The book sounds interesting; my Mom worked at Little Brown in the 70s, she left not too long before it got bought out and essentially shut down, what had been a book place in Boston with a century plus of products in the cellar became a PO Box in Manhattan
Let's not forget the heyday of the short story, from 1900 into the 1930's, which coincided with the heyday of newspapers (and comic strips). Not considered Literature-with-a-capital-L, maybe, but extremely popular. O. Henry wrote a new story every week for New York City's leading tabloid, which had a circulation over a million. F. Scott Fitzgerald made far more money off his stories than his novels, from magazines like Saturday Evening Post, which had a circulation of three million. Short story writers in America were kind of their era's pop stars.
Could we get novels back to the status they had during the 1980's Brat Pack days? I don't see why not. But they'd need to look and read very differently from how they do now. In this world, everything is in constant change. Why should literature remain creatively stuck in one spot?
It's a great point about short stories (and comic strips!) There was a time, even after the heyday of the Saturday Evening Post where people were calling each other on the phone to talk about the latest Salinger in the New Yorker. And even as late as the 1980s, Bloom County was a major narrative of my growing up, as Doonesbury was for others...
The book sounds interesting; my Mom worked at Little Brown in the 70s, she left not too long before it got bought out and essentially shut down, what had been a book place in Boston with a century plus of products in the cellar became a PO Box in Manhattan
Let's not forget the heyday of the short story, from 1900 into the 1930's, which coincided with the heyday of newspapers (and comic strips). Not considered Literature-with-a-capital-L, maybe, but extremely popular. O. Henry wrote a new story every week for New York City's leading tabloid, which had a circulation over a million. F. Scott Fitzgerald made far more money off his stories than his novels, from magazines like Saturday Evening Post, which had a circulation of three million. Short story writers in America were kind of their era's pop stars.
Could we get novels back to the status they had during the 1980's Brat Pack days? I don't see why not. But they'd need to look and read very differently from how they do now. In this world, everything is in constant change. Why should literature remain creatively stuck in one spot?
The trick will be figuring out how to change it.
It's a great point about short stories (and comic strips!) There was a time, even after the heyday of the Saturday Evening Post where people were calling each other on the phone to talk about the latest Salinger in the New Yorker. And even as late as the 1980s, Bloom County was a major narrative of my growing up, as Doonesbury was for others...