National Review*'s Literary Network* traces the careers of novelists, journalists, and literary critics who wrote for William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review. In the 1950s, the magazine sought to establish itself as a conservative alternative to liberal journals like Partisan Review. To do so, it needed a robust book review section, featuring nationally recognized writers. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Whittaker Chambers, John Dos Passos, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, ...

America's post–World War II prosperity created a boom in higher education, expanding the number of university-educated readers and making a new literary politics possible. Writers began to direct their work toward the growing professional class, and the American public in turn became more open to literary culture. This relationship imbued fiction with a new social and cultural import, allowing authors to envision themselves as unique cultural educators. It also changed the nature of litera...

This book traces American writers' contributions and responses to the War on Poverty. Its title comes from the 1964 Opportunity Act, which established a network of federally funded Community Action Agencies that encouraged "maximum feasible participation" by the poor. With this phrase, the Johnson administration provided its imprimatur for an emerging model of professionalism that sought to eradicate boundaries between professionals and their clients—a model that appealed to writers, espec...

Celebrates and illuminates the legacy of one of America’s most innovative and consequential 20th century novelistsIn 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis’s collected nonfiction and his final novel and Jonathan Franzen’s lengthy attack on him in The New Yorker, a number of partisan articles appeared in support of Gaddis’s legacy. In a review in The London Review of Books, critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses t...