; W. W. Norton Elias, Amy: on Jameson’s views on Ragtime, 247n28; on postmodern arts and history, 249n70. See also Jameson, Fredric; Ragtime (Doctorow) Eliot, T. S., 77; and Boni & Liveright, 209; and FSG, 197. See also Boni & Liveright; Farrar, Straus and Giroux Elkin, Stanley, 249n88; on the firing of Allen Peacock, 195 Ellis, Bret Easton: American Psycho, 193–96; and Howard, 193–94; Less Than Zero, 169, 193; Rules of Attraction, 194. See also Howard, Gerald; W. W. Norton Ellis, Zoey, 218. See also copyright; fan fiction Ellison, Ralph, 88; and Erskine, 117–18; Invisible Man, 75, 142; on the NEA/democracy, 142, 150; and New American Library, 30; and Random House, 75, 80, 97, 181; on reading (and the voice), 214–15. See also Erskine, Albert; National Endowment for the Arts; New American Library; Random House; reading; voice emergence, 12, 150–51, 186, 218, 243n51, 244n71 Empty Bowl, 129. See also Port Townsend Emre, Merve: on Hardwick, 93; on Sleepless Nights, 94–95. See also Hardwick, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Tom: The Last Days of Publishing, 242n43 Englander, Nathan, 222–23

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English, James: on historical novels and literary prizes, 40–41, 44–45, 58, 265n35. See also historical fiction; prizes, literary Enoch, Kurt: on mass-market paperbacks, 27; and Penguin, 31; and Weybright, 4, 29–34, 41. See also New American Library; Weybright, Victor Entrekin, Morgan: and Atlantic Monthly Press, 148; and Grove Atlantic, 137, 169, 209, 216, 270n4; and Literary Hub, 216. See also Atlantic Monthly Press; Grove Ephron, Nora, 53 Epstein (née Zimmerman), Barbara, 82, 88; and Epstein, 75–77, 254n17; and Lurie, 86–88; and The New York Review of Books, 76. See also Epstein, Jason; Lurie, Alison Epstein, Jason, 20–21, 71–78, 124, 184, 254n17; on agents, 99; and Anchor Books, 125; on Bernstein, 119; Book Business, 73; on conglomerates, 73; and Didion, 114; and Doctorow, 71, 73; and Doubleday, 20, 74–75, 173, 194, 197; and Fisketjon, 120, 173; and food, 78, 98; and the Four Seasons, 53; and Grove, 136–37; and Hardwick, 93–94; and Lurie, 89; and Nabokov’s Lolita, 75, 197; and The New York Review of Books, 76; and Random House, 20, 71–78, 86, 97–98, 107–8; and Roth, 77, 85, 89; sexism of, 20, 82, 87, 93–95; and Sontag, 98; and the trade paperback, 20, 98, 173; and Vidal, 77, 98; and Vitale, 72–73, 101. See also Anchor Books; Epstein (née Zimmerman), Barbara; Miller, Judith Erasure (Everett), 154–56, 158, 160. See also Everett, Percival Erdrich, Louise, 26, 150, 157, 183. See also multiculturalism Erskine, Albert, 120; and Ellison, 117–18; and McCarthy, 4, 80, 117–18; and Warren, 77, 80, 117–18. See also McCarthy, Cormac; Random House; Warren, Robert Penn escape: literature and, 23, 30, 122. See also fantasy Ettlinger, Marion: and McCarthy’s author photo, 120. See also McCarthy, Cormac Eugenides, Jeffrey, 199–200; Middlesex, 67 Europa Editions, 221. See also Ferrante, Elena; translation Evans, Joni, 251n39; and Random House, 13, 127. See also Random House; subsidiary rights

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Evans, Will: and Deep Vellum, 221. See also Deep Vellum Everest House, 103 Everett, Percival, 18–20, 152–58, 164–65, 182; and autofiction, 18–19; and claims of diversity, 152–53; Erasure, 154–56, 158, 160; Frenzy, 152–56; God’s Country, 153; and McCrae, 153, 155, 157; on Morrison, 157; and nonprofits, 131; on Oprah, 156; as pigeonholed, 155; The Trees, 153; on Alice Walker, 156, 161. See also autofiction; Graywolf Press excess: entertainment (in Wallace’s Infinite Jest), 15; productivity (for Steel), 51–52, 251n25; whiteness (in Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress), 187 Exley, Frederick: and autofiction, 85. See also autofiction Exorcist, The (Blatty), 46 expectations: placed on nonprofits (by donors), 135–36, 140–41, 143–44, 146, 151, 169; placed on writers of color (by the market), 155–56 Faatz, Chris: on number-fudging at Graywolf, 148. See also Graywolf Press Faber & Faber, 149, 153 fan fiction, 217–18; fanfiction.net, 70, 218. See also Wattpad Fantagraphics, 205–6; and Norton, 206. See also graphic novels; W. W. Norton fantasy, 10, 23–24, 44, 60–62, 65, 70, 178–79; and ebooks, 214. See also genre fiction Farah, Nuruddin, 165 Farrar, John, 30, 196. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 30, 67, 77, 79–80, 115, 166, 194–201, 209, 220, 223, 275n157; and children’s literature, 197; colophon of, 3; under Galassi, 13, 67, 169, 198–201, 208, 223; as independent, 12–13, 98, 169, 197, 199; as no longer independent, 13, 124, 169, 196, 199, 209, 223; and multiculturalism, 198–99; succession at, 198–99. See also Farrar, John; Giroux, Robert; Holtzbrinck; Straus, Roger Farrell, James T., 30, 38–39; “Will the Commercialization of Publishing Destroy Good Writing?,” 126. See also New Directions Farrow, Mia. See Sinatra, Mia Faulkner, William, 3–4, 30, 38–39, 75, 209, 249n70; literary double-life of, 248n45; and

mass-market publishing, 26–27; and Mencken’s The American Mercury, 30; and obscenity, 31–32; Sanctuary, 4, 31; The Wild Palms, 4, 31. See also New American Library Fawcett: acquisition of, 5, 41, 69; and black sleaze, 30; and mass-market publishing, 4, 29–30, 32, 59; sexism at, 82–83. See also CBS; massmarket publishing feminism, 48, 55–56, 88, 93–95, 106–7, 114, 119, 123, 196; feminist bookstores, 107; Feminist Press, 149, 165; Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 181; second-wave, 84–85, 106, 167, 171 Feminist Press, 149, 165. See also feminism; nonprofits Ferrante, Elena, 204, 221 Fiction Collective (2), 137 Fight Club (Palahniuk), 170, 190–93, 210, 223; and class, 191–92, 223; queerness of, 191, 273n118. See also Palahniuk, Chuck financial crisis (2008): and publishing, 21, 200, 210, 212–13, 215 Firbank, Ronald: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions Fisketjon, Gary: and Epstein, 120, 173; and McCarthy, 120; and McInerney, 173–74; and paperback originals (Vintage Contemporaries), 65–66, 173–74, 208; and Random House, 108, 120, 173. See also Vintage Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 24, 38–39, 243n51; literary double-life of, 248n45 Fitzgerald, Zelda, 93 Flatiron Books, 242n40. See also Macmillan Flaubert, Gustave, 162; Sentimental Education, 18; and the senses (for Doctorow), 39 Flynn, Vince, 208 Foley, Abram: on the value of an author (for corporate publishers), 8 Follett, Ken, 13, 24, 26, 68. See also middlebrow Ford, Richard, 103, 120, 174; and minimalism, 143; and poor sales, 174. See also minimalism Ford Motor Company: influence of, 5; Ford Foundation, 133, 146 Forrest, Leon, 170, 183; Divine Days, 184; and Morrison, 109, 184. See also Morrison, Toni Forster, E. M.: “Only connect…,” 91. See also Speedboat (Adler) Fosse, Jon: Trilogy, 165

i n dex Foucault, Michel: and Schiffrin/Pantheon, 1, 9, 167. See also Pantheon; Schiffrin, André Fox, Joe, 88, 124; and Adler, 13, 79–80; and Capote, 80; and editorial independence, 96; and Lurie, 80, 87; and Matthiessen, 174; and Random House, 13, 73–74, 79–82, 96–97, 174; and Roth, 79, 81, 89; sexism of, 81–82, 95, 108. See also Random House Fox, Paula, 170; Desperate Characters, 202 Frank, Dan: and Pantheon, 207. See also graphic novels; Pantheon Frank, Edwin: and New York Review Books, 221. See also translation Frankfurt Book Fair, 13, 54, 103, 219 Franzen, Jonathan, 163; The Corrections, 67, 201; on Paula Fox, 202; Freedom, 201; and FSG, 13, 169, 199–201, 223; Strong Motion, 201; Twenty-Seventh City, 200–201. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Frazier, Charles, 270n4. See also Grove: Grove Atlantic Freedgood, Anne; on budgetary concerns at Random House, 97; and Epstein, 108. See also Epstein, Jason; Random House Freeman, Ru, 165 Frenzy (Everett), 152–56; and rhythm, 154. See also Everett, Percival Freud, Sigmund: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 171. See also W. W. Norton Friedan, Betty: The Feminine Mystique, 167, 171 Friedman, Jane, 99–102; and the author tour, 3, 100–102; and HarperCollins, 102, 124; and Random House, 74, 100–101, 119–20, 124. See also author tours; HarperCollins; McCarthy, Cormac; publicists; Random House Friedman, Martin, 131, 134, 144. See also National Endowment for the Arts; nonprofits Friedman, Mickey, 131, 134. See also nonprofits Gaddis, William, 31–32, 162, 195; The Recognitions, 31, 197 Gaines, Ernest, 73, 176. See also multiculturalism Galassi, Jonathan: on Franzen’s work, 201; and FSG, 13, 67, 169, 198–201, 208, 223; and Graywolf Press, 147; and multiculturalism, 198–99; Muse, 275n161; and National Poetry Month, 198; as poet, 198; and Random House,

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13, 108, 147, 173; and Vintage Contemporaries, 208. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Graywolf Press; Random House Gallagher, Tess, 128; and Graywolf Press, 128, 149; and Sitter, 134–35. See also Carver, Raymond; Graywolf Press; Sitter, Jim Gardner, Erle Stanley: “fiction factory” of, 32, 242n36; as “in the game for money,” 247n42; and Pocket Books, 32. See also ghostwriting Garner, Margaret, 110. See also Beloved (Morrison) Gass, William H., 97; on the firing of Allen Peacock, 195 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.: on Forrest’s Divine Days, 184; and the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 182. See also Forrest, Leon; W. W. Norton General Electric: influence of, 5 genre fiction, 6, 10; and chain bookstores, 62–65, 113; and ebooks, 69, 214; and the Kindle, 69; literary, 14, 18, 20, 44–45, 73, 108–25, 150, 187–88, 212, 222–23, 262n73; and mass-market publishing, 27, 29, 32, 43, 58–60, 69, 112–13; and nonprofits, 187; and Norton, 205; and women, 81, 95, 108–17. See also detective fiction; fantasy; horror; mystery; romance; science fiction; spy novels; thrillers; Western Gerald, Marc: and Howard / Norton, 185–86. See also Howard, Gerald; W. W. Norton Gernsback, Hugo, 59–60; Amazing Stories, 59. See also science fiction Gertler, T.: Elbowing the Seducer, 258n116. See also sexism Gessen, Keith: on the “tyranny of Sessalee,” 66. See also Hensley, Sessalee Getty, Ann: and Grove, 137, 169. See also Grove ghostwriting, 242n36; for Gardner, 32, 242n36; for Patterson, 279n48; for Steel, 51. See also authorship GI Bill, 5, 32, 74; and the government’s relationship to art, 142 Gibson, William, 262n71 Giddens, Anthony, 17 Gingrich, Newt: and the NEA, 146, 164. See also National Endowment for the Arts Giroux, Robert, 98, 127, 197; and Harcourt Brace, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Gladwell, Malcolm: The Tipping Point, 199 Glass, Loren: on Mailer’s novels, 248n46. See also Mailer, Norman

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Glusman, John: and Crown, 208; and FSG, 208; and Macmillan, 174; and Norton, 208, 210; and Random House, 108; and Vintage, 208. See also Crown; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Macmillan; Random House; W. W. Norton; Vintage Goble, Mark: on aesthetic uses of time, 262n71 Goines, Donald, 170, 183, 185; Dopefiend, 185 Goldman, Emma, 35, 57. See also Ragtime (Doctorow) Goldman, Francisco, 270n4: The Ordinary Seaman, 179. See also seafaring literature; Grove: Grove Atlantic Goldstein, Ann: and The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 204. See also Levi, Primo; translation; W. W. Norton Golomb, Susan: and Franzen, 200–201. See also agents; Franzen, Jonathan Gordimer, Nadine, 199 Gordon, Mary: and Morrison, 108. See also Morrison, Toni Gore, Al: and Segal’s Love Story, 49 Gorey, Edward: and cover design, 75; and Lurie, 86. See also Anchor Books; Epstein, Jason; Lurie, Alison Gottlieb, Robert, 21, 127; and Crichton, 121–22; and Jaffe, 82; and Knopf, 73, 109, 122; and Morrison, 109; and The New Yorker, 73, 119, 122 Gould, Lois: Such Good Friends, 84 Graham, Katharine, 54 Grann, Phyllis, 53, 222. See also Putnam Grant, Donald: and King’s Dark Tower series, 105. See also King, Stephen grants, 118, 132, 134; “challenge grants,” 143–44, 146. See also National Endowment for the Arts; nonprofits graphic novels, 20, 203, 205–7, 209. See also Crumb, R.; W. W. Norton Grass, Günter: The Tin Drum, 1 Grau, Julie, 222 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 25, 27, 68, 79, 245n6; and mass-market publishing, 27. See also Pynchon, Thomas Graywolf Press, 19–20, 127–28, 132–40, 142–49, 152–58, 195, 198; colophon of, 4; and diversity, 140, 154–56, 165; and FSG, 166; and financial chaos, 143; number-fudging at, 148; Short Fiction Series, 134; and Sitter, 132, 134–35,

144, 147–49; and translation, 140, 221. See also nonprofits; Walker, Scott Greco, Albert: on mergers in publishing, 239n7 Greenberg, Clement, 90; on avant-garde vs. kitsch, 32 Greenwell, Garth, 223. See also autofiction Greer, Germaine: The Female Eunuch, 119 Grey, Zane: and mass-market publishing, 32 Griffiths, Ed (“Bottom Line”), 6, 98. See also Random House; RCA Grimes: on (myths) of authorship, 9. See also authorship Grisham, John, 24, 26–27, 104, 122, 219, 222 Groenland, Tim: on editing, 244n70. See also editors Grose, Bill: and Steel, 47, 49–50. See also Dell; Steel, Danielle Gross, Gerald: Editors on Editing, 11, 240n20. See also editors Groth, Gary: on graphic novels and bookstores, 206. See also chain bookstores; graphic novels Grove, 209; and autofiction, 95; flame-out of, 136–37; Grove Atlantic, 137, 169, 179, 216, 270n4; and Random House, 137; sexism at, 136. See also autofiction Grundy, Alice: on professional vs. textual editing, 242n41. See also editors Grusin, William F.: and Norton/Fantagraphics, 206, 208. See also Fantagraphics; graphic novels; W. W. Norton Guggenheim Foundation grant, 118, 223. See also prizes, literary Guinzburg, Harold, 209. See also Viking Gulf + Western: and Simon & Schuster, 5, 7–8, 41, 69, 101, 194. See also Paramount; Simon & Schuster Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 21. See also New Press Gustafsson, Lars: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions Gyasi, Yaa, 222 H. D.: and New Directions, 126. See also New Directions Hachette Book Group, 14, 21, 211–12 Haley, Alex: Roots, 44–46 Hall, Donald: and Epstein, 75. See also Epstein, Jason Hamid, Mohsin, 222

i n dex Hamill, Sam, 128–30, 133, 149; and Lane, 129; on New York publishing, 130. See also Copper Canyon Press; Lane, John; Port Townsend Hammett, Dashiell, 59–60 Hannah, Barry, 270n4. See also Grove: Grove Atlantic Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 7, 80, 177, 197; and literature anthologies, 171; and race, 183 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 82, 86, 88, 92–96, 98, 115–17, 123; on Adler’s Speedboat, 92–93; on Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, 93–94; and the Book Review Index, 77; and Didion, 115; and feminism, 93–95; and Lowell, 95; and The New York Review of Books, 76–77, 93; on The New York Times’ book reviews, 255n27; Seduction and Betrayal, 93–94; “Sense of the Present,” 92, 97–98; Sleepless Nights, 93–96, 98; and Sontag, 259n133 Haring, Keith: and Ellis, 193. See also Ellis, Bret Easton Harlequin, 58, 62; and romance, 50–51. See also Mills & Boon; romance Harper, 4, 79–80 HarperCollins, 7, 102, 124, 198, 211–13; workers strike at (for fair pay), 219–20 Harper & Row, 7 Harris, E. Lynn, 141, 181. See also romance Harris, Zakiya, 279n53 Harrison, Jim, 270n4. See also Grove: Grove Atlantic Harrison, Sheri-Marie: on Morrison’s novels and the intimacy of audiobooks, 215. See also audiobooks; Morrison, Toni Harry Potter series (Rowling): and YA fiction, 203, 218. See also young adult fiction Hart, Matthew: on conglomeration and extraterritoriality, 243n57 Hartwell, David, 60; on del Rey, 62. See also del Rey, Lester; science fiction Haslam, Charles: on Hoffman’s distribution system, 42. See also Hoffman, Harry; Ingram Book Company Haslett, Tobi: on Hardwick, 93. See also Hardwick, Elizabeth Haviland, Beverly: and Random House, 107–8. See also Epstein, Jason Hawkes, John: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions

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Haynes, Christine: on authorship, 240n18, 241n22. See also authorship Haynes, David, 158, 182 Head, Gwen: and Dragon Gate, 129. See also Port Townsend Heaney, Seamus, 198–99. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Heffernan, Laura: on autofiction, 258n124. See also autofiction Heffernan, Teresa: on queerness in Fight Club, 273n118. See also Fight Club (Palahniuk) Heisey, W. Lawrence: and Harlequin, 50. See also Harlequin; marketing Heller, Joseph, 24, 92, 114 Hemingway, Ernest, 24, 32–32, 38–39, 114, 209; on Babel, 203; The Old Man and the Sea, 33. See also Babel, Isaac Hemon, Aleksandar Hempel, Amy, 175 Hensley, Sessalee, 208; as the bookbuyer, 66– 68, 253n99; on Franzen’s The Corrections, 201. See also Barnes & Noble; chain bookstores Herbert, Frank: and Port Townsend, 129. See also Port Townsend Herman, Edward: Counter-Revolutionary Violence, 254n5 Hersey, John, 32–33; on conglomeration, 6. See also Authors Guild Hesse, Herman: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions Heti, Sheila: and autofiction, 18, 95–96; How Should a Person Be?, 96; Motherhood, 96. See also autofiction Heynen, Jim, 165 Hibbert, Edward: and Palahniuk, 191. See also Palahniuk, Chuck highbrow: graphic novels, 203; multiculturalism, 182–84; trade books as, 75. See also middlebrow; popularity vs. prestige Highsmith, Patricia, 170, 207; The Talented Mr. Ripley, 205, 210. See also Weil, Robert; W. W. Norton Hijuelos, Oscar: and Barthelme, 199; The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 198–99 Hill, Anita: and Clarence Thomas, 123, 263n107. See also sexual harassment Himes, Chester, 185; and New American Library, 30

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historical fiction, 44–45, 52, 177; and book clubs, 157; and literary prizes, 40–41, 44–45, 57–58, 157; and writers of color, 45, 143, 157 historiographic metafiction, 39–40, 249n70, 262n73. See also Ragtime (Doctorow); postmodernism Hobsbawm, Eric: and Schiffrin, 22. See also Schiffrin, André Hochman, Sandra: Walking Papers, 84 Hocking, Amanda, 218 Hoffman, Harry, 64–66; and distribution, 42–43; and the Waldenbooks/Kmart opportunity, 64. See also Ingram Book Company; wholesalers Hogan, Kristen: on mainstream readership for feminist texts, 107. See also feminism Holiday, Billie: depiction of in Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, 95. See also Hardwick, Elizabeth Holloway House: and Slim’s Pimp, 30, 185. See also Goines, Donald; Slim, Iceberg Holt, Henry: and oceanic lit, 179. See also seafaring literature Holt, Rinehart and Winston: and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, 52, 109, 125. See also Morrison, Toni Holtzbrinck: acquisition of FSG, 13, 124, 199, 209, 223; acquisition of Macmillian / St. Martin’s Press, 199, 202–3. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Macmillian Holtzbrinck, Dieter von, 199. See also Holtzbrinck Homer: and authorship, 8. See also authorship Hoover, Colleen, 218 Horn, Dara, 202 horror, 43, 65, 103, 112. See also genre fiction; King, Stephen; Morrison, Toni Houdini, Harry, 35, 39. See also Ragtime (Doctorow) Houghton Mifflin, 4, 80, 198, 213 Houston, Pam, 176 Howard, Gerald; and Anchor Books, 193; on creative writing programs, 163; and Ellis, 193–94; and Lamm, 189, 191; on Mosley, 273n98; on New American Library, 175; and Norton, 172–75, 177, 179–80, 183–86, 188–93, 196, 198, 202, 210; and paperback originals (at Penguin), 65–66, 120, 173–74, 193–94, 207; on sexism at Norton, 176. See also Anchor Books; Ellis, Bret Easton; Mosley, Walter;

Palahniuk, Chuck; Penguin; Slim, Iceberg; Welsh, Irvine; W. W. Norton Howe, Fanny: and the Fiction Collective (2), 137 Howe, Florence: and Feminist Press, 149. See also feminism Howe, Irving: and Levi, 204. See also Levi, Primo Howey, Hugh, 218 How to Make an American Quilt (Otto), 192 Hub City Press, 150, 165. See also nonprofits Hungerford, Amy: on the publishing of Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 18 Hunger Games, The (Collins), 218. See also young adult fiction Hunt, Keel: on the woes of running a bookstore, 42 Hunter, Andrew: and Literary Hub, 216 Hurston, Zora Neale, 168 Hustvedt, Siri, 196 Hutcheon, Linda: on historiographic metafiction, 39–40, 262n73. See also historiographic metafiction Huxley, Aldous, 32 IFI: and Bantam, 5, 36, 41. See also Bantam I Hotel (Yamashita), 159, 160–62. See also Yamashita, Karen Tei I’m a Gay Wizard (Santoni), 217. See also Wattpad independents, 167–211. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux; W. W. Norton Infinite Jest (Wallace), 14–17, 45, 244n65. See also Wallace, David Foster Ingram Book Company, 42, 64, 102, 139; and microfiche, 42. See also Hoffman, Harry; wholesalers Instagram, 216. See also social media interiority: novelists and (for Doctorow), 37 internet, the: and publishing, 213–18. See also Amazon; ebooks intimacy: and audiobooks, 215; and book-buying, 50. See also audiobooks Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 147, 163, 202 Irving, John, 67; and autofiction, 18; and Fox, 13; The Hotel New Hampshire, 46; A Widow for a Year, 113; The World According to Garp, 46. See also autofiction; Fox, Joe; middlebrow Isherwood, Christopher: and New World Writing, 31 Ishiguro, Kazuo: Klara and the Sun, 222 ITT, 5

i n dex Jackson, Melanie: and Lurie, 87. See also Lurie, Alison Jaffe, Marc: and New American Library’s “Jewish seat,” 29, 37. See also New American Library Jaffe, Rona: The Best of Everything, 82–83, 246n17 James, Clive: on Krantz’s Princess Daisy, 56–57. See also Krantz, Judith James, E. L.: Fifty Shades of Gray, 218. See also fan fiction James, Henry, 107, 245n6: and modernism, 19; and the novel, 32, 248n45; and third-person perspective, 38; on the writer, 72 James, Marlon, 158, 222 Jameson, Fredric: on Doctorow and Ragtime, 29, 35, 247n27; on history, 39–40. See also Ragtime (Doctorow) Janklow, Morton, 53–55, 131; and the Mailer/Vidal feud, 54; and Nesbit, 58, 74; and Safire, 3, 53; and Steel, 53, 55; and Vidal, 98; on Vitale, 58. See also Nesbit, Lynn; Safire, William; Steel, Danielle; Vidal, Gore; Vitale, Alberto Jaws (Benchley), 46 Jemisin, N. K., 245n77 Jerome Foundation, 140. See also nonprofits Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 176 Johnson, Charles, 199 Johnson, Denis, 128–29, 163, 175; and Graywolf Press, 128; The Stars at Noon, 113. See also Graywolf Press; Port Townsend Johnson, James Weldon: and Mencken’s The American Mercury, 30 Johnson, Lynda Bird, 88 Johnson, Mat, 164 Jonathan Cape, 44, 188–89 Jones, Gayl: and Morrison, 109. See also Morrison, Toni Jones, James: and New American Library, 31 Jones, Tayari, 222 Jones, Tommy Lee: and Segal’s Love Story, 49 Jong, Erica: Fear of Flying, 48, 84 Jordan, June: and Morrison, 109. See also Morrison, Toni Jovanovich, William: on book publishing, 7 Joyce, James, 75, 249n70; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 84; Ulysses, 126. See also autofiction Jung, Carl, 76 Junger, Sebastian: The Perfect Storm, 179, 202. See also seafaring literature; W. W. Norton

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Kachka, Boris: on FSG under Holtzbrinck, 200; on Straus’s strategic hobnobbing, 77. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Straus, Roger Kakutani, Michiko: on Franzen’s Twenty-Seventh City, 200–201. See also Franzen, Jonathan Kamil, Susan, 251n39. See also subsidiary rights Kanellos, Nicolás, 149; on FSG and Hijuelos, 199. See also Arte Público Press; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Hijuelos, Oscar Karr, Mary, 132 Karunatilaka, Shehan, 165 Katchor, Ben, 207. See also graphic novels Katz, Don: and Audible, 214–15. See also audiobooks Katz, Steve: and the Fiction Collective (2), 137 Kaya Press, 165. See also nonprofits Kelley, William Melvin, 269n135; dem, 158 Kelman, James: and Norton, 190. See also W. W. Norton Kempf, Sherry: on Graywolf ’s community outreach goals, 140. See also Graywolf Press Kennedy, Jackie, 54 Kennedy, Robert F.: Thirteen Days, 171 Kennedy, Susan Petersen: and Riverhead, 222. See also Riverhead Kennedy, William: Ironweed, 45 Kenner, Hugh: on authorship, 8–9; The Pound Era, 19. See also authorship Kermode, Frank, 79 Kerouac, Jack: and FSG, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Kesey, Ken: and Port Townsend, 129; and Viking, 79. See also Port Townsend; Viking Kidd, Chip: and McCarthy, 120. See also cover design; Knopf; McCarthy, Cormac Kim, Annabel L.: on literature as performance, 258n124. See also autofiction Kincaid, Jamaica, 199 Kindle, Amazon, 21, 69–70, 212–14; and direct publishing, 70, 217–18. See also Amazon; ebooks; self-publishing King, Stephen, 3, 6, 24, 27, 46, 99, 103–6, 150, 198, 219, 222–23, 250n18, 251n25; as “Richard Bachman,” 104; Carrie, 103, 112; The Dark Half, 104; The Dark Tower series, 105–6, 110; and genre fiction, 10, 43; It, 104; Misery, 17, 104–5; Thinner (as “Bachman”), 104; The Tommyknockers, 104. See also horror

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Kingsnorth, Paul: and Graywolf Press, 135. See also Graywolf Press Kingsolver, Barbara, 67. See also middlebrow Kingston, Maxine Hong, 26, 39, 119, 157; and Chin, 161–62; Tripmaster Monkey, 162; The Woman Warrior, 85, 107, 162. See also Chin, Frank; multiculturalism Kirn, Walter, 210 Kitchen Sink Press, 205. See also graphic novels Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 181 Klein Foundation, 177 Klopfer, Donald: and Random House, 75–76, 78, 99, 209, 213, 219. See also Random House Kloske, Geoffrey: and Riverhead, 279n51. See also Riverhead Kmart: as bookseller, 64, 66. See also Borders; Waldenbooks Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 221; and autofiction, 19; My Struggle, 165. See also autofiction Knopf, 2–5, 13, 19, 31, 72–73, 77, 79–80, 119–20, 122, 152, 183, 196, 222, 275n157; colophon of, 3; and The New Yorker, 73, 103, 119, 122; under Random House, 5, 76, 125, 167, 201. See also Knopf, Alfred; Random House Knopf, Alfred, 127, 209. See also Knopf Konstantinou, Lee: on autofiction, 18, 96, 258n124. See also autofiction Koontz, Dean, 26–27, 43, 113, 117, 222 Korda, Michael: and Didion, 115; on Janklow, 53. See also Didion, Joan; Janklow, Morton Kornbluh, Anna: on anarcho-vitalism (vs. constructive projects), 244n59 Kornblum, Allan, 132, 139–41, 144, 149, 158–59, 161; and multiculturalism/diversity, 140–41, 161; and the NEA challenge grant, 144; as not a great date (for rich people), 134; and Walker, 134; and Yamashita, 158–59. See also Coffee House Press; Toothpaste Press Kornblum, Cinda, 132, 134. See also Coffee House Press; Toothpaste Press Kosinski, Jerzy, 77, 80; and mass-market publishing, 27 Kraf, Elaine: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions Krantz, Judith, 3, 6, 13, 20, 26–28, 46, 55–58, 131; and Helen Gurley Brown, 55–57; critical response to, 56–57, 123; and the desire to become number one, 56; I’ ll Take Manhattan, 56–57; and mass-market publishing, 27–28;

Mistral’s Daughter, 55–56; Princess Daisy, 55–57; Scruples, 55–58; Sex and Shopping, 56 Krantz, Steve: and Fritz the Cat, 55. See also Crumb, R.; Krantz, Judith Kraus, Chris: and autofiction, 95. See also autofiction Krauss, Nicole, 163, 202 Kumin, Maxine, 177 Kundiman, 220. See also Asian American literature Kunitz, Stanley, 177 lad lit, 20, 67, 170. See also chick lit; Palahniuk, Chuck; Welsh, Irvine; W. W. Norton Lambert, Josh: on Lish, 249n88; on women and shitty media men, 257n71. See also Lish, Gordon; sexism Lamm, Donald, 180, 201; on fiction, 176; and Howard, 189, 191; on Polly Norton, 171; on Norton’s independence, 170–71; on readership and the industry, 172, 175; and Schiffrin, 167–68, 172. See also Howard, Gerald; Schiffrin, André; W. W. Norton L’Amour, Louis, 60; and Fawcett, 32. See also Western Lane, Allen: and Weybright, 30–31. See also Penguin; Weybright, Victor Lane, John: and Copper Canyon Press, 129, 150; and Hub City Press, 150, 165. See also Copper Canyon Press; Hamill, Sam; Port Townsend Lannan, Patrick: and Graywolf Press, 149. See also Graywolf Press Lannan Foundation: and Graywolf Press, 149. See also Graywolf Press Larsen, Nella, 168 Laster, Owen: on the “suddenly glamorous” book business, 99. See also Michener, James; Vidal, Gore Last Thing He Wanted, The (Didion), 10, 17, 113, 115–17, 124, 223, 262n73. See also Didion, Joan Lattany, Kristin: The Lakestown Rebellion, 158 Lau, Jamie Marina, 165 Laughlin, James, 126–31, 133, 136, 264n3; as independently wealthy, 126, 147, 209; and New World Writing, 31; on Schiffrin’s firing, 127; and Walker, 128, 130–31, 133. See also New Directions; nonprofits; Port Townsend; Walker, Scott

i n dex Lawrence, D. H., 31 Lawrence, Starling (“Star”), 202, 208; and the fictionification of W. W. Norton, 176–80; on O’Brian’s humor, 178; on Mosley’s appetite for racial equity, 187; on Palahniuk’s Fight Club, 192; on Welsh’s work, 189. See also Mosley, Walter; O’Brian, Patrick; Palahniuk, Chuck; W. W. Norton le Carré, John, 245n6 LeClair, Tom: on the “systems novel,” 262n73 Lee, Chang-Rae, 222 Lee, James Kyung-Jin: on Yamashita and multiculturalism, 269n141. See also multiculturalism; Yamashita, Karen Tei Lee, Rachel: on Yamashita’s early novels, 159. See also Yamashita, Karen Tei Le Guin, Ursula K., 60; The Left Hand of Darkness, 107. See also feminism Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher: on Crichton’s Disclosure, 123; on Doctorow’s Loon Lake, 248n67; on Doctorow’s Ragtime, 37; on Doctorow’s World’s Fair, 57; on Krantz’s I’ ll Take Manhattan (as “unlovable”), 57, 123. See also Crichton, Michael; Doctorow, E. L.; Krantz, Judith Leilani, Raven, 279n53 Lengel, William, 83, 246n17. See also Fawcett; Jaffe, Rona L’Engle, Madeleine: A Wrinkle in Time, 197 Lennon, J. Robert, 164 Leonard, John: on Lurie’s Real People, 90. See also Real People (Lurie) Lerner, Ben, 165; and autofiction, 19, 96, 223. See also autofiction Lethem, Jonathan, 223 letterpress publishing, 128–30, 132, 149; and poetry, 129 Levi, Primo: and Calvino, 204; The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 20, 170, 204–5, 210; If This Is a Man, 204; and Jewishness, 204. See also W. W. Norton Levine, Philip: and Graywolf Press, 128. See also Graywolf Press Levinson, Barry: and Disclosure, 122. See also Crichton, Michael Lewis, Sinclair: and Mencken’s The American Mercury, 30 Leyner, Mark, 15 Li, Yiyun, 223. See also autofiction

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Libman, Ben: on Sontag, 256n47, 259n128. See also Sontag, Susan libraries, 172 Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund, 140, 144–48, 222. See also nonprofits; Wallace, DeWitt; Wallace, Lila Lillenstein, Maxwell: on bookselling, 7 Lim, Eugene, 165 Limbaugh, Rush, 194 Lindsey, Johanna, 50 Lippincott: and O’Brian, 177. See also O’Brian, Patrick Lish, Gordon, 249n88, 258n116; and Carver, 128, 242n36, 249n88, 264n10; and creative writing programs, 45. See also Carver, Raymond Literary Hub, 216, 221 Little, Brown, 4–5, 21, 77, 80, 222; and Time Inc./ Time Warner, 5, 14–17 Liveright, 209. See also Liveright, Horace; Weil, Robert; W. W. Norton Liveright, Horace: Boni & Liveright, 30, 209. See also Boni, Albert; Random House Locke, Alain: and New World Writing, 31 Lockhart, 129. See also Port Townsend loneliness: and book publishing (at Norton), 208; and entertainment (for Wallace), 15; in Fight Club, 191; of novelists, 241n22; occasional (in Sleepless Nights), 94; of Steel’s childhood, 47 Looking for Alaska (Green), 218. See also young adult fiction Loomis, Bob, 108; and Kosinski, 80; and Styron, 77–78. See also Kosinski, Jerzy; Random House; Styron, William Loomis, Gloria: and Mosley, 186. See also agents; Mosley, Walter Loos, Anita: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 209 Lopez, Barry: and Port Townsend, 129. See also Port Townsend Lord of the Flies (Golding), 23–24 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 10, 23–24, 26, 60–61, 178–79 Lorde, Audre: and Kitchen Table, 181. See also feminism Lorentzen, Christian: on autofiction, 97, 258n124. See also authorship; autofiction Lost Horizon (Hilton), 28 Lovecraft, H. P.: and Ballantine, 61. See also Ballantine; fantasy

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Lowell, Robert, 87; and FSG, 197; and Galassi, 198; and Hardwick, 95; and The New York Review of Books, 76. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Galassi, Jonathan; Hardwick, Elizabeth Lucas, Lisa: on crediting and collective authorship, 240n20. See also authorship Luciano, Jeannie, 208. See also W. W. Norton Luey, Beth: on romance novels in 1979, 51. See also romance Luhmann, Niklas, 84–85 Luiselli, Valeria, 165 Lurie, Alison, 86–92, 96, 98, 116, 123: and the Book Review Index, 77; and the Epsteins, 75, 77, 86–88; and Fox, 80, 87; Invisible Friends, 86–87; Love and Friendship, 86; and The New York Review of Books, 86, 88; Real People, 87–90, 94, 96; and Roth, 86–89, 95; and Yaddo, 86–89. See also Epstein, Jason; Epstein (née Zimmerman), Barbara; Fox, Joe; Roth, Philip MacArthur grant, 118, 135, 179, 223. See also prizes, literary Macdonald, Dwight: on Epstein, 75. See also Epstein, Jason MacDonald, George: and Ballantine, 61. See also Ballantine; fantasy Machado, Carmen Maria, 165 MacKinnon, Catharine: Sexual Harassment of Working Women, 122. See also sexism; sexual harassment MacLeish, Archibald, 30, 247n34. See also New Yorker Macmillan, 4–5, 86, 202, 211; acquisition of, 5, 7, 208; and multiculturalism, 242n40; and the trade paperback, 174–75. See also St. Martin’s Press Magic Mountain, The (Mann), 129. See also Mann, Thomas; Port Townsend Mailer, Beverly, 89 Mailer, Norman, 248n46; and autofiction, 85; and Dial, 34, 80; on “Gentile girls,” 89; Harlot’s Ghost, 113; and mass-market publishing, 27; and New American Library, 31; The Prisoner of Sex, 85; and Town Bloody Hall, 85; and Vidal, 54 Major, Clarence: and the Fiction Collective (2), 137

Malamud, Bernard, 77, 79; and FSG, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Mandingo (Onstott), 30 manga, 207. See also graphic novels Mankell, Henning, 21. See also New Press Mann, Thomas, 31, The Magic Mountain, 129 Manshel, Alexander: on writers of color and historical fiction, 45, 143, 157 Margolis, Esther: and the author tour, 100, 102; and Newmarket Press, 102. See also author tours; Bantam marketing, 28, 85; “aggressive,” 120; authenticity as, 126, 155; bestseller lists as, 43; departments, 6, 151, 208, 210; gimmicks, 37, 50, 56, 65, 96, 100–101, 179; internalization of, 245n76; reviews as, 76–77; and social media, 216; and television, 44, 100–101, 103. See also author tours; publicists Markson, David: The Ballad of Dingus Magee, 112–13; and the rejection of narration, 116 Marmur, Mildred, 251n39; and Doctorow’s Ragtime. See also Ragtime (Doctorow); subsidiary rights Márquez, Gabriel García, 159 Martin, George R. R.: word processor of, 9–10 Mason, Alane: and Dubus III’s The House of Sand and Fog, 202. See also W. W. Norton Mason, Bobbie Ann, and minimalism, 143. See also minimalism mass-market publishing, 10, 19–20, 23–70, 74–75, 112, 131; and access, 26–27, 32, 68–69; decline of, 68–70, 212, 214; and distribution, 42–43, 59, 113; and genre fiction, 27, 29, 32, 43, 58–60, 69, 112–13; and readership, 4, 20, 32. See also Pocket Books materiality: and literary production, 9–10; middlebrow, 69 Mathis, Ayana, 222 Matthiessen, Peter, 98; and Epstein, 80; and Fox, 174; on Sag Harbor hangs, 78. See also Epstein, Jason; Fox, Joe; Sag Harbor Maxwell, Robert: and Macmillan, 7 Maxwell, William, 80 Mayerson, Charlotte: and Random House, 108. See also Random House McBride, James, 222 McCarthy, Cormac, 26, 117–21, 196; All the Pretty Horses, 13, 120–21, 124; Blood Meridian, 13, 118, 120–21; Child of God, 118; and Erskine, 4,

i n dex 80, 117–18; and Fisketjon, 120; and genre fiction, 10, 20, 60, 73, 121, 188; and Mehta, 119–20; and Nesbit, 118–19; The Orchard Keeper, 117–18; Outer Dark, 118; and poor sales, 118, 174; and the Pulitzer, 121; and Random House, 4, 117–18; The Road, 121; Suttree, 117, 119; and Urban, 119–20. See also Erskine, Albert; Fisketjon, Gary; Mehta, Sonny; Nesbit, Lynn; Urban, Amanda (“Binky”) McCarthy, Mary, 77, 80, 82, 88, 94, 115 McCarthy, Paul, 242n36 McCarthy, Tom: Remainder, 162 McCrae, Fiona: and Graywolf Press, 149, 153, 166; and Everett, 153, 155, 157. See also Everett, Percival; Graywolf Press McDonald, Errol: and Random House, 108. See also Random House McDonnell, Terry: and Literary Hub, 216 McFeely, Drake, 208; on Bertelsmann’s “empire,” 201–2. See also Bertelsmann; W. W. Norton McGann, Jerome: on the text’s materiality/ sociality, 9–10 McGill, Meredith: on the “magnetic appeal of the author,” 241n22. See also authorship McGinnis, Meredith, 208. See also marketing; W. W. Norton McGrath, Laura: on comps and white hegemony, 274n124; on literary agents, 54, 67. See also agents; whiteness McGrath, Sarah: and Riverhead, 279n51. See also Riverhead McGraw Hill, 80 McGuane, Thomas, 173–74; and Penguin, 173; and Vintage, 174. See also Penguin; Vintage McGuire, Richard, 262n71 McGurl, Mark: on autofiction, 18; on creative writing programs, 17–19, 38–39, 162–63; Everything and Less, 217; on “high cultural pluralism,” 142; The Program Era, 19, 162–63; on the self-reflexive production of modernist artist, 84. See also creative writing programs McHale, Brian: on historiographic metafiction, 249n70. See also historiographic metafiction McInerney, Jay, 120, 173–74; Bright Lights, Big City, 66, 173–74, 271n28. See also Vintage McIntosh, Madeline, 213 McKay, Nellie: and the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 182

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McLean, Duncan: and Norton, 190. See also W. W. Norton McMahon, Ed: as reader (and drinker), 118. See also McCarthy, Cormac McMillan, Terry, 26, 187; Waiting to Exhale, 181 McMurtry, Larry, 207; and genre fiction, 60, 205; Lonesome Dove, 45 McPhee, John: and FSG, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux McPherson, Sandra: and Graywolf Press, 130. See also Graywolf Press McSweeney’s, 18 Medd, Jodie: on the results of bonds between modernist authors and patrons, 266n37 mediation: of the author/publisher relationship, 11, 18, 54; of female power, 89–90 Mehta, Sonny: and Crichton, 122, 124; and Ellis, 195–96; and McCarthy, 119–20; and Pavlin, 222; and Picador, 119–20; and Random House, 74, 119–20, 124–25, 127, 195–96. See also Crichton, Michael; Ellis, Bret Easton; McCarthy, Cormac; Random House Mellon Foundation, 140, 144–48, 222. See also nonprofits Mencken, H. L.: The American Mercury, 30; Black Mask, 59, 247n42. See also mystery Mendelson, Edward: on The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 204. See also Levi, Primo; W. W. Norton Mengiste, Maaza, 202 Mentor, 33. See also New American Library Meredith, Scott, 53 Merker, Kim, 130. See also letterpress publishing Merritt Communications: and oceanic lit, 179. See also seafaring literature Merton, Thomas: and New World Writing, 31 Metzenbaum, Howard M.: and conglomerates, 6–7 Michel, Lincoln, 269n150 Michener, James, 24, 65, 68, 99, 114, 118; and the Book Review Index, 77; The Novel, 251n39; and Random House, 71–72, 80, 86, 98. See also middlebrow middlebrow, 24, 32–33, 51, 61, 67– 69, 98, 114, 121, 139; materiality, 69; and modernism, 246n18. See also highbrow; popularity vs. prestige Milkweed Editions, 20, 135, 146, 149, 152, 158. See also nonprofits

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Miller, Frank: The Dark Knight, 206. See also graphic novels Miller, Henry: and Laughlin’s New Directions, 126; on mass-market paperbacks (as trash), 27. See also mass-market publishing; New Directions Miller, Judith: Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, 73. See also Epstein, Jason Miller, Laura: on rationalization of bookselling, 63, 67. See also rationalization Miller, Nolan, 56 Millett, Kate: Sexual Politics, 85, 90 Mills & Boon: marketing practices of, 50. See also Harlequin Miłosz, Czesław, 198 Mimeo Revolution, 128 minimalism, 38, 44–45, 128, 143, 249n88 Minnesota State Arts Board, 140. See also nonprofits Mirvis, Tova, 202 Misery (King), 17, 104–5. See also King, Stephen misogyny: and the poetry scene, 256n65; at Random House, 20; of Wallace 16. See also sexism; sexual harassment Mixed Blood Theatre Company, 132–33. See also grants; nonprofits Moby-Dick (Melville), 121, 179; and gender, 95. See also seafaring literature Modern Library series, 75–76, 209, 219. See also Boni & Liveright; Random House modernism: and creative writing programs, 19; and freedom, 246n18; and Mailer, 248n46; and mass-market houses, 31–32; as “public good,” 247n34; and the self-reflexive, 84–85. See also New Directions Momaday, N. Scott: House Made of Dawn, 80, 180 Monroe, Marilyn, 35. See also Ragtime (Doctorow) Montale, Eugenio, 198. See also Galassi, Jonathan Moore, Alan, 207; Watchmen, 206. See also graphic novels Moore, Demi: and Disclosure, 122. See also Crichton, Michael Moore, Lorrie, 73, 164 Moore, Wayétu, 165 Moran, Joe: on autofiction and public authorship, 85, 258n124. See also autofiction Moravia, Alberto: and FSG, 196–97. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Moretti, Franco: on the “slaughterhouse of literature,” 246n8 Morris, William: and Ballantine, 61. See also Ballantine; fantasy Morris, Wright: Plains Song, 45 Morrison, Toni, 26, 38–40, 53, 73, 108–12, 131, 150, 157, 187, 196, 260n36; Beloved, 10, 17, 45–46, 110–13, 124–25, 152, 157, 182–83, 275n157; and Bernstein, 78, 108; The Black Book, 110, 181; The Bluest Eye, 52, 109, 125, 215; on conglomeration, 110; as editor, 108–10, 184, 261n41; and Forrest, 109, 184; and genre fiction, 10, 20, 73, 112–13, 262n73; and Gottlieb, 109; Home, 215; and Levi’s work, 204; A Mercy, 109; and the National Endowment for the Arts, 44, 131, 134, 143–44; Playing in the Dark, 168; prizes/ awards of, 45, 110–11, 157, 168; and Random House, 78, 80, 108–11, 137, 181; Song of Solomon, 110, 112; Sula, 80, 109–10; Tar Baby, 112, 131, 215; on the whiteness of the publishing world, 182–83 Mosley, Walter, 20, 159, 170, 183, 193, 205, 273n98; Devil in a Blue Dress, 186–87, 210; and Norton, 186–89, 202, 207; and serialization, 186–87; on white publishing, 186–87, 189. See also W. W. Norton Mueenuddin, Daniyal, 202 Mueller, Cookie: Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, 95 Muhammad, Ismail: and post-2016 fiction from black writers, 279n53 multiculturalism, 14, 17, 212, 220, 222–23, 242n40; anti-, 159–60, 164, 269n141; and ethnic studies, 137, 160; and FSG, 198–99; highbrow, 182–84; and historical fiction, 45; illusion of, 150; lowbrow, 184–86; Multi-Cultural Literacy, 139–40; and nonprofits, 10, 137–41, 146, 149–40, 152–66, 168, 182; and Norton, 183–87, 198–99; and Random House, 73, 137; and women, 161. See also diversity; whiteness Munro, Alice, 73 Murakami, Haruki, 196 Murdoch, Rupert: and HarperCollins, 7, 124. See also HarperCollins Murray, Gerald: and Forrest’s work, 184. See also Forrest, Leon Murray, Simone: on authors and online promotion, 216. See also social media

i n dex mystery, 43, 59–60, 81, 112–13, 205, 223; and Dell, 32; and ebooks, 214. See also genre fiction n+1: on the two paths for the novel, 162–63. See also creative writing programs Nabokov, Vladimir, 80; and autofiction, 18, 84–85; Despair, 113; Lolita, 75, 197, 255n19. See also autofiction Nadell, Bonnie: and Wallace, 15, 17. See also Wallace, David Foster Nader, Ralph: and Schiffrin, 1. See also Schiffrin, André Nathan, Patrick, 165 National Book Award, 13, 27, 44, 57, 71, 79, 81, 121, 135, 159, 162, 168, 201–2, 221, 223 National Book Critics Circle Award, 29, 41, 46–47, 71, 91, 126, 135–36. See also prizes, literary National Book Foundation: recognition of Stephen King, 104. See also King, Stephen National Endowment for the Arts, 131–33, 140–45, 149, 151, 164; and democracy, 142, 150; and minimalism, 45, 143; and the push for broader representation/diversity, 44–45, 140–41, 143, 146, 157. See also nonprofits Native American fiction, 80, 158, 180 Navarre Jr., Carl: and Atlantic Monthly Press, 169. See also Atlantic Monthly Press Naylor, Gloria, 120, 175 NBM Graphic Novels, 205. See also graphic novels Nelson, Deborah: on the prominent women writers at The New York Review of Books, 115 Nelson, Maggie, and autofiction, 95; and Graywolf Press, 135. See also autofiction; Graywolf Press Nesbit, Lynn, 53, 74; and Crichton, 122; and Didion, 116; and Janklow, 58, 74; and McCarthy, 118–19. See also Crichton, Michael; Didion, Joan; Janklow, Morton; McCarthy, Cormac Netflix, 212 New American Library, 2, 4–6, 22, 29–37; and black writers, 30; and Doctorow, 20, 29, 32–34, 36–37, 78, 175; “Jewish seat” at, 29, 37; and King, 104; and mass-market publishing, 4, 27, 29, 32; under Penguin, 69, 175; under Times Mirror, 5–6, 22, 33–34, 37, 69, 175, 193. See also mass-market publishing New Directions, 126–31, 136–37, 147, 206, 209; whiteness of, 137. See also Laughlin, James; nonprofits

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Newhouse, Si: acquisitions of, 7, 58, 73, 101, 103, 119, 124; attempted acquisitions of, 197; and Bernstein’s firing, 73, 101, 119–20, 222; and Roy Cohn, 101. See also Random House; New Yorker Newmarket Press, 102 New Press, 21, 150, 165, 206; and minority hiring, 181; and Norton, 167–68, 206. See also nonprofits; Schiffrin, André; W. W. Norton News Corp: and HarperCollins, 7 Newton, Huey: and Morrison, 109. See also Morrison, Toni New Yorker, 7, 30, 90, 93, 204; fiction of, 62, 73; and Gottlieb, 73, 119, 122; and Knopf, 73, 103, 119, 122. See also Gottlieb, Robert; Knopf New York Review Books, 221. See also translation New York Review of Books, 76–77, 82, 88, 91–93, 95, 115, 221 Nishikawa, Kinohi: on black postmodern satire, 269n135; on racism and the demise of Black Arts, 181. See also Black Arts Movement Nixon, Richard, 3, 23, 35, 53 Nobel Prize, 27, 87, 111, 168. See also prizes, literary nonprofits, 13, 19–20, 126–69, 208, 210, 212, 222; and donor expectations, 135–36, 140–41, 143–44, 146, 151, 169; and the literature of embodiment, 151–56; and multiculturalism, 10, 137–41, 146, 149–40, 152–66, 168, 182; and the NEA, 143, 145; and poetry, 136. See also Coffee House Press; grants; Graywolf Press; Milkweed Editions; National Endowment for the Arts; New Press Noonan, Peggy: victim-blaming of, 263n107. See also sexual harassment Norris, Frank, 243n51 North, Rusty: and Sagittarius, 129. See also Port Townsend Norton. See W. W. Norton Norton, Polly: and employee ownership at W. W. Norton, 170–71, 193. See also W. W. Norton Norton, William Warder, 170–71. See also W. W. Norton Notley, Alice, 139 novelization, 6, 47, 49, 62, 105, 221 Oates, Joyce Carol, 80, 115; on autofiction, 216; and social media, 216

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O’Brian, Patrick, 20, 170, 177–79, 186–89, 192, 202, 205, 207; Aubrey/Maturin series, 177; The Commodore, 179; and female readers, 178; Master and Commander, 177, 186, 210; Testimonies, 177. See also Lawrence, Starling (“Star”); W. W. Norton O’Brien, Geoffrey: on Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, 94. See also Hardwick, Elizabeth O’Brien, John, 149, 221. See also Dalkey Archive O’Brien, Tim: In the Lake of the Woods, 262n73 obscenity, 31–32, 255n19. See also Caldwell, Erskine; Faulkner, William; Nabokov, Vladimir; Spillane, Mickey; Wilson, Edmund O’Connor, Flannery, 79; and FSG, 197; and New World Writing, 31. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Offill, Jenny: and autofiction, 96, 222. See also autofiction O’Hara, Frank: and Epstein, 75; and Lurie, 86. See also Epstein, Jason; Lurie, Alison O’Hara, John, 32, 80 Olson, Peggy, 81 Ondaatje, Michael, 176 O’Neill, Joseph: Netherland, 162 Open Letter Books, 165, 221. See also translation Oprah, 66, 156, 201; Oprah’s Book Club, 121, 201–2, 251n39. See also book clubs; middlebrow orange: A Clockwork Orange (Burgess), 180; mousse (hard-on-dipped, in Fight Club), 191; Tropic of Orange (Yamashita), 159, 162. See also Burgess, Anthony; Fight Club (Palahniuk); Orange, Tommy; Trump, Donald; Yamashita, Karen Tei Orange, Tommy, 222 Osnos, Peter: and Judith Miller, 73 Otsuka, Julie, 222 Oyeyemi, Helen, 222 Ozeki, Ruth, 262n71; muses of, 9 Ozick, Cynthia, 249n88; and The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 203. See also Babel, Isaac; W. W. Norton Page-Fort, Gabriella: optimism about globalization, 221. See also Amazon; translation Pakalik, Eugenia, 208. See also W. W. Norton Palahniuk, Chuck, 20, 67, 196, 202, 210; Fight Club, 170, 190–93, 210, 223; Invisible Monsters, 190

Paley, Grace, 39, 79–80, 97, 200, 249n88; “A Conversation with my Father,” 85–86; Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 98; and FSG, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paley, William, 54. See also CBS Pan, Florence: and the PRH/S&S merger deal, 211. See also antitrust law; Penguin Random House; Simon & Schuster Pantheon, 1–2, 5, 9, 21–22, 72–73, 76, 125, 127, 136, 167, 201; and the avant-garde, 13; and graphic novels, 206–7; mass quitting at (in response to Schiffrin’s firing), 2, 71, 127, 206–7, 242n43. See also graphic novels; Random House; Schiffrin, André Paramount, 49, 69, 194–95. See also Gulf + Western; Simon & Schuster Parks, Carole: and Morrison, 109. See also Morrison, Toni Partisan Review, 32, 77, 82, 93, 177 Pasternak, Boris: Doctor Zhivago, 76 Patterson, James, 19, 219, 222, 251n25; and ghostwriters, 279n48 Patterson, Richard North, 13, 113, 117 Pavlin, Jordan, 222 Payback Books, 186 Peacock, Allen: firing of, 195. See also Simon & Schuster Peele, Thomas: on queerness in Fight Club, 273n118. See also Fight Club (Palahniuk) PEN, 7, 98, 184, 186; Ernest Hemingway Prize, 93, 98; publishing day for minorities, 186; study on race/equity in book publishing, 220. See also prizes, literary Penguin, 21, 25, 181; and graphic novels, 207; and mass-market publishing, 4, 30–31; and New American Library, 69, 175; and paperback originals (Contemporary American Fiction series), 65–66, 120, 172–75, 180, 193–94; and seafaring literature, 179; Viking Penguin, 181, 207; Writers from the Other Europe series, 275n151. See also Penguin Putnam; Penguin Random House; Riverhead Penguin Putnam, 125, 279n51. See also Penguin; Putnam; Random House Penguin Random House, 2, 69, 207, 211–12, 213, 221; and the Department of Justice / Simon & Schuster, 211–12, 219. See also Bantam; Berkley; Crown; Dell; Dial; DK; Doubleday; Dutton; Knopf; New American Library;

i n dex Penguin; Pantheon; Putnam; Random House; Viking Percy, Walker, 79–80; and FSG, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Perkins, Maxwell, 16, 240n20; on authorship and invisible collaboration, 8. See also authorship Petry, Ann: and New American Library, 30 Petterson, Per: Out Stealing Horses, 221 Phillips, Jayne Anne: and minimalism, 143. See also minimalism Picador, 119–20, 199. See also Mehta, Sonny; trade publishing Picoult, Jodi, 26, 67, 208 Pietsch, Michael: and Mosley, 187; and Wallace / Little, Brown, 14–17, 187. See also Crown; Little, Brown; Hachette Book Group; Mosley, Walter; Scribner; Wallace, David Foster Pimp (Slim), 30; 185–86. See also Slim, Iceberg Pinckney, Darryl: and Hardwick, 93; High Cotton, 199. See also Hardwick, Elizabeth Pinsky, Robert, 198 Piper, Andrew: on fiction and the embodied encounter, 151 Planck, Max, 171 Plath, Sylvia, 93 Plume: and the trade paperback, 174 Pocket Books, 47–48, 52, 55, 242n36; and genre fiction, 59–60, 178; going-public of, 33; and mass-market publishing, 4, 28–32, 46, 48, 68–69, 74, 131; and the public domain, 32. See also CBS; mass-market publishing Podhoretz, Norman, 87 popularity vs. prestige, 26–29, 32, 36, 40–46, 57–58, 103–5, 112–14, 265n34. See also highbrow; middlebrow Porter, Arabel: and New World Writing, 31 Portis, Charles, 80 Port Townsend: and the nonprofit publishing movement, 20, 127–31, 150. See also nonprofits Post, Chad: and Open Letter, 221. See also Open Letter Books; translation postmodernism: and fiction, 39–40, 44, 46. See also historiographic metafiction Pound, Ezra, 128–29, 245n6; Make it New, 91; and New Directions, 126, 128, 136; and wealthy donors, 133, 266n37. See also New Directions; Speedboat (Adler) Powell, Anthony, 176

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Powers, Richard, 200, 262n71; Orfeo, 208; The Overstory, 208; Prisoner’s Dilemma, 208. See also Glusman, John pregnancy: in Beloved (Morrison), 152; in Going Home (Steel), 48; in Speedboat (Adler), 91– 93 Prentice Hall, 103 Prestige, 200 Price, Leah: on the publishing industry and great novels, 239n12; on reading’s many forms, 214. See also audiobooks; ebooks; reading Price, Richard, 173 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (GrahameSmith), 220 Princess Bride, The (Goldman), 62 prizes, literary: 27–29, 43–45, 61, 118, 163; and historical fiction, 40–41, 44–45, 57–58, 157; and presumed value, 40. See also American Academy of Arts and Letters award; Guggenheim Foundation grant; MacArthur grant; National Book Award; National Book Critics Circle Award; Nobel Prize; PEN: Ernest Hemingway Prize; popularity vs. prestige; Pulitzer Prize; Rockefeller Foundation grant Promise, The, 49–51, 53. See also Steel, Danielle Prose, Francine, 92; Babel’s influence on, 203. See also Babel, Isaac protest: over low wages, 219–20; over Peacock’s firing, 195; over Schiffrin’s firing, 2, 71, 101, 127, 146, 206–7, 242n43; over the Vietnam War, 23 Pruett, Jordan, 270n155; on historical novels, 40. See also historical fiction public domain, 5, 32. See also copyright publicists, 96, 99–102, 150, 180; and influencers, 216; as powerful women, 102. See also author tours; Brockett, Louise; Friedman, Jane; marketing Puig, Manuel, 195 Pulitzer Prize, 27, 33, 40, 44–45, 110, 121, 135, 168, 208, 223. See also prizes, literary pulp, 29–30, 32, 44, 59, 72, 74, 84, 112, 121, 170, 183–85 Putnam, 2, 53, 86, 103, 222, 279n51. See also Penguin Putnam; Riverhead Puzo, Mario: and Evans, 13; The Godfather, 46. See also Evans, Joni Pym, Barbara: Excellent Women, 68

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Pynchon, Thomas, 25–26, 38–40, 92, 97, 114, 162, 262n73; The Crying of Lot 49, 113; Gravity’s Rainbow, 25, 27, 68, 79, 245n6; “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” 183; Mason & Dixon, 39; and the mass market, 27, 32; “The Secret Integration,” 183; V., 27 Pyr Books, 60 QB Bad Boy and Me, The (Marley), 217. See also Wattpad Queen, Ellery, 81 Queneau, Raymond: and New Directions, 136. See also New Directions Quinn, John: and Pound, 133, 266n37. See also Pound, Ezra Quinto Sol, 158 Quirk Books, 220 Rabinowitz, Paula: on modernism and mass-market houses, 31 Rachlin, Nahid: Foreigner, 176 Radway, Janice: on category books, 58; on literary taste, 245n6; on romance’s popularity (and increased access), 63. See also genre fiction Ragtime (Doctorow), 20, 29, 34–36, 40–41, 46, 55–58, 71, 173, 247n27; awards/prizes for, 41, 46, 71; critical response to, 37; film version, 35; Jameson on, 29, 35; marketing gimmicks for, 37; and temporality, 35 Rahv, Philip, 77 Ramey, Mark: on queerness in Fight Club, 273n118. See also Fight Club (Palahniuk) Rand, Ayn: The Fountainhead, 68 Random House, 1–4, 12–13, 30–31, 36–37, 71–101, 106–27, 136–37, 146, 174, 177, 195–96, 198, 207, 209, 211, 213, 219; acquisitions/mergers of, 12, 22, 73, 76, 125, 167; and autofiction (by women), 86–99; and Bertelsmann, 2, 7, 69, 73, 124–25, 201–2, 209; colophon of, 3; and (apparent) diversity, 181, 183; and educational material, 78; going-public of, 5, 73, 76; and graphic novels, 207; and the Modern Library series, 75–76, 209, 219; and Newhouse, 7, 58, 73, 101; Random House AudioBooks, 101, 119, 213; Random House Fellowships, 79; Random House Worlds, 221; and RCA, 5–6, 36, 73, 78–79, 85, 101. See also Penguin Random House; Vintage

randomness: for Dohle, 219; and disturbing emotions (for Hardwick), 92; of Voltaire’s Candide’s house, 3. See also Random House Rankine, Claudia: and Graywolf Press, 135. See also Graywolf Press rationalization, 11, 18, 63, 67, 98–99, 113, 151, 169, 199, 213, 218–19, 261n41, 265n25. See also BookScan (Nielsen/NPD) RCA: and Random House, 5–6, 36, 73, 78–79, 85, 101. See also Random House Reader’s Digest: as middlebrow, 145. See also Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund; middlebrow readership: black, 30; increased, 4–5, 20, 26, 32, 41, 76; stagnating (for Lamm), 172; and television, 85. See also access reading: vs. idleness, 28; light (as preferred by Hoffman), 65; as penance, 157; stratified, 27; and voice, 4, 97, 188, 214–15 Reagan, Ronald, 45, 115, 137; and corporate consolidation, 7; and the NEA, 45, 142; “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (Ballard), 205 Real People (Lurie), 87–90, 94, 96. See also Lurie, Alison Reed, Ishmael, 39, 80, 170; Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 165 Reid, Calvin: on the whiteness of the publishing industry, 180–81. See also whiteness Reidy, Carolyn, 251n39. See also subsidiary rights Reuler, Jack: and the Mixed Blood Theatre Company, 132–33 Rexroth, Kenneth, 133, 265n20; and New Directions, 128. See also New Directions Reznikoff, Charles, 243n51 Rhodes, David, 165 Rice, Anne: Interview with a Vampire, 112 Richards, Maggie: and National Poetry Month, 198. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Riker, Martin, 165 Riverhead, 21, 200, 279n51; and genre fiction, 222. See also genre fiction; Penguin; Putnam Robbins, Harold: and mass-market publishing, 26–27 Robbins, Henry: and Didion, 115–16. See also Didion, Joan; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Simon & Schuster Robinson, Kim Stanley, 245n77 Robinson, Marilynne, 26, 199–200. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux

i n dex Rockcastle, Mary, 165 Rockefeller Foundation grant, 118. See also prizes, literary Rogers, Henry: and Krantz, 56. See also Krantz, Judith Rogers, Rosemary, 50 Roiphe, Anne: Up the Sandbox!, 84 Roland, Edwin: on novels of nonprofit publishers vs. Random House, 151–53. See also Sinykin, Dan romance: black, 181–82; and chain bookstores, 63, 65; and ebooks, 214; and mass-market publishing, 28–29, 43–45, 47–55, 59, 70, 112; and Wattpad, 217; and women writers, 95. See also genre fiction; Steel, Danielle Romtvedt, David: and Port Townsend, 130; on Schiffrin’s firing, 265n21; and Walker, 130. See also Port Townsend; Schiffrin, André; Walker, Scott Rooney, Sally, 223. See also autofiction Roots (Haley), 44–46 Rosen, Jeremy: on literary writers’ use of genre, 113. See also genre fiction Ross, Fran, 269n135 Ross, Harold, 30. See also New Yorker Ross, Steve: on the “third age of television,” 14–15. See also television; Time Warner Rosset, Barney: and Grove, 137, 169, 209. See also Grove Roth, Henry: Mercy of a Rude Stream, 203 Roth, Philip, 26, 39–40, 79, 92, 124, 262n73; and autofiction, 18, 86, 94; Babel’s influence on, 203; and the Book Review Index, 77; The Counterlife, 197; and Czech writers, 13, 275n151; and Epstein, 77, 85, 89; and Fox, 79, 81, 89; and FSG, 194, 197, 247n27, 275n151; Goodbye, Columbus, 81; Letting Go, 81–82; and Levi, 204; and Lurie, 86–89, 95; and mass-market publishing, 26–27; My Life as a Man, 85; Portnoy’s Complaint, 89; and Simon & Schuster, 194, 247n27; and Talese, 81–82; When She Was Good, 89. See also autofiction; Epstein, Jason; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Fox, Joe; Levi, Primo; Lurie, Alison; Talese, Nan A. Routledge, 21 Rower, Ann: If You’re a Girl, 95 Rukeyser, Muriel, 243n51

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Rush, Norman, 175 Rushdie, Salman, 119, 247n27; Midnight’s Children, 39–40 Rusoff, Marly: on publicists before 1970, 102. See also Doubleday; publicists Russ, Joanna: The Female Man, 107 Russell, Bertrand, 171 Russell, Karen, 222 Russo, Richard, 175 Sacco, Joe: and Fantagraphics, 206. See also Fantagraphics; graphic novels Sáez, Elena Machado: on “market aesthetics,” 157–58 Safire, William: and Janklow, 3, 53; on Clarence Thomas, 263n107. See also Janklow, Morton; Nixon, Richard; Thomas, Clarence Safran Foer, Jonathan, 163, 223 Sag Harbor, 77–78, 97 Sagittarius, 129. See also Port Townsend Said, Edward: and Schiffrin, 1. See also Schiffrin, André Salinger, J. D., 23–25, 114; The Catcher in the Rye, 23–24, 197, 271n28; and New American Library, 31 Salter, James, 78, 80 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio: on Flatiron Books and Cummins’s American Dirt, 242n40. See also multiculturalism Sandford, John, 219 Sarabande Books, 165. See also nonprofits Sargent, John: and Galassi, 199–200. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Holtzbrinck Sarnoff, David: and the destruction of Chomsky’s Counter-Revolutionary Violence, 254n5 Sarraute, Nathalie, 92, 94; Planetarium, 165 Sarton, May: and cats, 176, 189. See also W. W. Norton Satrapi, Marjane: Persepolis, 207. See also graphic noves Saunders, George, 164, 222. See also creative writing programs Savage, Sam, 165 Schambelan, Elizabeth: on revisiting Krantz’s I’ ll Take Manhattan, 57. See also Krantz, Judith

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Schiffrin, André, 1–3, 21–22, 127; The Business of Books, 2–3; on Enoch and Weybright, 33; and FBI surveillance, 1; firing of, 1–2, 21–22, 58, 71–74, 101, 120, 127, 137, 146, 167, 172, 195, 206–7, 210, 242n43, 265n21; hiring of, 5, 22, 76; and Lamm, 167–68, 172; and multiculturalism, 168, 170, 181; and New American Library, 22, 30, 33; and The New Press, 21, 150, 165, 167, 181, 206; on Norton, 170; and Pantheon, 207 Schryer, Stephen: on Didion’s style, 115. See also Didion, Joan Schumacher, Julie: Dear Committee Members, 210 Schuster, Max, 209. See also Simon & Schuster Schwartz, Delmore: and New Directions, 126; on O’Brian’s Testimonies, 177. See also New Directions; O’Brian, Patrick Schwartz, Elizabeth: on early nonprofit letterpresses and gentrification, 134. See also letterpress publishing; nonprofits science fiction, 28, 35, 43, 57, 59–62, 112, 205; and ebooks, 214. See also genre fiction Scribner, 4, 15, 21; and the trade paperback, 174 Scruples (Krantz), 55–58. See also Krantz, Judith seafaring literature, 20, 177–79. See also O’Brian, Patrick Seajay, Carol: and the feminist bookstore movement, 107. See also feminism Sebold, Alice: The Lovely Bones, 67, 199 Segal, Erich: Love Story, 49. See also Promise, The Segal, Lore, 21. See also New Press Sehgal, Parul: on gendered borders in writing, 84 self-publishing, 67, 181–82, 217–18, 269n150 Semiotext(e): Native Agents series, 95 serialization, 6, 10, 28, 41, 43, 58, 60, 113, 169, 177–78; and Wattpad, 216 Seuss, Dr.: and Random House, 4, 75, 97 sexism: in publishing, 20, 73, 81–99, 107–8, 136, 176, 257n71; on Wall Street, 52. See also misogyny; sexual harassment Sexton, Kay, 135; and Graywolf Press, 138–39. See also B. Dalton; Graywolf Press sexual harassment: 122–23, 263n107, 263n110, 263n113. See also Disclosure (Crichton); misogyny; sexism; Thomas, Clarence; Trump, Donald Shakespeare, William, 31, 88 Shameless Hussy Press, 132

Shange, Ntozake: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, 132 Shapiro, Laura: on Krantz’s I’ ll Take Manhattan (as “unpleasant”), 57. See also Krantz, Judith Sheldon, Sidney, 131 Shoonover, Shirley: author tour of (to promote Mountain of Winter), 100. See also author tours Shreve, Anita, 67. See also middlebrow Shriver, Eunice, 88 Shteyngart, Gary, 163 Shulman, Alix Kates: Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, 84 Signet, 33. See also New American Library Silber, Joan, 177 Silberman, Jim, 37–38, 77–78, 260n36. See also Doctorow, E. L.; New American Library; Random House silence: political (of name novelists, for Doctorow), 38, 45; of Schiffrin (due to severance agreement), 2; the Silent Generation, 21 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 180; and Port Townsend, 129. See also Port Townsend Silvers, Robert: and The New York Review of Books, 76 Simmons, Herbert, 185 Simon, Richard: and the rejection of Dowie’s Corporate Murder, 254n5. See also Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster, 4, 7–8, 28, 53, 69, 77, 79–81, 115–16, 125, 169, 181, 185, 194–95, 208; and American Psycho, 194; educational and professional imprints of, 8, 194–95; and graphic novels, 207; and Gulf + Western, 5, 7–8, 41, 69, 101, 194; and Penguin Random House, 211–12, 219; and Pocket Books, 69 Simpson, Mona, 173 Sinatra, Mia, 88 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 79–80; and FSG, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Sinykin, Dan: on novels of nonprofit publishers vs. Random House, 151–53. See also Roland, Edwin Siraganian, Lisa: on emergent properties of aesthetic movements, 243n51. See also emergence Sitter, Jim: and Bookslinger, 132, 134, 138–39; and Buchwald (Milkweed), 144; and the Council

i n dex of Literary Magazine and Presses (CLMP), 135, 144–45, 148; and the Kornblums (Coffee House), 132, 139, 144; and letterpress, 132; and the nonprofit publishing movement, 20, 131–35, 144–46, 148, 164, 210; and Walker (Graywolf), 132, 134–35, 144, 147–49. See also Buchwald, Emilie; Coffee House Press; grants; nonprofits Sleepless Nights (Hardwick), 93–96, 98. See also Hardwick, Elizabeth Slim, Iceberg, 170, 183–86, 210; Pimp, 30; 185–86. See also W. W. Norton Small, David, 207. See also graphic novels Smashwords, 217. See also self-publishing smell: of a Barnes & Noble, 24; and history/ apprehension (for O’Brian), 178; of an original edition of Divine Days, 184 Smith, Barbara: and Kitchen Table, 181. See also feminism Smith, Carol Houck, 202; and the fictionification of W. W. Norton, 176–77, 179–80. See also W. W. Norton Smith, Clark Ashton: and Ballantine, 61. See also Ballantine; fantasy Smith, Zadie, 69; on the two paths for the novel, 162–63 smutty books, 182; of Faulkner, 3–4 Snyder, Gary: and Port Townsend, 129. See also Port Townsend Snyder, Richard (“Dick”): and Simon & Schuster, 8, 28, 101, 116, 194–95 So, Richard Jean: on the whiteness of publishing, 181, 220. See also whiteness social media, 215–17 socialization, anticipatory, 10–11 Sontag, Susan, 12–13, 86, 88, 93, 98, 115; Against Interpretation, 79–80; Death Kit, 98; In America, 201; and the nouveau roman, 79–80, 92, 97, 197, 200, 256n47, 259n128, 275n151; and Straus, 80, 169, 197, 259n133. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Straus, Roger Sorrentino, Gilbert: and autofiction, 85; and Grove, 137. See also autofiction Sosin, Danielle, 165 Souljah, Sister, 208; The Coldest Winter Ever, 181, 185 Southern, Terry: and Random House, 75 Spahr, Juliana: on creative writing degrees, 163. See also creative writing programs

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Speedboat (Adler), 91–95, 98; critical reception, 91; pregnancy in, 91–93; and resistance to plot, 91–92, 94. See also Adler, Renata Spicer, Jack: on the work of the writer, 9. See also authorship Spiegel, Cindy, 222 Spiegelman, Art, 39; Maus, 206–7; Maus 2, 206. See also graphic novels Spielberg, Peter: and the Fiction Collective (2), 137 Spielberg, Steven: and Jurassic Park, 122. See also Crichton, Michael Spillane, Mickey: and mass-market publishing, 26–27; and obscenity, 31–32; religious convictions of, 32 Spotify, 212 spy novels, 43, 113. See also genre fiction; thrillers Squires, Claire: on internalized marketing in contemporary British fiction, 245n76; on Welsh’s work, 188, 190. See also marketing; Welsh, Irvine Stafford, Jean, 82 Star Trek, 60, 178 Star Wars: and Random House Worlds, 221; and serial novelization, 6, 62, 221 Stead, Christina, 200 Steel, Danielle, 3, 6, 14, 26–28, 43, 47–55, 58, 99, 131, 150, 198, 219, 222–23, 250n18; and authorship, 51–52; and Dell, 47, 49–50; and fashion, 47–48; Going Home, 48; and Grose, 47, 49–50; Now and Forever, 49–50; Passion’s Promise, 49–50; and Pocket, 48; productivity of, 51–52, 251n25; and The Promise, 49–51, 53; and social media, 216; and Supergirls (PR firm), 48; Zoya, 52 Stegner, Wallace, 79–80 Stein, Gertrude, 75, 95, 126; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 84; G. M. P., 243n51 Steinbeck, John, 32–33 Stevens, Wallace: on (the complications of) taking money from foundations, 265n25. See also nonprofits Stillinger, Jack: on multiple authorship, 8. See also authorship St. Martin’s Press, 199, 202–3, 222. See also Macmillan; Picador Stone, Robert, 80 Stratemeyer Syndicate, 242n36. See also authorship; ghostwriting

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Straub, Emma, 222 Straus, Roger, 12–13, 77, 115, 124, 169, 194–99, 275n161; on “class-mass” fiction, 200; on Ellis’s American Psycho, 196; on Franzen’s FSG success, 201; as independently wealthy, 196–98, 209; on Newhouse, 197; on Simon & Schuster, 195–96; and Sontag, 80, 169, 197, 259n133. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Straus III, Roger (“Rog”), 198–99. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Streep, Meryl: and videobooks, 101 street lit, 67, 181–82, 141, 185 Stringer, Vickie: Low Down and Dirty, 182; and self-publishing, 181–82. See also self-publishing Styron, William, 86, 98; and the Book Review Index, 77; and Loomis, 77–78. See also Loomis, Bob; Random House subsidiary rights, 6, 12, 21, 37, 41, 54, 103, 107, 140, 168; “the decade of,” 99; and gender, 251n39. See also copyright Sukenick, Ronald: and autofiction, 85; and the Fiction Collective (2), 137. See also autofiction Supergirls: and Steel, 48. See also Steel, Danielle Suri, Manil, 202 Susann, Jacqueline: and mass-market publishing, 27, 46; Valley of the Dolls, 46 Swenson, Eric: and Norton, 180. See also W. W. Norton Swenson, Tree, 128, 130, 149. See also Copper Canyon Press; Port Townsend Talese, Nan A., 254n5; and Random House, 73–74, 81–82, 254n5; and Roth, 81–82. See also Random House; Roth, Philip Tan, Amy, 150, 183, 199; The Joy Luck Club, 192. See also multiculturalism Tan, May-Lan, 165 Targ, William: on Weybright, 247n36 Tartt, Donna: The Secret History, 113 taste: bad, 60, 96, 245n6; and booksellers, 62–63; and class, 26; and conglomerates, 44; corporate, 67–68; of editors, 6, 13 television: -to-book series, 60, 178; decline of network, 215; and literary prizes, 40; and literary trends, 38; and marketing, 44, 100–101, 103; and readership, 85; “third age of ” (Ross), 14–15

Terkel, Studs; and Schiffrin, 1, 22, 146, 168; Race, 168. See also Schiffrin, André Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, 21. See also New Press Thomas, Bill, 223. See also Whitehead, Colson Thomas, Clarence: and sexual harassment, 123, 263n107. See also sexual harassment Thompson, E. P.: and Schiffrin, 1. See also Schiffrin, André Thompson, John: on traditional publishing vs. self-publishing, 217–18. See also self-publishing Thompson, William, 103–4; and King, 103. See also King, Stephen Thorn Birds, The (McCullough), 245n6 thrillers, 113, 117, 121, 153, 262n73; and ebooks, 214. See also genre fiction; spy novels TikTok, 212, 216. See also social media Tillman, Lynne: The Madame Realism Complex, 95 Time Inc.: and Little, Brown, 5, 14. See also Little, Brown; Time Warner Time Warner: and Little, Brown, 14–17. See also Little, Brown Times Mirror: and New American Library, 5–6, 22, 33–34, 37, 69, 175, 193. See also New American Library Tolkien, J. R. R. See Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien) Toole, John Kennedy: and Grove, 137 Toomer, Jean, 168 Toothpaste Press, 132, 134. See also Kornblum, Allan; Kornblum, Cinda Tor Books, 60, 62 trade publishing, 19–20, 42–43, 71–99, 112, 119, 150, 173–74, 207 Trainspotting, 170, 188–92, 210; film version, 189. See also Welsh, Irvine translation, 14, 41, 165, 178, 198, 221; and the Council of Literary Magazine and Presses (CLMP), 144; and Dalkey Archive, 221; and Graywolf Press, 140, 221; as medium, 244n58; and New York Review Books, 221; and Norton, 203–5 trash: Humphrey Bogart movies as (for Doctorow’s Daniel), 34; mass-market paperbacks as (for Miller), 27; New York City as full of (for Lurie’s Smith), 87 Treuer, David, 182; Little, 140, 158; Native American Fiction, 158. See also Graywolf Press; Native American fiction

i n dex Trilling, Diana, 77 Trilling, Lionel, 77, 88 Trump, Donald, 56–57; The Art of the Deal, 101; as playing himself, 56. See also Cohn, Roy; Krantz, Judith Turow, Scott: and FSG, 198–99; Presumed Innocent, 198. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Twain, Mark, 32 Twilight: and fan fiction, 218. See also fan fiction Twitter, 216, 220. See also social media Tyler, Anne, 39, 67, 80, 103, 245n6. See also middlebrow Tyree, Omar, 141; Flyy Girl, 181. See also street lit Underwood, Ted: on fiction vs. biography, 38, 151 University of Washington Press: and Asian American literature, 138. See also Asian American literature; multiculturalism Updike, John, 39, 73, 80, 92, 103; and the Book Review Index, 77; and Czech writers, 13; and mass-market paperbacks, 26–27 Urban, Amanda (“Binky”), 74; “Binky Watch,” 196; and Ellis, 194–96; and McCarthy, 119–20; and Mehta, 195–96. See also agents; Ellis, Bret Easton; McCarthy, Cormac; Mehta, Sonny; Random House Uris, Leon, 24, 32 U.S. Steel, 106; influence of, 5 VanderMeer, Jeff, 222 Vanguard, 80 Varela, Alejandro: The Town of Babylon, 221 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 199 Vasquez, Danny: and Astra House, 220–21 Vázquez, Diego, 202 Velveteen Rabbit, The (Williams), 101. See also children’s literature Viacom: and CBS, 69; and Paramount, 69 Vidal, Gore, 12, 80, 99; and autofiction, 85–86; and the Book Review Index, 77; Burr, 98; Edgar Box series, 113; 1876, 98; and the Epsteins, 77, 98; and Mailer, 54; and mass-market publishing, 27; on the new fiction, 97–98, 197, 200, 259n128; and New World Writing, 31. See also Epstein, Jason; Mailer, Norman videobooks, 101 Vietnam War, 48, 115; and protests, 23; and literary trends, 38

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Viking, 2, 4, 61, 77, 79; Viking Penguin, 181, 207 Vintage, 101, 120, 125, 196, 201; and Anchor Books, 125; and paperback originals (Vintage Contemporaries), 65–66, 120, 173–74, 208. See also Random House Vitale, Alberto, 193, 222; and the firing of Schiffrin, 2, 58, 71–73, 101, 120, 146, 195. See also Random House Vizenor, Gerald: and nonprofits, 137–38 voice: and reading, 4, 97, 188, 214–15. See also audiobooks Voigt, Ellan Bryant: on Smith’s love for seeking out new writers, 176. See also Smith, Carol Houck Volcker, Paul: and the “Volcker Shock,” 172 Vonnegut, Kurt, 24, 27, 80, 92; and autofiction, 85; Breakfast of Champions, 85 Wachtell, Diane: and the New Press, 21. See also New Press Walcott, Derek, 198–99. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Waldenbooks, 41, 62–66, 99; decline of, 66; and publishers, 64–65; sale to Kmart, 64. See also chain bookstores Walker, Alice, 156, 161, 187; The Color Purple, 45; and Port Townsend, 129 Walker, Scott, 134–35, 138–39, 142, 146–49, 195; and Rachel Newton Bellow, 145, 148; and the Kornblums, 134; and Laughlin, 128, 130–31, 133; resignation of, 148; and Romtvedt, 130; and Sitter, 132, 134–35, 144, 147–49; on small presses, 128, 138. See also Graywolf Press; letterpress publishing; nonprofits Walker Art Center: and nonprofits, 131 Walkowitz, Rebecca: on fiction “born translated,” 244n58. See also translation Wallace, David Foster, 26, 187, 162; Broom of the System, 174; on “commercial” editorial cuts, 16; Girl with Curious Hair, 180; Infinite Jest, 14–17, 45, 244n65; and Pietsch, 14–17, 187. See also Little, Brown; Penguin; Pietsch, Michael Wallace, DeWitt, 145. See also Lila Wallace– Reader’s Digest Fund Wallace, Lila, 144–46; and beautification, 145. See also Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund Wallace, Lois: and Didion, 116. See also Didion, Joan

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Walmart: as bookseller, 27, 113 Walters, Barbara, 54 Walters, Ray: on Steel, 49–50. See also Steel, Danielle Walton, Evangeline: and Ballantine, 61. See also Ballantine; fantasy Ware, Chris, 206–7; Jimmy Corrigan, 206. See also graphic novels Warhol, Andy: and Ellis, 193; and Random House, 75. See also Ellis, Bret Easton; Random House Warner Books: and graphic novels, 206; and mass-market publishing, 56. See also graphic novels; mass-market publishing Warren, Robert Penn, 86, 118; and the Book Review Index, 77; and Erskine, 77, 80, 117–18; Flood, 82. See also Erskine, Albert Wasserman, Sarah: on autofiction, 258n124. See also autofiction Watkins, Claire Vaye, 222 Watson, Brad, 202 Wattpad, 70, 212, 216–17; Wattpad Books, 217. See also social media Webster, Lee: and Forrest, 184. See also agents; Forrest, Leon Weil, Robert: and Crumb, 207; on Highsmith’s novels, 205; on literary xenophobia, 203; and Liveright, 209; on McMurtry’s novels, 205; on the necessity of large advances, 193; and Norton, 202–9; and St. Martin’s Press, 202–3. See also Crumb, R.; advances, large; W. W. Norton Weiner, Jennifer, 67 Weir, Andy, 218 Welch, James, 170, 180, 183; Fools Crow, 180; The Indian Lawyer, 180; and Port Townsend, 129. See also Port Townsend Wells, H. G., 209 Welsh, Irvine, 20, 67, 188–90, 193, 210; The Acid House, 188–89; on American Psycho and Fight Club, 196; and “non-readers,” 188–89; and Slim’s Pimp, 186; Trainspotting, 170, 188–92, 210 Wesleyan University Press: and multicultural fiction, 137–38. See also multiculturalism West, Nathanael: Day of the Locust, 159 Western, 10, 29, 32, 35, 43, 59–60, 112–13, 121, 205. See also genre fiction Westlake, Donald, 81

Weybright, Victor, 247n36; and Enoch, 4, 29–34, 41; on Enoch, 4, 31, 33–34; and the (smuttier) work of Faulkner, 3–4; and New World Writing, 31; and Penguin, 30–31; on Random House, 31. See also Enoch, Kurt; New American Library; Penguin; Random House Wezerek, Gus: on the whiteness of publishing, 220. See also whiteness Wharton, William: Birdy, 45 White, Edmund: and Penguin, 173. See also Penguin Whitehead, Colson, 26, 164, 188, 222–23; Harlem Shuffle, 223, The Intuitionist, 223; and literary prizes, 223; The Underground Railroad, 223; Zone One, 113, 223 whiteness: of comparative titles (comps), 242n40, 274n124; of the contemporary canon, 26, 137, 140, 168; of the publishing industry, 21–22, 25, 109, 137, 150, 168, 180–83, 185–87, 189, 220, 242n40. See also diversity; multiculturalism wholesalers, 12, 28, 42–43; and the author tour, 102; and microfiche, 42. See also Hoffman, Harry; Ingram Book Company Wideman, John Edgar, 80 Wiesel, Elie, 204 Wilde, Oscar, 209 Wilk, David: and small-press distribution, 132. See also Sitter, Jim Williams, C. K., 198 Williams, John A., 185; Clifford’s Blues, 158 Williams, Joy, 175 Williams, Tennessee: and New Directions, 126, 136; and New World Writing, 31. See also New Directions Williams, William Carlos: and New Directions, 126, 136. See also New Directions Wilson, Diane, 165 Wilson, Edmund: and the Epsteins, 254n17; Memoirs of Hecate County, 255n19; on Nabokov’s Lolita, 75 Winfrey, Oprah. See Oprah Winters, David: on Lish, 249n88. See also Lish, Gordon Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs: on “content ownership” and the conglomeration of publishing, 240n17 Wolf, Wendy: on graphic novels, 206. See also graphic novels Wolfe, Linda: on Janklow, 54. See also Janklow, Morton

i n dex Wolfe, Thomas, 16 Wolfe, Tom, 53, 79; Back to Blood, 247n27; Bonfire of the Vanities, 197, 201, 275n157; and FSG, 197, 201; on Straus’s fashion, 197. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Wolff, Kurt, 127 Wolff, Michael: on Epstein and sexism in the book business, 82. See also Epstein, Jason; sexism Wolff, Tobias: and minimalism, 143. See also minimalism Wolitzer, Hilma: Ending, 84 Wollheim, Betsy, 60. See also science fiction Wood, James: on The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 204–5. See also Levi, Primo; W. W. Norton Woodiwiss, Kathleen, 50; The Flame and the Flower, 48. See also romance Woodmansee, Martha: on collaborative authorship, 241n22. See also authorship Woods, Teri, 26; and self-publishing, 181–82; True to the Game, 185. See also self-publishing Woolf, Virginia, 93–95; To the Lighthouse, 84 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 93 Worthington, Marjorie: on autofiction’s flourishing, 85. See also autofiction Wouk, Herman, 24, 32–33; on conglomerates, 6; War and Remembrance, 45. See also Authors Guild Wright, Charles, 198 Wright, Lee, 81 Wright, Richard: Native Son, 30; and New American Library, 30–31 Writers of Color (Twitter account), 220 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 28, 31, 36. See also Brontë, Charlotte W. W. Norton, 167–210, 212–13, 222; colophon of, 4; and diversity, 183–87, 202; and education/academia, 170–72, 202, 209; as employee- owned, 20, 169–71, 179–80, 193, 209; and Fantagraphics, 206; fictionification of, 175–79; and graphic novels, 205–7; as independent, 19, 177, 179,

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199, 203, 209; and lad lit, 67; and multiculturalism, 183–87, 198– 99; and the New Press, 167– 68, 206; Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 182; Norton Anthology of English Literature, 167– 68, 170–72; sexism at, 176; and translation, 203–5; as WASPy, 168, 180, 185, 190, 223. See also Babel, Isaac; Crumb, R.; independents; Levin, Primo; whiteness Wylie, Andrew, 247n27; and Roth, 197, 247n27. See also Roth, Philip Wynwood Press, 103–4 Xanth series (Anthony), 10, 24, 61–62. See also Anthony, Piers Yamashita, Karen Tei, 20, 158–62, 164–65, 182, 269n141; Brazil-Maru, 159; and claims of diversity, 153; and identity, 161; I Hotel, 159, 160–62; and nonprofits, 131; Through the Arc of the Rainforest, 158–59; Tropic of Orange, 159, 162. See also Coffee House Press Yanagihara, Hanya: A Little Life, 210 Yanique, Tiphanie, 165 Youcenar, Marguerite: and FSG, 196–97. See also Farrar, Straus and Giroux Young, John: on the social dimension of a text, 10 Young, Marguerite: Miss Macintosh, My Darling, 165 Young, Stephanie: on creative writing degrees, 163. See also creative writing programs young adult fiction, 106–7, 203, 279n33; and conglomerates, 218. See also children’s literature Young Bear, Ray: and Graywolf Press, 128. See also Graywolf Press Zambreno, Kate: and autofiction, 96. See also autofiction Zellar, Brad, 165 Zimmerman, Barbara. See Epstein, Barbara Zugelder, Danny: and Steel, 48–49. See also Steel, Danielle