Reading Matters: Book Men, Serious Readers, and the Rise of Mass Culture, 1930-1965

This dissertation examines trade book publishers' attempts to modernize their industry. The genteel culture of book men, as they called themselves, made the industry slow to embrace modern professionalism during the Gilded Age. However, innovative new publishers in the 1920s inspired the trade; this, combined with persistently difficult market conditions, opened the industry's eyes to the need for a new idea of themselves and their readers. During the Second World War, book men formulated an identity for themselves as stewards of democratic culture, and marketed reading as essential to the War effort and what they called “the Smart Man's peace.” In the postwar period, they tried to bring a similar sense of reading's importance to the social problem of Civil Rights. This effected the ways in which black authors were cultivated and promoted by the industry, as I demonstrate through the case of Richard Wright. Another national “emergency” that book men hoped to redress through increased reading was the growth of technological mass culture. I look at the editorial policies of William Shawn of The New Yorker magazine as examples of the way one segment of book culture attempted to survive the rise of technological society by reiterations of reading's power to promote loving community. In conclusion, I look at the changes in business structures and literary discourses that brought about an end to the community that book men and their ideal audience of “serious” readers had made together at mid-century.