Literature

The rise of the mass entertainment industry profoundly affected literature in the 20th century, especially in the last half of the century, with the emergence of huge media and entertainment conglomerates that combine movies, “blockbuster” fiction, and mass marketing of books. One major consequence has been a sharp distinction between “serious” literature that appeals to well-educated readers (often constituting a small readership) and “popular” fiction (usually for a mass audience). Although there are occasional overlaps between serious literature and popular literature, a growing disparity between the two types became increasingly evident as Americans entered the 21st century. Witnessing this growing distance between audiences and the exhausted literature of a postmodernist world, some critics declared the “end of the novel.” Serious literature often became more esoteric and, indeed, incomprehensible and unappealing, to most readers.

The one caveat to this generalization appeared in ethnic and regional writing that attracted both serious readers and a large audience. For example, Toni Morrison’s novels, such as The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1970), appealed to a wide readership in its historical depictions of the African-American experience in the United States. Her books were found in assigned reading lists in literature classes in high schools and universities.

Other ethnic themes were found in Native American and Asian-American novels that began to appear in the late 1960s. Typical of Native American literature were such novels as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), and Louise

Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984). Another Native American author, Sherman Alexie, also found a popular audience for his novels and short stories. Stories of the Asian-American experience were captured in best-selling novels by Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Gish Jen. The Chicano cultural experience in America was the focus of a number of Mexican-American writers, such as Sandra Cisneros.

Other authors attracted wide audiences with serious novels, including E. L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Joan Did-ion, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Mary Gordon, and Jane Smiley, among others. Novelists of an earlier, post-World War II generation including Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and John Updike continued to produce novels that reached a popular audience, while being acclaimed by literary critics.

Yet a clear trend in literature appeared to place more emphasis on literary style and esoteric philosophical themes. In the mid-1970s a “minimalist” school of literature emerged. Minimalist writers sought to capture postmodern, alienated culture through spare, attenuated fiction that focused on the isolation of individuals in a mass, urban society. Sardonic in tone, spare in the use of words, deliberately avoiding grand themes and philosophical profundity, minimalist writers captured the disconnection of individuals in their personal lives. Closely associated with this minimalist fiction was short-story writer Raymond Carver, whose stories were collected in Cathedral (1984) and What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981). Frederick Barthelme’s short stories, for example, are often set in shopping malls and apartment complexes, suggesting the “soullessness” of commercial culture. Novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote surrealist allegories of modern life in his well-received The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Vineland (1990). Although minimalism became less fashionable in the 1980s, it continued to find expression in Ann Beattie’s and Lorrie Moore’s stories. For the most part, however, minimalist writers attracted a relatively small audience.

Symbolic of this bifurcation between serious literature and popular literature was the status of literary magazines in the late 20th century. As traditional literary magazines, such as Saturday Review and Atlantic Monthly, began to lose readers in the 1960s, literary reviews tended to become more academic, both in content and in their base of support. In the 1960s, small reviews such as Tri-Quarterly, Salmagundi, and Field were founded, all housed at universities. Tri-Quarterly, under the editorship of Charles Newman, found support from Northwestern University. Salmagundi, at Skidmore College, focused more on cultural issues than on literary themes. Edited by Robert and Peggy Boyers, Salmagundi published such distinguished cultural critics as Christopher Lasch, Gerald Graff, and George Steiner. Field, housed at Oberlin College, remained devoted to contemporary poetry and the study of poetry. As a result, Field published every major American poet, and provided a forum for discussing new trends in poetry, from “confessional” poetry to contemporary poetry in Russia and South America. Boundary 2, started by faculty members at the State University of New York, emphasized experimental fiction and poetry, while promoting a literary POSTMODERNISM. Other college-based literary magazines, The Chicago Review (University of Chicago), the Iowa Review (University of Iowa), and the Columbia Review (Columbia University) also provided an outlet for aspiring young writers. These and other journals, as well as commercial magazines like the New Yorker, published leading short story writers such as Raymond Carver, William Taylor, Cynthia Ozick, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, as well as younger writers such as Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, and Rick Bass. While literary magazines introduced these writers to a larger public,

Writer and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison in September 1987 (AP Photo)

Most of them found limited audiences. For the most part, their market was confined to a relatively small audience of educated readers.

The publishing market itself changed, as established publishing companies underwent consolidation through mergers. In 1980 Harper and Row merged with J. B. Lip-pincott, for example, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s, large corporations such as Viacom and Time Warner began acquiring publishing houses to diversify their businesses. While W. W. Norton avoided amalgamation, other larger publishing enterprises, including HarperCollins, the Penguin Group, Simon and Schuster, and Random House, were absorbed by larger corporations. These mergers led to a greater emphasis on producing books with potential for large financial returns. Emphasis was placed on advertising, and on acquiring writers with potential for “celebrity” status. Although small independent publishing houses continued to survive, and occasionally published a best-seller, the new publishing corporations emphasized the “bottom line” in choosing the books they produced. Computer technology changed the publishing business, making it easier to write, edit, design, and print books, but the costs of books continued to increase for a variety of reasons, including the desire of large publishing houses to raise their marginal profits.

While the publishing business was changing, the distribution of books also changed. Independent bookstores were driven from business by mega-bookstores such as B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, and Barnes and Noble, that could afford store space in shopping malls. At the same time, wholesale book distributors, which provided the books to these stores, also consolidated. The development of the Internet provided another outlet for the distribution of books, as Ama-zon. com and Barnes and Noble sold books through their Web sites. Beneficiaries of the Internet, ironically, included used booksellers who used it to expand their markets.

In this new book market, publishers sought the “blockbuster” novel. This meant the acquisition of writers with established reputations in the marketplace. Romance novels (such as those published by Harlequin), westerns by authors such as Louis L’Amour, mysteries, and some science-fiction novels maintained a steady mass market. Older writers, such as Herman Wouk, Harold Robbins, and James Michener, remained popular as well. Female novelists, such as Danielle Steel and Jacqueline Susann, provided sexual drama to their fans. John Grisham’s legal novels found a ready audience, while Stephen King’s “horror” novels consistently reached the best-seller lists. The beauty of all these writers from the publishers’ point of view was that their novels were easily adapted to movies for theaters and television, then released on videos and DVDs.

The trend toward the “blockbuster” novel was exemplified in the early 21st century by the success of the Harry Potter novels and films. A series of seven novels by J. K. Rowling, a struggling single mother in England, the books captured the imagination of children (and many adults) around the world. The novels chronicled the life of a young boy who goes to wizard school and struggles through all the difficulties of growing up while engaged in a life-and-death struggle with a powerful evil wizard. Each book in the series sold phenomenally well and, to date, six of the seven have been made into major motion pictures. The same pattern occurred with Dan Brown’s novel The DaVinci Code, another best-seller made into a major motion picture. In this case, however, the controversial fictional plot, suggesting that Jesus was married and fathered a daughter, angered Christians around the world, and the controversy may have contributed to the lack of financial success of the movie.

The “blockbuster” novel made into a film was not just for mainstream media. Christian bookstores benefited from the spectacular sales of the Left Behind series, coauthored by Jerry Jenkins, a novelist and biographer whose works usually feature evangelical Christians as protagonists, and Tim LaHaye, a fundamentalist Christian minister. Three movies have been made from the novels and have enjoyed success in the home video market and church theatrical viewings.

The late 20th-century trend of making a successful novel into a movie, then releasing it on video and DVD by companies that combine book publishing, movie production, and home video releases, will likely continue well into the 21st century.

Yet the success of these novels, and movies made from them, suggested the great gap that had been created between serious fiction and popular fiction in the 21st century. This is not to say that the novels produced for the mass market were without literary merit; nonetheless, the market for fiction and literature had changed radically from the 19th century, when writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain were writing their novels. Still it is worth noting that the novels of these classic writers, too, found a place on the shelves of the mega-bookstore chains. And Hollywood scriptwriters discovered that these classics sometimes made for good movies.

See also COMPUTERS; Internet; media; movies; recreation.

Further reading: Dale M. Bauer, “Fiction,” Robert S. Fogarty, “Literary Reviews and ‘Little Magazines,’” Paul Gutjahr, “Books,” in Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, Vol. 3, eds. Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner, 2002), 589600, 317-323, 407-416; Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

—Stephen E. Randoll