“Evan Brier’s recent book Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965–1999 (2024)”
“in the latter few decades of the 20th century, literary fiction endured a long, slow, deep recession in the “prestige economy.””
“During that time, although book sales, advances, and author royalties steadily rose, the symbolic capital once enjoyed by America’s literary lions—the Saul Bellows and John Updikes—also steadily declined”
“American authors, in his view, remain as talented as ever. What has happened, though, is that, from 1965 through 1999, there has been a marked increase in art forms competing for elite cultural esteem—forms such as rock music criticism, journalism, film, television, and nonfiction memoir”
“Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) is best remembered for its association with the New Journalism, but Capote himself actually held journalism in low regard. For him, it was mere “hackwork,” and Brier shows that Capote wanted his artistic reputation to rest upon technique alone—that is, pure literary skill”
“Capote’s brutal dismissal of Jack Kerouac as a practitioner of “typing” rather than writing”
“The Beats, Capote believed, relied on performativity and improvisation rather than technical expertise, and he considered their writerly skills inferior to the craft displayed by such authors as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or James Joyce”
“by the 1970s, the literary zeitgeist was trending in a new direction”
“literary sociology: the material processes by which books are acquired, edited, published, distributed, sold, and reviewed”
“distinguish Novel Competition from other important books tackling the notion of literary reputation, such as James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005) or Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now (2016)”
“his earlier argument in A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, The Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction (2010)”
“Although winning a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award can still make one’s literary career, we no longer expect our literary lions to become public intellectuals. Once upon a time, authors like Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and Susan Sontag were recognizable faces on the television circuit. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine any novelist finding that same prominence”