THOUGHTS ON THE STATE OF LITERATURE IN AMERICA, 2022

“Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

-Bertolt Brecht

Literature can inspire action, deepen understanding, challenge the power structure, and speak for the voiceless. It must do so without polemics, which has mistakenly been taken to mean that novels must exclude political struggles and overt class conflicts. Had novelists followed that precept, we wouldn’t have For Whom the Bell Tolls, In Dubious Battle, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Beloved, The House of Mirth, Intruder in the Dust, or the fiction of Marge Piercy, Richard Russo, Alice Walker, John Sayles, Leslie Marmon Silko, or Toni Cade Bambara, to name just a few. Furthermore, we wouldn’t have the plethora of class-conscious, system-challenging writers who are relegated by the literary establishment to the crime/mystery genre:  S. A. Cosby, Sara Paretsky, Steven Mack Jones, Joe Ide, Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, James Lee Burke, and deceased writers Gordon DeMarco, Sue Grafton, Tony Hillerman, and the incomparable Barbara Neely, among many others.

In the literary battlefield, John Hawkes stands in one corner, proclaiming that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies of the novel. In the opposite corner Tom Wolfe passionately defends realistic fiction that “portray[s] the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him.”

How did this situation come about?

While some point to the mergers of publishing companies, a more insidious and more probable reason is the rise of Master of Fine Arts programs.

Until relatively recently, many of our best writers did not have college degrees, let alone MFAs. Faulkner didn’t even finish high school and Dashiell Hammett left school at thirteen. Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Raymond Chandler, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Richard Wright − none attended college. Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton. Other renowned writers attended college and earned degrees in English (Roth, Updike, Kim Stanley Robinson, Sue Grafton) or other fields entirely (Mailer, engineering; Bellow, anthropology).  But it’s a rare writer of today’s “literary fiction” who doesn’t have an MFA. (1)

The first creative writing degree program in the United States was the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, begun in 1936. By 1975, 52 U.S. colleges offered MFA writing programs; over half had been founded by Iowa graduates. (2)

That the Iowa Writers’ Workshop expanded in scope and influence during the Cold War is not coincidental.

WWII had barely concluded when the United States began its ideological and political fight against the USSR. In 1947 the wartime OSS gave way to the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was concerned about (or perhaps more accurately, fanatically fearful of) the influence of communist ideals, and immediately set up the “Propaganda Assets Inventory” division. Among its arms was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), established in 1950. The purpose was “to wage…ideological war” against communism. The CIA sought to promote American values of individualism and art for art’s sake against the Soviet ethos of collectivism and social realism. (3)(4)

An early attempt in 1946 by the State Department to promote the cultural superiority of the United States with a traveling exhibit of modernist art had been widely denounced by members of Congress, the press, and others. Even President Truman got into the act, remarking after seeing a modernist painting, “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot.” (5)

The CIA then came up with a plan to promote abstract expressionism without CIA involvement being known to the artists being promoted, to the American public, or to the USSR. A former CIA operative working on the project has said that most abstract expressionists self-identified as anarchists, which worked in the CIA’s favor; the artists wouldn’t be suspected of carrying out the CIA’s agenda. (6)

The CIA called this policy “Operation Long Leash.” The agency was kept “at a remove of two or three degrees from the artists or exhibitions” and “couldn’t be linked to furtive government bankrolling.” (7) Tom Braden, who was the head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division (under the auspices of which were the CCF and other groups), explained:

“We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, ‘We want to set up a foundation.’ We would tell him what we were actually trying to do and pledge him to secrecy and he would say, ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was a pretty simple device.” (8)

The Museum of Modern Art was intricately involved with the CCF’s agenda. Nelson Rockefeller was the president of the MoMA’s board of trustees and it was he who arranged for worldwide exhibitions that promoted abstract expressionist art, which Rockefeller called “free enterprise painting.” (9) (10)

The person who “did the most to put Abstract Expressionism on the map” was Clement Greenberg, editor and art critic of The Partisan Review, the highly prestigious journal of the non-Communist left that was subsidized in part by the CIA through private donations and foundations, including the Farfield Foundation. (11) (12)

All the efforts and money succeeded. As Jason Epstein, founder and publisher of The New York Review of Books, said of abstract expressionism:

It was like the emperor’s clothes. You parade it down the street and you say, ‘This is great art,’ and the people along the parade route will agree with you. Who’s going to stand up to Clem Greenberg and later to the Rockefellers who were buying it for their bank lobbies and say ‘This stuff is terrible’? (13)

The CCF also funded dozens of literary journals and other publications. Most of the writers probably didn’t know that, just as it’s doubtful that Pollock and Rothko knew that abstract expressionism was being promoted and funded by the CIA. What many of these writers and artists had in common was either anti-communism or “artistic indifference to politics,” both of which were ideologies that permitted them to not look too closely at the institutional structures that supported and promoted them or at the financial backers of those institutions. (14)

Some writers did know. Peter Matthiessen, a co-founder of The Paris Review, was employed outright by the CIA. Publisher/writer Sol Stein also knew; he’d been a CIA scriptwriter for Voice of America from 1951 until 1953, when he set up and ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom. (15) (16)

Not until 1966 was the CCF revealed as a CIA project. Over fifty years later, the CIA’s website boasts that “the Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA’s more daring and effective Cold War covert operations.” (17)

In 1973 Americans learned that the CIA had three dozen journalists on its payroll who were working overseas. Then, in 1977, a series in the New York Times revealed that the CIA actually “embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals.”  Some publications were created by the CIA, others were already-existing ones. A CIA official told the Times  that it was better cover to get involved with an established publication, “The important thing is to have an editor or someone else who’s receptive to your copy.” (18) (19)

The CIA’s involvement in media and publishing has been written of extensively and was examined in the Church Committee hearings. Less well known is that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was a recipient of the CIA’s largesse.

In the 1950s the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Paul Engle, solicited funds from the aforementioned Farfield Foundation. (20)

Farfield Foundation was a CIA front. Its directors included Cass Canfield, the “titan of publishing” (Grosset & Dunlap, Bantam Books, and Harper Brothers); William Burden, a Vanderbilt, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, and an advisory chairman of MoMA; and Farfield’s co-founder and primary donor Julius Fleischmann, of the yeast company, who was also on the MoMA board. At least two of Farfield’s directors were actual CIA agents, John Thompson and Fred Platt. The CIA nicknamed the organization “SS Farfield.” (21)

Engle also got money for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Asia Foundation (another CIA front), and the State Department. (22) (23)

Engle’s fundraising used “explicitly anti-communist rhetoric: he communicated with private and public donors that Iowa was in the business of bringing writers together in one place to train them to compete against their ideologically-driven counterparts in the Soviet Union.” Under Iowa’s influence, American fiction became individualistic and apolitical. (24)

Viet Thanh Nguyen, in a 2017 essay, connected the anti-communism of the 1950s to the depoliticizing of fiction via the writing workshop; plot became identified with genre writing, while politics, history, theory, philosophy, and ideology disappeared from “literary” writing. (25)

Not only did Iowa inculcate students with its philosophy of fiction, but it worked hand in glove with publishers. Doubleday paid Engle a cut whenever it published a book by a former Iowa student and hired him to oversee the O. Henry Awards series, which soon became dominated by Iowa graduates. (26)

And MFA programs multiplied exponentially. From the 52 that existed in 1975, over 350 colleges had creative writing programs in 2016, twice that number if undergraduate degree programs are included. (27)

“….the explosion of MFA programs in the last 40 years under its [Iowa’s] influence, and the CIA and other groups’ active sponsorship, are well-researched and substantiated.” (28)

While the growth of MFA programs began with CIA money, decades later, the direct influence of the CIA is no longer necessary. American creative writing has been permanently affected. (29)

One alumnus of Iowa was Eric Bennett, who left wholly disheartened (leading to his investigation into the program’s history and eventually to his book, Workshops of Empire). He’d been told by the Workshop that no good novel could be built on ideas and he was pressured to conform to the Workshop’s literary style: “how”, not “what”; show don’t tell; craft over content.

In Current Affairs, Annie Levin described her experience as a creative writing workshop student in 2008. The professor had the workshop draw diagrams of the bar where her harrowing story of desperate people took place. No one made a comment about the content of the story; “the subject matter....was treated as ornamental and didn’t enter into the analysis….What mattered to my teacher was where the tables and chairs were. The moral dimensions of my story and its topic….were pushed completely aside.” (30)

In 1996 David Foster Wallace, writing about the four-volume biography of Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank, pointed to “the stark contrast between passionately ideological Russian novels and the ironic and apolitical fiction” being written by current American novelists: (31)

[W]hat makes Dostoevsky invaluable is that he possessed a passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we, here, today, cannot or do not allow ourselves….

[W]e fiction writers – won’t – ever- dare to try to use serious art to advance ideologies…..We’d be laughed out of town. (We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or protest ideologies. But there is a difference.)  (32)

But the publishers of so-called literary fiction are entrenched in workshop principles. They have an especial fondness for photogenic young MFA recipients whose book jacket bios recount colorful job histories and often add, with no apparent irony, that the writer has homes in two different locales (characteristically phrased “the author splits his/her time between…”). These novels rarely feature characters who work dead-end jobs out of necessity. Characters are presented as free-spirited rebels − and seem to be perceived as such by their creators − because they sport tattoos, have jobs that their bourgeois parents consider to be beneath them, and live in an urban enclave depicted as rough and dangerous, even though the grittiness is a façade and in reality the neighborhood had already become a haven for hipsters and their landlords.

Only those working-class or impoverished people who live safely distant from the authors both regionally and culturally can be portrayed sympathetically. The literary establishment lauds depictions of non-white people suffering nobly, especially if the non-white people live on another continent, and of white working class Americans as crude, in-bred, violent lawbreakers.  Every fictional lower class white community is filled with meth-cooking grotesques and monstrously immoral despoilers of the environment.

Even more uncommon in current American literature are working class characters who don’t accept their role as helpless victims awaiting salvation in academia or the professional class. Oppressed people who fight back aren’t allowed into literary fiction; revolutionaries or activists who wander in are portrayed as dishonest, corrupt megalomaniacs with no true empathy for others.

Just as the CIA’s intent in the 1950s was to promote American individualism as a symbol of freedom, literary fiction centers on the individual. Only personal rebellion is an option, and it may only consist of acts that affect the character’s intimates, not the community as a whole.

Mary Lee Settle famously said that her books were not fashionable because “I don’t write about being vaguely unhappy in Connecticut.” (33) In a recent essay Annie Levin noted that “Serious postwar fiction, whether it was what I was being fed in school or read in the pages of The New Yorker, was about sad white people with relationship problems.” (34)

Readership for literature has declined concurrent with the rise of the MFA. (35) And no wonder. “[S]tories are built upon narrower and narrower subjectivities until the only readership left is that of the writer alone….” (36)

In her insightful and concise essay Levin demolishes the Workshop’s “rules” of fiction, such as the principle show, don’t tell: “[L]iterature historically is full of dogmas, doctrines, and philosophies. It’s full of writers telling you things.” Levin names Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Melville, and Jane Austen as examples. Fiction, she argues, should show and tell, supporting her argument by a cogent comparison of Updike’s short story “A&P” with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. (37)

Devon tells of being deeply affected as an adolescent by Dostoevsky whereas the National Book Award winners, while “elegantly wrought,” “made me feel even lonelier.” (38) But according to the “cultural elite”, if literary writers “don’t make sense or bore us to tears, that can only mean we aren’t worthy of them.” (39)

Meanwhile, “the creative business [teaching writing] makes over $200 million a year….Literature, part of our human birthright, has, like our food and water supply, our systems of care and education, and so many other things, been ransacked and misused by capitalism.” (40)

This essay originated as a brief comment on the state of fiction as I prepared to post on my website a story I wrote in 1978, “Just Cause.”  I was surprised to discover that in the forty-plus years since I wrote it, no American novel has been published about a rent strike. (41) John Sommerfield’s short story “Trouble in Porter Street” was published in 1939. Alfred Grossman’s novel The Do-Gooders (1968) is a satire that includes a hapless character’s plan to organize a rent strike. (It may be relevant that from 1951 to 1961 Grossman edited one of the CIA-fronted literary journals, East Europe magazine.) I am only aware of one fictional account of a rent strike since − the short story “Tenor” by Linda Mannheim (in the 2014 collection Above Sugar Hill), a tale inspired by the real-life murder of tenants’ rights organizer Bruce Bailey in 1989. (42)  With the advent of book publishing technology that enables writers to bypass the publishing industry, the possibility exists that we will see novels whose plots concern the struggles of tenants, a topic that has become even more relevant since the pandemic.

B. R. Myers notes that for inspiration on how to change the current state of “literary” fiction, we should

…look back to a time when authors had more to say than ‘I’m a Writer!’; when the novel wasn’t just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket…

and stand up to the literary establishment. (43)

Nguyen argues cogently for writing that not only includes different races and classes, but, more importantly, embodies their interests and their perspectives, and doesn’t force them to adopt the bourgeois principles of the workshop. He stresses that writing must be enabled by and in turn enable “social movements, revolutions and the struggle for power.” (44)

Certainly there are many literary novels today about the problems and prejudices facing Americans who are not white, or heterosexual, or wealthy. But even so-called outsider literature is often concerned with the struggles of characters hoping to achieve the American dream of personal success − home ownership, wealth (or relative affluence), and a nuclear family (or acceptance by the mainstream culture).

Where are the novels about, say, a young woman growing up in Oakland in the late 1960s who joins the Black Panther Party? About an immigrant family in the San Joaquin Valley who protests housing conditions for farm workers? About a gay couple in the Castro who objects to an illegal rent increase by a gay landlord? (45)

We need stories about more than fighting to achieve personal success against the odds; we need stories about people defending the community. We need stories of confrontations and fights for collective justice. We need novels that expose the deep rot of a corrupt justice system, novels that raise the bar for literature the way “The Wire” did for television.

“The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.”

-James Baldwin, from a 1979 interview by the NY Times (46)

ENDNOTES

1. Lest anyone think this an exaggeration, my survey of the New York Times Book Review of May 8, 2022 yields the following information:

Not including books by non-American authors, children’s books, or the crime book column, 15 books were reviewed. 4 of these are outliers: 2 memoir authors are outside the current system (“old school” writer Delia Ephron and musician/songwriter Janelle Monae); and 2 books are scientific studies written by scientists or mathematicians. I’ve excluded those 4.

That leaves 11 reviews. Of those 11, 8 of the writers have MFAs. Of the 3 that don’t, each has been the recipient of one or more writing Fellowships. 4 of the 11 writers now teach writing.

The 11 reviews were written by 8 reviewers (one person reviewed 4 books). All 8 are all college graduates. 2 have MFA’s.  3 are recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships. 2 teach in MFA programs.

2. Josh Jones, “How the CIA Helped Shape the Creative Writing Scene in America,” Open Culture December 2018, citing Eric Bennett; and Richard Jean So and Andrew Piper, “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic, March 6, 2016. The article concludes that MFA-grads don’t write differently than other literary novelists, missing the point that what the workshop has done is to change so-called “literary writing” entirely, so that any writer wishing to be published in that genre must conform.

3. President Truman created the Central Intelligence Group in 1946. It became the Central Intelligence Agency pursuant to the National Security Act of 1947.

4. Jennifer Dasal, “How MoMA and the CIA conspired to use unwitting artists to promote American propaganda during the Cold War,” artnet.com September 24, 2020 extracted from Dasal’s book, ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History (New York: Penguin Random House, 2020).

5. The painting was “Circus Girl Resting” by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, part of the State Department’s exhibit, “Advancing American Art.” 117 pieces were purchased by the State Department to travel overseas in order to show the rest of the world that Americans weren’t just a bunch of uncultured rubes.  See “Secrets and Lines: The CIA/AbEx connection,” Chapter 2 in Dasal, ArtCurious, op. cit.

6. Some abstract expressionists were even former members of the Communist Party. Typically, they were the most vociferous anti-communists, such as Mark Rothko. See note 14.

7. Dasal, “How MoMA and the CIA,” op. cit. Another action of the CCF was to attend the first All African People’s Congress in Accra in 1958 although the U.S. was supposedly not participating.

8. Dasal, ibid; see also Braden interview in the documentary “Hidden Hands,” 1995

9. MoMA had been co-founded by Nelson Rockefeller’s mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, in 1929. He referred to it as “Mommy’s museum.” (Dasal, “How MoMA and the CIA,” op. cit.)

10. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), p.258

11. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper, 258. In fact, Greenberg’s 1939 essay in Partisan Review, “Avant-Garde and Kitch,” “still stands as the definitive article of faith for the elitist, and anti-Marxist view of Modernism. The avant garde, wrote Greenberg, had been ‘abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs − our ruling class.’” MoMA’s Executive Secretary Tom Braden was smitten with the proposition that avant garde artists should be subsidized by the wealthy, just as had been done in the Renaissance, and was inspired to join the CIA to supervise the agency’s cultural activities.

12. Saunders, ibid, 163-4.

13. Saunders, ibid, 275

14. Michael Brenson, “Art View: Divining the Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” New York Times, December 13, 1987 (describing Pollock’s apolitical, art-for-art’s-sake view, and that Pollock had been a radical leftist in the 1930s.) Rothko was a “committed anti-Communist during the Cold War” along with Adolph Gottlieb; they formed an artists’ federation that “led…efforts to destroy Communist presence in the art world….when the federation voted to cease its political activities in 1953, they resigned.” (Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p.277

15. Joel Whitney, Finks – How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers (London: OR Books, 2016), 24 and 249. Stein, a high school classmate of James Baldwin, published and championed Baldwin via publishing house Stein & Day. On the jacket of Notes of a Native Son, Stein refers to white Americans critical of racism as “professional champions of Negroes.” Stein himself could be called a professional anti-Communist. He despised W.E.B. DuBois and was a good friend and publisher of Elia Kazan. Robert Scheer called him “The Archdeacon of the Cold War.” In a 2007 letter to the New York Times regarding its review of a book by Tim Weiner about the CIA, Stein praised the American Congress for Cultural Freedom for its “essentially centrist cast” with 600 “members,” and concluded with the carefully worded sentence “The organization’s C.I.A. connection was not known to most members until the late 1960s.”

16. James Baldwin refused to work with the CIA. Matthiesson later sneered that Baldwin’s writings were “polemical.”

17. Michael Warner, “Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50,” on CIA.gov, Center for the Study of Intelligence. Retrieved March 24, 2022.

18. John M. Crewdson, “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 1977. It’s worth noting that Carl Bernstein’s Rolling Stone article, “The CIA and the Media” (Oct. 20, 1977), describes interactions between the CIA and the Times: “A senior CIA official” who reviewed some CIA files on journalists “found documentation of five instances in which the Times had provided cover for CIA employees between 1954 and 1962. In each instance, he said, the arrangements were handled by executives of the Times.” Bernstein was unable to find out who in the Times made the arrangements.

19. According to author Deborah Davis, the CIA’s program to control the news media was named Operation Mockingbird. (Davis, Katharine the Great (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pages 138 et seq.) The CIA also owned news services, including Forum World Features, which was “ostensibly owned” by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald, who several CIA sources said knew of the connection. Forum sold features to dozens of U.S. newspapers between 1958 and 1966.

20. Joel Whitney, Finks,30-31; Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire – Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015) p. 112; Washington Post, opinion, “The CIA funded a culture war against communism,” Aug. 22, 2018; Eric Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2014.

21. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper, 135-39; 422; 426.

22. Eric Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature.”

23. Paul Engle, the second director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ran it from 1941-1967. He’d once written for Hallmark cards and had been what was called a Communist sympathizer. His poetry had been heavily promoted in the 1930s by Life magazine and by its publisher, Henry Luce, a Yale graduate and founder of Life, Time, and Fortune magazines. Luce was a key figure in the CIA’s infiltration of the media. Engle’s first important supporter for his work at Iowa was Averill Harriman. The heir to a railroad fortune, Harriman had been FDR’s wartime ambassador to the USSR, and he recruited Engle in post-war efforts to export American ideals. Engle and his family even lived for two years at Harriman’s upstate New York estate (1952-54), during the formative years of the Iowa Writers’ Conference. For a fuller biography see Bennett’s Workshops of Empire.

24. Annie Levin, “How Creative Writing Programs De-politicized Fiction,” online edition of Current Affairs, April 2022, originally published in Current Affairs, Jan/Feb 2022 edition.

25. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Critic’s Take: Your Writing Tools Aren’t Mine,” New York Times, April 30, 2017.

26. Bennett, Workshops of Empire, op.cit., pp. 94-95

27. Richard Jean So and Andrew Piper, “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?”, op.cit. Author Chad Harbach said in 2014 that there were 854 MFA programs in the country.

28. Josh Jones, “How the CIA Helped Shape the Creative Writing Scene in America,” www.openculture.com, December 14, 2018

29. Josh Jones, ibid.

30. Annie Levin, “How Creative Writing Programs De-politicized Fiction,” op cit.

31. Holly Devon, “America’s Propaganda War,” May 17, 2021, at www.laidoffnyc.com.

32. David Foster Wallace, “Dostoevsky,” in The Village Voice, April 9, 1996. But Wallace is being less than candid − or possibly willfully ignorant − when he also writes that he doesn’t know why current American literature is so “thematically shallow and lightweight”. He himself had an MFA (from University of Arizona) and, as so many MFA recipients do, went on to teach creative writing courses in college. He was the beneficiary of the literary establishment’s approval apparatus, including a MacArthur grant. Perhaps not incidentally, he also received an award from The Paris Review.

33. Born in a West Virginia coal mining region, Settle wrote 23 books; the best known are the Beulah Quintet. She founded the PEN-Faulkner Award. Settle had sworn that if Nixon were elected, she’d leave the U.S. – and she did. She lived in England and Turkey from 1969 to 1974. In an article about Settle for the New York Times, Alix Kuczynski wrote that “ ‘vaguely unhappy in Connecticut’ practically has its own section in Barnes & Noble.” (“Frankly, My Dear,” Sept. 2, 2007).

34. Annie Levin, “How Creative Writing Programs De-politicized Fiction,” op.cit.

35. The National Endowment of the Arts commissioned a survey, “Reading at Risk,” which was conducted by the Census Bureau in 2002. The percentage of the U.S. population that reads literature (any kind of fiction) was 56.9% in 1982 and 46.7% in 2002. The NEA attributed this to the rise of electronic media and video games.

36. Devon, “America’s Propaganda War,” op.cit. A friend of mine, a lifelong reader of serious books, told me recently in a tone of confession that she cannot read the “literary” novels of today. They leave her cold and, worse, bore her. She’s taken to avoiding them and identifies them by the back covers, where they are blurbed by other so-called literary writers. The most frequent descriptions I’ve seen that give it away are “compelling,” “evocative,” “lean,” “spare” with “lyrical prose,” or “edgy prose,” or “muscular prose” — and occasionally a bald indication that the book is more concerned about style than substance because it has “sentences that slither and pounce.”

37. Levin, “How Creative Writings Programs De-Politicized Literature,” op. cit.

38.Holly Devon, America’s Propaganda War,” op.cit.

39. B. R. Myers, “A Reader’s Manifesto,” in The Atlantic, August 2001. Myers also wrote that “[Literary writers] seem to know that in leaner and livelier form their courtroom dramas, geisha memoirs, and horse-whisperer romances will not be taken seriously, and that it is precisely the lack of genre-ish suspense that elevates them to the status of prize-worthy ‘tales of loss and redemption’.” I urge anyone interested in an in-depth article about the problems with modern “literary fiction” to read this article.

40. Annie Levin, “How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction,” op cit.

41. Several non-fiction books have been written about the plight of tenants: Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2017) and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001), which by showing the lives of the working poor inevitably includes the problems of finding and keeping a roof over one’s head.

42. Similarly, gentrification isn’t a subject often taken on by literature even though it is a central issue in the lives of many Americans, especially those of us living in urban areas. One exception is Alyssa Cole’s When No One is Watching, a thriller with politics. Several other novels within the past decade or so center on that theme, as well.

43. B. R. Myers, “A Reader’s Manifesto,” op.cit.

44. Nguyen, “Critic’s Take,” NY Times, April 30, 2017, op.cit.

45. The other unfortunate trend is fiction by so-called outsiders that includes countercultural or activist characters but portrays them as hypocrites and the movement as oppressive. One is reminded of the movies made after imposition of The Hollywood Code, in which characters who refused to conform (sexually active unmarried women, moonshiners, etc.) were not allowed a happy ending. In the U.S. in the 2000s, it’s fine to write about radicals and activists but only if they’re depicted as hypocrites and cowards who exploit their comrades and are secretly racist/sexist/homophobic/materialistic. For example, would the literary elite have gushed over Tommy Orange’s There There had the novel NOT portrayed the Alcatraz occupiers as irresponsible parents who spent so much time getting high? Had it not implied that people concerned with collective justice were woefully unaware of an attack on their own daughter? Had it not ended with gunplay so ludicrous and over the top that it would have been rejected as a gun control advertisement?

46. Baldwin was at a reception in a home in the Berkeley hills that was also attended by Angela Davis and Huey Newton. When the journalist asked a police officer for directions, the officer told him to “look for the street lined with patrol cars.” (John Romano, “James Baldwin, Writing and Talking,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 1979)