12 Books Like The Making of Middlebrow Culture

I always like to start learning about a subject with an overview, and this book brings together experts on topics ranging from technology to censorship, marketing, copyright, and book clubs in the period starting with World War II. I turn to this volume, again and again, to refresh my knowledge and enjoy excellent writing by the top scholars in book history. Earlier volumes in the series cover the topic from colonial times.

As a voracious reader, I’ve often wondered about why exactly reading is so pleasurable—so essential—and whether others feel the same way about books as I do. Leah Price writes about books and reading clearly and entertainingly, busting myths about a “golden age” of books as well as the much-feared “death of the book.” I learned a lot from this book and enjoyed every minute.

More than a century before Oprah, emancipated African Americans organized their own book clubs. They studied mainly the Western classics but also emerging black writers.

While Booker T. Washington emphasized vocational training, more militant black leaders demanded the right to read the same authors taught in elite white academies: One of their syllabuses included Milton, Spenser, Homer, Aeschylus, Longfellow, Dryden, Pope, Browning, Pindar and Sappho. Those poets, said one reader, inspired the "hope [that] the great American epic of the joys and sorrows of our blood and kindred, of those who have gone before us[,] would one day be written."

And that's exactly what happened. A young Ralph Ellison read everything in the segregated branch of the Oklahoma City library; Malcolm X was profoundly affected by Paradise Lost; and Toni Morrison minored in classics at Howard University.

As a writer and teacher, I’ve always classified plagiarism as a high crime and misdemeanor. It’s the academic equivalent of treason. Thomas Mallon covers well-known and unknown instances, word thieves punished and not. The book is highly entertaining but deadly serious about the harm done by plagiarists and by those who do not take their crimes seriously.

Censors can be astonishingly intelligent readers. For them, discernment and insight are essential job skills. Aleksandr Nikitenko (1804-77) hated and loved his work for the same reason: "Only the censor has the opportunity to read everything being written in our country." He adored Byron ("his poetry is like a storm playing an Aeolian harp") and scolded Russians for not appreciating Shakespeare. And he fully recognized the "downright absurdity and contradiction" of the system.

He tried to reason with Orthodox clerics who demanded the suppression of historical articles on the Reformation, which, they believed, might inspire a Russian Martin Luther. The minister of war insisted that an expose of army atrocities be recalled from Moscow bookstores: "This book is particularly dangerous because there's truth in every single line of it."

Nikitenko won some battles, heading off attempts to expurgate Pushkin and block John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. But the government created… show more.

Before it launched the modern environmental movement, Silent Spring (1962) had to run a formidable publication gantlet. Rachel Carson challenged the prevailing scientific consensus about pesticides, a subject most magazines wouldn't touch for fear of losing ads. The chemical industry threatened legal action and mounted a PR campaign against Carson. But she had several strong cards to play.

She was already a best-selling author. She was firmly backed by her editor, Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin, then an independent family firm with a tradition of publishing nature writers. The book was serialized in the New Yorker, and President Kennedy plugged it at a press conference. On CBS, Eric Sevareid gave Carson equal time with an industry spokesman, though some corporations pulled their commercials. As Brooks predicted, "A future social historian will be writing his Ph.D. thesis on the career of Silent Spring—just you wait!"

Priscilla Coit Murphy builds a gripping… show more.

Modern American literature is inconceivable without Maxwell Perkins. As an editor at Scribner's, he probably saved that dustily respectable firm by dragging it into the 20th century. He nursed F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and performed lifesaving surgery on the baggy manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe.

For all manner of authors, he had an unprejudiced eye for brilliance. He angled for Henry Roth's radical proletarian fiction and gave Winston Churchill the idea that eventually became A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He advised Charles Scribner to grab Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, explaining that "it treats Christ as a supersalesman." (Scribner was scandalized, and another publisher made it a blockbuster.) He published the classy mysteries of S.S. Van Dine and capped his career with From Here to Eternity. And he gave every author unstinting time, attention, and labor.

Read this classic biography, and you'll understand why… show more.

A History of Knowledge is a treasure that invites everyone to explore and enjoy. It recounts the history of human progress from primitive times to the 21st century. Van Doren covers the history of ideas, inventions, civilizations, ideologies, and issues of justice, war, and slavery. Almost no famous thinker, emperor, philosopher, inventor, or artist is not mentioned, and his contribution examined. These are two of my favorite quotations; “Our fathers started the revolution, and we are still living it. We could not stop it even if we wanted to.” “The rich are never rich enough... to have enough is simply to be content with what you have. When wanting comes first, you can never have enough. If contentment is placed first, it does not matter how much you have.”

I may have admired Kincaid as a person even before I read her novel about a young woman who must find her way in life after her mother dies during childbirth. I admired Kincaid’s determined journey to become a writer: she left home as a teenager, worked, found a job as a staff writer for The New Yorker, then began writing stories and novels, even changing her name in the process.

Reading Autobiography—one of several of her books about the mother/daughter relationship—gave me a meaningful connection between the story being told and the language/syntax being used to tell that story. Kincaid’s amazing sense of honesty is only eclipsed by her lyrically perfect prose. I knew that if I found myself writing in that same beautiful style, I, too, might be able to tell my own stories as they should be told.

I also admired Kincaid’s ease in writing… show more.