Introduction: Seeing Double: Editors in Postwar American Literature

When literary editors appear in fiction, they are often ambiguous and even duplicitous figures. The plot of Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991) is set in motion in the top-floor office of a conglomerate publisher, where Bill Gray's editor has cooked up a dubious scheme to leverage his reclusive author's celebrity to free a hostage poet -- a stratagem that entangles Gray in ­­­the machinations of international terrorist networks and ultimately leads to his death. In John Le Carré's The Russia House (1989), receipt of a clandestine manuscript leads a publisher to become a spy; during the climactic book fair that signals his impending betrayal of the West, he becomes (in the narrator's words) "the cool-headed broker between the necessity and the far vision,"1 hammering out the settlement between practicality and idealism necessary for both espionage and the material expression of literary ideas.2 The plot of Zakiya Dalila Harris's The Other Black Girl (2021) hinges on subterfuge, as the novel's assistant-editor protagonist turns to office espionage to understand the treacherous racialized dynamics threatening her career in publishing. Her investigations lead her to a discovery about a forgotten, visionary editor — clearly modelled on Toni Morrison at Random House — whose career was cut short by her colleagues' suspicion of her forthright politics. In each of these novels, editors are caught between different systems of power and value, their decisions potentially subordinated to larger social, financial and ideological agendas. The "far vision" (in Le Carré's words) that allows an editor to imagine unrealized possibilities threatens to damage or destroy the social relationships necessary to put them into effect.

The plot of Muse, a 2015 novel by Jonathan Galassi, then the publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, also hinges on such an "impossible dilemma."3 The protagonist of Galassi's text is an editor at a fictional independent publishing house in New York who has promised to publish a posthumous manuscript that turns out to reveal compromising information about the author's literary and social circle. The editor must thus find a way to publish the manuscript while managing the enormous corporate and interpersonal strife that its publication will inevitably cause. In an earlier essay, Galassi metaphorized the editor as a "double agent" whose "loyalties are inescapably divided." An editor, in Galassi's telling, must represent the publishing house to the writer — to whom he is "collaborator, psychiatrist, confessor and amanuensis" — and the writer to the publisher, performing the roles of "politician, diplomat, mediator."4 Muse brings this insight to life by placing its editor-protagonist into a drama of divided loyalties in which he cannot but act against the wishes of writers and colleagues.

The role of the editor, these works suggest, is defined by competing allegiances: a phenomenon widely recognized by authors yet undertheorized by scholars.5 Editors are negotiators whose work requires balancing the competing interests of publisher, author, and reader, as well as of the many individual actors — executive editors, marketing teams, agents, booksellers, and so on — charged with representing these interests. When these interests can no longer be reconciled, the editor confronts a crisis. Taking the literary editor as the protagonist of recent literary history — as this collection does — thus involves orienting ourselves towards the different forms of double vision required of a literary, social, and economic mediator. By pulling the editor out of the shadows once and for all — by, as Ben Fried puts it in his contribution to this issue, "betraying the editorial ethic" of invisibility and taking the act of mediation as our focus — we stand a better chance of disentangling the conjunction of visions and material imperatives through which writing enters the world.

Editors, as Jim Casey and Sarah Salter argue, "have long served as minor characters in American literary history, dismissed as handmaidens or demonized as gatekeepers but hardly ever the focus of any concerted studies," with scholarship on US literary history reflecting a more general disciplinary tendency towards the study of particular authors and movements.6 A wave of twenty-first-century literary sociology has countered this tendency by giving us a detailed picture of the institutional dynamics that have shaped post-1945 literary culture, often focusing on the ways that texts are produced and mediated.7 In particular, in the last ten years, a body of work has emerged that takes editors as its focus, attempting not only to bring to light particular editorial relationships but to theorize editing as a literary and cultural practice.8 Monographs and articles drawing on the intersections between literary history and sociology, while not solely or primarily focused on editors, have also treated editing and/or individual editors at length in their accounts of particular publishing contexts.9 These studies often highlight the complex and varied nature of the editorial role to emphasise how editors bring texts and interpretive communities into being; Susan Greenberg's proposal for a multidisciplinary and comparative field of "Editing Studies" is the most ambitious call for a wide-ranging conceptual approach to the subject. Scholars have also deepened our understanding of the various processes involved in editing, which can, as Peter Ginna has outlined, generally be subsumed under the categories of acquisition, textual development, and publishing.10 Editors must find texts, develop them, and bring them to audiences — in the process mediating and even "translating" between the languages of art, commerce, and interpretation to bridge gaps between the fields of creation, production, and reception.11 Editors need to read with an eye to future reception, imagining what a text can be and how its virtues can be made legible to existing and perhaps even new reading communities. In this way, editors need to see things that others don't.

The essays assembled here bear witness to the varieties of editorial vision and the diverse contexts in which editors act. Some of the editors discussed in this volume worked (or continue to work) for large for-profit organizations. Katharine S. White and William Maxwell were New Yorker editors during the era in which the New Yorker rose to become the US's most successful magazine in terms of advertising revenue.12 Galassi, Robert Gottlieb, and Gordon Lish were mid-to-late-century editing eminences with influential tenures at corporate publishing houses Simon & Schuster, Knopf, Random House, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux and at magazines including Esquire and the New Yorker. Peter Blackstock (interviewed for this issue by Tim Groenland), is Vice President and Deputy Publisher at Grove Atlantic, an independent press of international renown. These are editors as they are perhaps typically imagined — caretakers of distinctive and distinguished New York-based brands; conductors of meetings with authors, perhaps over expensive lunches; crucial collaborators in the making of books but not household names; bridges between the business and artistic sides of for-profit enterprises.

Since the mid-1960s, accounts of such powerful editors have often fit into a decline narrative, not least by editors themselves, who have lamented the collision between the editor's artistic aims and new realities of the marketplace; the rise of the literary agent and the book marketer; the neoliberal turn generally; and the concentration of the publishing business.13 This decline narrative is typically framed as a war of attrition between an editorially driven model defined by a "passionate sense of responsibility" to writers and readers and a corporate "marketing model" that is both dominant and devoid of literary standards, prompting editors during times of intense corporate activity to mourn publishing's "fall into the fiscal."14 Galassi's novel, too, participates in this elegiac framing. He gives one of its central characters the surname Perkins, surely an allusion to that most famous of editors, Maxwell Perkins, whose work at Scribner's in the early twentieth century provided the prototype against which later editors would be measured.15 The novel is pessimistic about the prospect of a figure like Perkins thriving in the contemporary era. The closing chapters of Muse see the protagonist, now president of his publishing house, growing increasingly anxious over the prospects for author-centred publishing in a world not just dominated by conglomerates but increasingly threatened by "Medusa," an Amazon stand-in that treats literary texts as cheap commodities. The editor, torn between fidelity to the "ghosts" of his twentieth-century literary idols and the lure of technological optimism, briefly considers an offer to join Medusa, but manages to avert his eyes from the Gorgon's gaze. We learn, however, that the tech giant will soon acquire the independent publisher in any case, and the editor's final act is to retreat from the publishing business to become a writer.16

This special issue reveals what is missing from the narrative of publishing's descent into corporate-induced homogeneity, deepening our sense of a field that is "fractal, dialectical" and dynamic rather than steadily eroding. In the process, it fleshes out the persistence of distinctive editorial input.17 Other key developments in literature's institutional history figure largely in this study: the absorption of modernism into academia and mainstream culture; the literary aesthetics of a mid-century power like the New Yorker;the emergence of an influential independent and non-profit publishing scene in the face of the corporate takeover of American publishers; the accompanying expansion of access and ongoing obstacles to publication for women writers and writers of color; the globalization of the publishing business in the 1990s and after. By linking these developments to individual efforts by editors, the essays in this collection strengthen our sense of a literary field marked by gatekeeping, negotiation, and profit considerations, but also by a "rugged bookishness" (as Dan Simon and Tom McCarthy put it in their survey of small publishers in 2009) and a persistent, productive belief in an idea of literature as something beyond commerce.18

The oft-repeated decline narrative centered around the halcyon days of figures like Max Perkins, then, tells a partial story that served particular postwar needs. The image of Perkins-as-paragon became, late in the twentieth century, the focus for editorial anxieties about increasing corporatization, feared obsolescence, and the declining importance of literary fiction.19 These fears, though, have only been partially realized; in the twenty-first century, the relationship between corporate and independent publishing has come to look less like the inevitable eclipse and more like a "dialectical spiral" in which corporate control and independent activity coexist in complex mutuality.20

John K. Young, in the issue's first essay, finds continuities in editing work from the pre-corporate publishing age of 1945 to the present, showing how the "sight" of a professional editor incorporates the structural ambiguities of a text in development. Taking his cue from Toni Morrison's conceptualization of a good editor as a "third eye" whose "uncanny" vision of the draft text can significantly shape a literary work, and invoking Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings on visual art — in which the viewer simultaneously perceives an image in "real and imaginary registers" — Young theorizes editorial vision as bifurcated between the material reality of a text and its abstract potentiality. Surveying the histories of critical approaches concerned with the revision and production of the material text, he demonstrates how they have frequently elided editorial vision — as distinct from the fact of editorial intervention — downplaying the editor's distinct contribution to a text's creative development. Noting the legacy of intentionalist and materialist approaches to scholarly editions as well as genetic criticism's attention to a work's drafts and alternate possibilities, Young identifies the relative paucity, in this rich field of textual scholarship, of criticism on professional editing that seeks, as he does, to "occupy editors' perspectives." Drawing on examples including Robert Gottlieb's editing of Toni Morrison's novels, Morrison's own editing of Gayl Jones, and Camille Hykes's reconceptualizing of Tim O'Brien's work, Young shows how a professional editor's position in the publishing field structures their encounter with a text and how their distinct perspective can guide an author towards new territory.

Other essays here add significantly to our knowledge and understanding of how particular editors have intervened in literary history by shaping careers and movements in the postwar era. Amy Reading's account of Katharine S. White's central role in the New Yorker's early years is complemented by Ben Fried's study of William Maxwell's tenure at the magazine, with both essays showing how the magazine's distinctive institutional aesthetic owes much to the cumulative work of some of its longest-tenured fiction editors. Fried's essay provides many of this issue's most memorable editorial metaphors, with one in particular highlighting the capacity of editors to intervene in the field in direct ways: "an editor's recognition," he writes, "can turn the creative tap on (just as an editor's apathy can turn it off again)." ²¹ Individuals can exert outsized effects on institutional cultures that persist beyond immediate market conditions.22 The New Yorker at midcentury is as good an example as any of the ways culture shapes a for-profit economic organization. Working for a magazine that depended less on subscription numbers than advertising targeted to its well-to-do readership, the New Yorker's White and Maxwell were hardly beholden to market demands, and they were key players shaping the vision of their influential publication. Alongside these familiar names, we find some that may be less immediately recognizable. Stephanie Anderson describes Daisy Aldan's unsung work throughout the 1950s, editing poetry by women at Folder magazine and creating the anthology New Folder. The article explores the hidden labor and complex social positioning of women in midcentury small press publishing; Rosmarie Waldrop's description of herself as a "spy in the audience" — a phrase Anderson has borrowed for the title of her forthcoming collection of interviews with a number of these publishers — resonates with the notion of editors as clandestine operators. Two other essays, indeed, trace surprising links between editors and espionage. Greg Barnhisel shows how Yale Professor Norman Holmes Pearson deployed skills acquired as a CIA counterintelligence officer to harness literary prestige for modernist poets, working patiently within and between elite institutions while remaining largely invisible. Through his editorial work, Pearson helped to shape post-1945 views of prewar literature and thus made an enduring impact on the reception of modernism, the education market, and publishers' backlists. Marta Sánchez's account of Dick Reavis and Ramón Pérez's collaboration details how the pair plotted to send the latter "undercover" to describe the reality of border crossings between Mexico and the US, simultaneously inhabiting the roles of mojado and reporter.

The case studies presented in other essays involve less subterfuge, but each brings to life the array of pressures that need to be negotiated in the editorial encounter. Susan Greenberg has defined editing as "a material act performed with others,"23 and these essays show how the work of editors can open up creative spaces, define and draw together communities, and, as Meredith Benjamin suggests in her essay in this collection, "[put] things in movement." The articles here reconstruct acts of mediation within their dimensions and material constraints, showing how the specific demands — textual, conceptual, temporal, and ideological — of each editorial moment are reconciled. The fugitive character of the editor identified by Galassi points to the web of dynamic relations in which (and across which) editors work at all times. Crucial nodes in this web, editors work to disappear at the moment of print. An editor turns a polyphonic creation into something received as a univocal product, and thereby makes the structural appear agential.

In his recent history of conglomeration, Dan Sinykin takes the publisher's colophon to stand for the process by which the polyvocality of a book's complex creation is deliberately obscured in its transformation into a commodity. He suggests that the colophon, as "an emblem that contains within it a collective,"24 can serve as our guide back into the milieus and larger systems that shaped the texts we read. The articles in this issue take the editorial role as the hinge between the text and its collective production, often probing the relationship between an editor's individual sensibility and positioning and the scene or milieu in which — and often, against which — they act and react. Editors must respond to the social and structural conditions in which their work is carried out — and in this sense, as Alice Grundy has written, editors can be considered as "social barometers" — but this response can in turn intervene in the field to generate new forms, genres, and communities.25 Similar claims might be made about other figures in the publication process: the power of literary agents, for example, to determine the textual form and commercial fate of literary texts has increased steadily since the later decades of the twentieth century, and the autonomy of the editorial role — at least at conglomerate-owned houses — has been impinged upon by the "many hands" Sinykin evokes.26 Still, the editor remains in a unique and central position, situated within (and employed by) the publishing institution and thus bearing direct responsibility for reconciling institutional and authorial demands. While the publication of a book may involve input from a multitude of figures (including outsourced copyediting, design, sensitivity reading, and more), the editor is the coordinating figure responsible (as Peter Blackstock says in his interview in this issue) for moving the book through every stage of the process.27 An editor like Blackstock acts as the in-house custodian of the colophon, deciding to safeguard or extend its remit as needed, weighing tradition against novelty in countless cumulative acts of mediation.

These acts, as Abram Foley has argued, make editing an "artistic and political practice" that "generates its own modes of creative and critical thought."28 This issue's articles build on this claim, bringing fine-grained attention to the modes and effects of creative practices enabled by specific instances of editorial work. In these articles, we see editing as curation and canon-making; editing as the tireless, often unrewarded work of making small-scale publications happen; and editing on the margins of the literary field as both labors of love and matters of principled, non-economic political, social, and artistic commitment. This last point is crucial. Since 1945, the work Ginna describes as acquisition, textual development, and publishing has been done not just by middle-managers of large publishers and cultural institutions but by people operating on their own or close to it at small and often short-lived presses. This editorial labor often plays a minor role in scholarship on publishing — and in novels like Galassi's, which largely hews to a particular postwar canon and a nexus of prestige that many of the articles here contest — but its influence is outsized.29 As Stephanie Anderson describes, Daisy Aldan's unsung work throughout the 1950s drew on the technological developments and expanded possibilities of small-scale publishing to bring poets largely excluded from other venues to the fore. Two decades later, as Meredith Benjamin shows, writers including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and June Jordan lent their symbolic capital to disseminate and promote poetry by women. The mimeograph revolution and the women-in-print movement (as discussed in Meredith Benjamin and Julie Enszer's essays) are at once wholly separate from our stories of mainstream publishing and conglomeration and at the same time, dialectically inextricable from the economic and demographic circumstances that concentrated and incorporated the publishing business.30

In these articles, the work of editors suggests a vast "secret history" of post-1945 American literature that marries the individual authorial achievements that still dominate literary histories to the history of literary institutions. Editors are essential to the "relations of writing" (a concept invoked by Marta Sánchez) that shaped not only Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant (1991) and Diario de un mojado (2003) but also most literary texts produced since 1945. A committed and visionary editor has the potential to build, modify, and leverage the literary infrastructures that undergird our engagement with authors and texts. In their brief, provocative coda to Joshua M. Murray and Ross K. Tangedal's edited volume Editing the Harlem Renaissance (2022), Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne conceptualize editing as the "infrastructural care" needed to preserve and curate bodies of writing for future generations.31 Several articles in this issue suggest the portability of this notion by showing how editors in different contexts lay foundations that outlast their immediate circumstances. These editorial efforts to make literary works available — bringing them into being and keeping them in print, cultivating a public, maintaining the networks of distribution, developing relationships at individual and institutional scales — frequently escape traditional understanding of the editor's role. In the case of the more familiar writers and institutions, the analogy between architectural and literary infrastructures is easily grasped. The New Yorker's famed "first reading clause," for example, which Amy Reading shows Katharine S. White played a central part in developing, provided lasting security for many writers and became a cornerstone of the magazine's success. Greg Barnhisel shows how Norman Holmes Pearson's lifelong campaign for recognition for particular poets centered on an ability to "knit [different] institutions together," helping to secure the authors' positions in American letters through sustained engagement with publishers, universities, and archives, and literary networks.

Other contributors consider what this kind of care might look like further from the mainstream. Julie R. Enszer examines how lesbian-feminist editors at small presses in the 1970s and '80s worked to build institutions and identities, using their editorial power to "intervene in canon-making" and build a "cultural archive" regardless of its commercial viability. Meredith Benjamin, too, both draws upon and theorizes the archival record of the work of feminist poet-editors to reconstruct the dynamic conflicts within poetry communities; her account of Audre Lorde's tenure as poetry editor for Amazon Quarterly and Chrysalis, for example, reveals how an editor might build alternative institutions and new pathways for publication through their relationships with authors and readers. Stephanie Anderson describes Daisy Aldan as an "heiress," asking us to think of her as part of a "non-genealogical lineage of women small press editors and publishers." Small-press activity is framed here as the creation of a conceptual and material inheritance, with its various activities of community-building accumulating in countless small ways into something of substance (Waldrop again provides a vivid metaphor, this time of a "leavening" that quietly transforms entire communities). In these processes, Anderson writes, "something that is almost ephemeral accrues value in a series of moves so minor that they are often invisible." Attending to the work of editors, we argue — tracking these "minor moves" whose sediment accumulates into the lasting structures of literary worlds — can make visible the creation of publishing communities and institutions across time.

In many cases, we see affect as the locus for the intersection between personal and institutional forces.32 Several of the essays here treat the affective dimension of editing — the intimacy, the conflict, the frustrations and divergent visions — not as distractions from the textual exchange or as complicating factors in the search to establish authorial intent, but as an essential lens for viewing the social and political dynamics of a given publishing context. Amy Reading's analysis of Katharine S. White's conversational editorial style and her (self-described) "personal-editorial letters" to authors shows how the strategic intimacy of the editorial response created an "intimate space of dialogue" between author and institution. Meredith Benjamin's essay builds on Heather Milne and Kate Eichhorn's understanding of "affective economies" to show how feminist poetry editors tried to rethink the relationship among readers, writers and institutions. These analyses reveal new dimensions of how particular communities were constructed through print, and how editors maintained and challenged institutional identities. Often, these dimensions encompass the materiality of the editorial "paper trail," as Ben Fried puts it; we see an editor cutting and pasting segments of texts in the hunt for textual connections (Fried), an editor and author buying a typewriter together in the market (Sánchez), and poet-editors gathering over the immediacy of the mimeograph machine (Anderson). The essays here attend to how editorial sociality is constructed, probing the complicated relationship between friendship and community, how particular editors negotiated the social demands and assumptions of their moments, and how editorial forms of intimacy shaped what Rachel Malik has termed "the horizons of the publishable."33

In places, this attention to affective environments and literary relationships also adds to the growing attention — in scholarship as well as in wider literary discourse — to the many and persistent inequalities in publishing.34 Several of the essays here bring to life the exclusionary dynamics in twentieth-century publishing, as our contributors consider the predominance of white writers in the midcentury New Yorker and Folder (Fried, Anderson) as well as Ezra Pound's white supremacist beliefs (Barnhisel). Meredith Benjamin traces Audre Lorde's attempts to challenge the classist and racist assumptions implicit in the formal preferences of the editors with whom she worked, showing how her editorships both challenged the white feminism of these magazines' general editors and fed into the development of Lorde's own convictions as expressed in her essays. In each case, we develop a fuller picture of how individual alliances and exchanges might negotiate power structures in the institutions of publishing, and how editors might perpetuate or resist their own and their audiences' assumptions. The patient archival analysis in these essays presents the "shadow archive" of editorial activity (Benjamin) as a resource to reconstruct and better understand the negotiations over representation and equality in literary and social movements. In the interview that closes this issue, Peter Blackstock discusses how his own background and "mixed identity" has informed his editorial relationships, giving a first-hand account of these negotiations and offering a window into how "point[s] of connection" between authors and editors might inform encounters with texts.

These points of connection indicate the international networks and institutional links that have helped to shape American literature, framing US publishing more explicitly within transcontinental and transnational histories. Barnhisel's account of the complex itineraries of the expatriates Pound and H.D. and the networks that Norman Holmes Pearson leveraged to place their work within a US context builds upon his scholarship on the mechanisms through which modernism was integrated into a Cold War ideological framework; Enszer's article unearths the editorial labor behind the bilingual, border-crossing writings of Gloria Anzaldúa; Reading's reconstruction of Katharine S. White's editorial career shows the editor's importance in consolidating Vladimir Nabokov's relationship with The New Yorker. Marta Sánchez's piece describes the late-twentieth and twenty-first century changes in US publishing that have contributed to a broader range of translated literature, due in this case largely to a growing Spanish-language population; the editor serves double duty here as translator, mediating between languages and nation states as well as literary fields. Sánchez's article expands the boundaries of the "American" in our title through its attention to relationships among multiple territories, languages, and markets. Peter Blackstock's worldly editorial outlook, and his role at a publisher famed for its openness to international literature, also indicates some of the ways in which contemporary American literature is informed by — and exists in dialogue with — traditions and perspectives beyond the anglophone.35 Blackstock's stated desire to build an editorial list that "reflects the world" — in the words that close this issue — comes as a response, at once personal and professional, to a literary canon and publishing milieu historically limited in its frame of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic reference. It might also be read as a typically coy statement in keeping with editors' tendency towards professional invisibility: reflecting the world is a more humble aspiration than shaping it, and the countless acts of curation implied in this activity have more agential power than this formulation gives them. At the same time, however, the statement is a reminder that American literature has long been shaped, consolidated, and challenged by editors whose activities mediate structures both local and global. This special issue aims to think through the various forms of this mediation, and to make visible some of the editorial labor that has built the literary world we know.

Taken together, these essays confront some questions key to the future of scholarship on editing. The provocatively diverse collection of essays here cuts across movements and publication contexts, and draws from scholarship in book history, literary sociology, periodical studies, and textual studies. It also shows how the study of editors might draw from and contribute to feminist historiography, scholarship on the middlebrow, and studies of modernism(s). This eclecticism spans subfields, most obviously literary history and periodical studies. We concur with scholars who would put these approaches into closer contact, not least because the careers of so many postwar writers and editors demand that we do so.³⁶ As these essays demonstrate, we may find ourselves looking at familiar figures in new ways, noting the fertile interchange between the roles of editor and author as editorial practices and problems feed back into their work as writers. The variety and richness of editorial labor on view here, indeed, brings us to the question of whether editing should properly be understood as a role — primarily, one carried out as a formalised activity in a relation of employment — or, as Foley has it, a more loosely-understood "function." We incline towards the same flexibility of definition.37

The essays here suggest that Editing Studies needs to account for the specific positionality and demands entailed in the editor's role while being flexible enough to recognise the diversity of actors who play this role and the variety of situations in which this role is played. The relationships between small-press editors, for example, and the long history of Reavis and Perez's collaboration, show how much essential editorial activity is done outside of codified publishing relationships. Barnhisel's piece is perhaps the most provocative in its focus on someone who was rarely an "editor" in the strict professional sense, but whose behind-the-scenes work shows a particular kind of editorial genius, or at least a set of aptitudes and strategies that we find productive to define as editorial ones. The multifarious activities described in these essays may challenge our conceptual boundaries and sense of established publishing roles, but we see this destabilization as integral to any concerted attempt to understand the forms of mediation through which texts reach us. "Editing," as a concept and set of activities, always threatens to exceed the boundaries we set for it. Our job as critics is to adjust our vision accordingly.

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Tim Groenland is SFI/IRC Pathway Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, where he is Principal Investigator on the project "The Publishing Infrastructures of Contemporary Anglophone Literature." His book The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace was published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Academic. 

Evan Brier is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is the author of Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965-1999 (University of Iowa Press, 2024) and A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction (Penn Press, 2010). His work on fiction and the marketplace has been published in American Literature, American Literary History, and PMLA.

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Banner image by Joanna Kosinkska licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

References