DON’T LISTEN TO TED GIOIA EITHER

In July I published a couple of essays here in response to a David Brooks column in the New York Times called “When Novels Mattered.” My essays were titled “Don’t Listen To David Brooks” and “Don’t Listen To David Brooks: Part Two.” Brooks argued that works of prose fiction once played a much larger part in American cultural life than they do today. He noted that “novelists were accorded lavish attention as late as the 1980s, and some became astoundingly famous: Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote.” But, nowadays, wrote Brooks, literature has become “less central to American life.” Describing the contemporary bestseller lists, he bemoaned that, “Today it’s largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction.” The problem, Brooks noted, is that highbrow book critics once had the power to turn fairly obscure writers into literary superstars just by promoting their works in small intellectual publications such as Commentary or the Partisan Review or the New Republic. He noted that many of these critics – Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, etc. – also got famous, and their recommendations carried a lot of clout with American readers.

In my rebuttals, I noted that, “Brooks believes that serious cultural critics lost the ability to decide which novels matter and why sometime after the 1980s. But the truth is that serious literary critics began losing their ability to sway the cultural conversation long before the 1980s. In his 2009 book, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960, scholar Gordon Hutner argues that elite critics began losing their sway over the American novel back in the 1950s. This happened, he says, because the critics of the era ‘despised and mocked the ambitions and experience of a large portion of the book-buying public – the middle class – and scholars as a group turned away from the interest of middle-class social experience in fiction and settled their attention on formal achievements,’ which explains why, by the 1970s, the critics all seemed enamored of writers like Joseph McElroy, Robert Coover, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and others of that ilk, most of whom, like the critics themselves, were professional academics. In the 1950s, ordinary American readers devoured books about subjects that were important to them, such as religious faith (The Cardinal, by Henry Morton Robinson was the bestselling novel of 1950), the lives of servicemen (From Here to Eternity and The Caine Mutiny were the two bestselling novels of 1951), the business world (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson, was the fifth bestselling novel of 1955), small town working-class lives (Peyton Place was the third bestselling novel of 1956 and the second bestselling novel of 1957), crime and punishment (Anatomy of a Murder, by Robert Travers, was the second bestselling novel of 1958, and politics (Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury, was the fourth bestselling book of 1959). The critics, meanwhile, tended to fawn over novels such as Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, John Barth’s The Floating Opera, and other niche works. As a result, by the end of the 1950s, serious literary critics were losing their ability to decide which novels mattered. This happened not because novels stopped mattering but because serious criticism had marginalized itself by embracing a thinner and thinner slice of the American literary pie.”

Astoundingly, my rebuttals did nothing to diminish the popularity of Brooks’s original essay. And, since it appeared, several other prominent writers have jumped on Brooks’s bandwagon. On September 22, Substack cultural commentator Ted Gioia published a similar piece called “Is Mid-20^th Century American Culture Getting Erased?” In that essay, he referred to a September 9^th essay in the Atlantic that lamented the fact that John Cheever’s work seems to be fading from cultural prominence. Gioia also referred to a February, 2025, piece written by New York Times reporter Joshua Barone, in which he lamented that many mid-century American operas, including some that won major prizes and plaudits, are rarely, if ever, produced any more. Gioia then asks, “Is there any creative field where America’s best work from the 1940s and early 1950s is still celebrated?”

Gioia’s timeline seems a bit wonky to me. After mentioning Cheever’s cultural decline, he laments that, “Not long ago, any short list of great American novelists would include obvious names such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison. But nowadays I don’t hear anybody say they are reading their books.” Updike’s first novel was published in 1959, and all the rest of them were published in the 1960s or later. Likewise, Cheever’s first novel was published in 1957, and all the rest of them were published in the 1960s or later. Cheever, of course, was already a prominent short story author by the mid 1950s, so perhaps that is why Gioia included him in his timeline. But Gioia also mentions Joseph Heller (first book published in 1961, and second novel published in 1974), Bernard Malamud (only one of his many books was published in Gioia’s timeline), and Katherine Anne Porter, whose lone novel was published in 1962 (though, like Cheever, she was already a prominent short-story writer by then). Gioia later notes of the writers whose current obscurity he laments, “Their era – mid-20^th-century America – really is disappearing, at least in terms of culture and criticism. Anything from the 1950s is like an alien from another planet. It simply doesn’t communicate to us, or maybe isn’t given a chance.”

For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to use Gioia’s more expansive timeline – i.e., mid-20^th century – rather than the more restrictive “1940s and early 1950s.” According to Google’s AI, the mid twentieth century is usually defined as stretching from 1940 to the early 1970s. And my answer to his question – “Is Mid-20^th Century American Culture Getting Erased?” – is “no.” Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett don’t seem to be getting erased. Booker-Prize-winning author John Banville’s 2014 novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde” (published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black) was based on Chandler’s work, as was Neil Jordan’s 2022 film adaptation, Marlowe. The 2024 TV miniseries, Monsieur Spade, is based on the exploits of a character created by Hammett. Clearly, the culture is in no hurry to erase either Chandler or Hammett.

Gioia complained that none of Cheever’s books are among the 25,000 bestselling books on Amazon.com., but Betty Smith’s 1944 novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, ranks number 3,138 on Amazon’s bestsellers list, and it ranks 136^th in “classic literature” on the website. Harper Lee’s 1961 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, ranks as Amazon’s 175^th bestselling book, and is listed as sixth in “classic literature.” Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 ranks third in classic literature at Amazon. The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, Cannery Row, The Crucible, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, The Godfather, Slaughterhouse Five, Once an Eagle, The Bell Jar, Atlas Shrugged, Flowers for Algernon, Dune, Stoner – all of these mid-century books rank among the one hundred bestselling classics at Amazon.com. Does that sound as if mid-century American culture is getting erased?

As I mentioned in one of my essays about Brooks: Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, and many another writer whose work is now collected in The Library of America, were largely ignored by literary snobs until Hollywood began adapting their work for the big screen. Leonard, Thompson, Highsmith, Dick, and a lot of other top-notch pop-fiction writers were active in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a time when highbrow critics tended to obsess over writers such as those mentioned in Brooks’s article: Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, John Updike, Gore Vidal, etc. Nowadays, the novels of those four men, and many of their contemporaries, are fading from cultural relevance. Meanwhile, Leonard, Thompson, Dick, and Highsmith seem to grow more respected with each new year. In the New Yorker Anthony Lane just wrote a fawning appraisal of the life and work of Elmore Leonard. Paul Gallico’s 1959 bestseller, Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, recently got a film adaptation. And his 1969 novel, The Poseidon Adventure, seems to get a new film treatment every decade or so. Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Exorcist, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and numerous other mid-century novels continue to inspire cultural spinoffs.

What Brooks lamented in “When Novels Mattered” was a time when a cadre of elite east-coast critics, most of them white men like Brooks, dictated to the public which novels mattered and which didn’t. What Ted Gioia seems to be lamenting isn’t that mid-century American culture is disappearing, but rather that mid-century American novels that were mostly written by east-coast male elites such as Updike, Bellow, and Heller, are starting to lose their prominence in the American canon, often to be replaced by works written by the likes of Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, Elmore Leonard, and many others who were active in the mid-century but largely ignored by literary snobs such as Gioia. This probably wouldn’t come as a complete surprise to John Updike, at least. Interviewed in 1991, after winning his second Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Updike shrugged off the accomplishment, noting that the first author to win two Pulitzers for his fiction was Booth Tarkington, a writer who was largely forgotten by 1991 (and remains so today). Likewise, Steven Vincent Benét won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1928 novel-in-verse, John Brown’s Body, and another in 1944 for his poetry. Steven’s brother, William Rose Benét also won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Both men are pretty much forgotten nowadays, as are most other Pulitzer Prize winners. Plenty of writers who were contemporaries of the Benét brothers or of Booth Tarkington remain highly popular today, writers such as Chandler and Hammett and Margaret Mitchell and Betty Smith. You can’t say that writers born near the beginning of the twentieth century are being erased just because so many of them have been forgotten. The vast majority of every generation of writers will be forgotten. The writers whose works still engage the imaginations of contemporary readers – Chandler, Hammett, etc. – remain alive and well and unerased.

Gioia asked: “Is there any creative field where America’s best work from the 1940s and early 1950s is still celebrated?” If we expand that question to include all mid-century American creative fields, the answer of course is “popular culture.” Spider-Man, Iron-Man, Wonder Woman, Archie Andrews, and plenty of other mid-century comic book characters are still very popular. Mid-century TV shows such as Star Trek, The Addams Family, Hawaii 5-0, Perry Mason, and many others have been celebrated with recent reboots and spinoffs. Likewise, plenty of mid-century films have inspired recent remakes and spinoffs, including Psycho, Ocean’s 11, West Side Story, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Mary Poppins, and The Planet of the Apes. But surely one of the American creative fields of the mid century that remains most highly celebrated is the popular fiction of that era. Netflix’s 2024 minseries Ripley was only the most recent adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Kurt Vonnegut, Ira Levin, Philip K. Dick, Elmore Leonard, Walter Tevis, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Shirley Jackson – these and plenty of other mid-20^th-century American writers still have a great deal of cultural importance in the 21^st century, putting the lie to Ted Gioia’s assertion that, “Their era – mid-20^th-century America – really is disappearing, at least in terms of culture and criticism. Anything from the 1950s is like an alien from another planet. It simply doesn’t communicate to us, or maybe isn’t given a chance.”

For the most part, the American fiction that lasts and lasts is the fiction that was written for popular consumption, usually in some genre or another, and was often ignored or sneered at by the serious literary crowd upon publication. Those novels are doing just fine these days, thank you very much. They still matter just as much as they always did – just not to the type of literary snob who can’t recognize literary talent unless it comes certified by the people who pass out Pulitzers and Nobels. But if the work of Bradbury and Jackson and Highsmith and Vonnegut doesn’t communicate to Gioia, that is his loss. Maybe he just hasn’t given it enough of a chance.