Literature is, variously: a refuge from reality, an encounter with an era, an expression of a singular sensibility and a sheer delight. But it is also a business, as Dan Sinykin, an English professor at Emory University, explains in his new monograph, “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.”
Many academics are clinical prose stylists, but Sinykin writes with verve and narrative flair as he documents the consolidation of the major publishing houses — and, along the way, overturns the myth of “the romantic author,” that lone genius unfettered by social circumstances or material constraints. Far from working in isolation, he argues, writers inhabit a “hidden world” of “subsidiary rights specialists, art directors, marketing managers, sales staff, wholesalers, chain book buyers, philanthropists, government bureaucrats.” In “Big Fiction,” these shadowy figures, so central yet so uncelebrated, slink out of the wings and onto the stage. The result is a fascinating and informative account of the convulsions roiling the American publishing industry for the past half-century — and a devastating reckoning with the ways in which conglomeration has altered American fiction.
Still, sentimental and naive as I am, I cannot quite shake the conviction that literature is more than an emanation of economic circumstance. For all its fragility and susceptibility to material degradation, it continues to strike me as a member of that endangered and embattled species: art.
“Big Fiction” is nonetheless a useful reminder to remain alert to how the sausage is made — and how the conditions of its production influence its flavor. Sinykin’s story begins in the 1940s and ’50s, when U.S. publishers “were relatively small and privately held, usually by the founders or their heirs.” Houses such as Harper, Macmillan, Knopf, Random House, Simon & Schuster and Viking flourished in an amenable postwar climate, characterized by an ample supply of eager readers. “During World War II, the military shipped millions of books to soldiers, creating a vast body of readers, many of whom came home and went to college on the GI Bill,” Sinykin writes. “Universities expanded and kept expanding to keep up with enrollments as they opened their doors to more than white men, churning out more readers.” A booming economy furnished newly minted bibliophiles with plenty of disposable income — and, thanks in large part to an influx of mass-market paperbacks, “cheap and portable books” were available for purchase in drugstores and train stations. The affordable editions put out by the likes of Pocket Books spanned the gamut from genre fiction to high literary classics. By the end of 1949, a mass-market publisher called New American Library had sold an astonishing 800,000 copies of William Faulkner’s lyrical sortie “The Wild Palms.”
But with the 1960s came the dawn of what Sinykin calls “the conglomerate era.” Because “antitrust law inhibited mergers and acquisitions within an industry,” corporations hoping to grow had to acquire companies in other fields. The shock to the literary landscape was swift and total. A newspaper company acquired New American Library in 1960 — and after that, the deluge. The electronics company RCA came for Random House in 1965; Time Inc. gobbled up Little, Brown in 1968; Macmillan went to a Canadian communications company in 1973. By 1977, the economy was in shambles, and “inflation hiked the price of books even as consumers had less money to buy them.”
Under the notoriously laissez-faire Reagan administration, corporate bloodthirst accelerated. As “barriers to consolidation and vertical integration” collapsed, the contemporary literary ecosystem solidified. Random House, already an empire of imprints, was swallowed up by German conglomerate Bertelsmann in 1998; Rupert Murdoch had become owner of Harper & Row in 1987 (an additional acquisition in 1989 led to the creation of HarperCollins). In 1991, the president of Simon & Schuster admitted, ominously, “We are not a publisher, we are now a creator of copyrights for their exploitation in any medium or distribution system.” Editors were no longer sovereign in the realm of literary production: Everyone was now beholden to the bottom line. The sole major trade house that survived the onslaught was W.W. Norton, which remains bravely independent to this day.
Conglomerates, in turn, gave rise to a competing but deeply intertwined world of nonprofit publishers, defined in conscious opposition to the corporate mainstream. “Despite the cant of liberation,” Sinykin writes with skepticism, “markets still mattered to nonprofits,” and they were still compelled to appease capricious donors. They published previously marginalized voices in part because “ethnic literature was becoming increasingly marketable, as well as increasingly desirable for government bureaucracies and the donor class to support.”
But even if their motives were sometimes impure, nonprofits like Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press ended up with more interesting, experimental and diverse rosters of writers than their corporate competitors. Today, they are home to some of the most ambitious writing in circulation. If the “villain” of “Big Fiction” is the fetishization of the individual author, then small, independent presses like Dalkey Archive Press, Sublunary Editions, Archipelago Books, Transit Books, New York Review Books, New Directions and so many more may provide imperfect but admirable alternatives: communities dedicated to jointly resisting the crass imperatives of the market.
“Big Fiction” purports to “defer judgment about whether conglomeration was good or bad in an effort to explain what it has meant for U.S. fiction,” but, happily, Sinykin sneaks in some of the censure that conglomerations so richly deserve. The usual suspects — among them, decreasing competition and encroaching homogeneity as the number of publishers shrinks — are largely (and somewhat curiously) absent. Instead, Sinykin focuses on the cynical “new management techniques” instituted by corporate publishers. He demonstrates that, in the conglomerate era, authors like Stephen King and Danielle Steel are pressured to become advertisements for themselves, even as much of the work of authorship (the research, the fact-checking) is farmed out to a small army of aides, assistants and publicists, leaving writers with less control over their output; editors, once charged with improving the quality of writing, have been overwhelmed with “managerial” tasks involving fundraising and promotion.
Perhaps worst of all, conglomeration has “stratified reading,” yielding an unprecedentedly sharp divide between popular and literary fiction. As mass-market paperback imprints were gutted and resources were directed toward brand-name authors in the 1980s, “bestsellers and prizewinners, previously integrated,” became “segregated.”
“I don’t believe the novels written in the last forty years are worse than those written in the forty years previous,” Sinykin claims, but sometimes the infelicities of the industry implicate its offerings. Much of the writing that tops bestseller lists can be churned out so quickly because it contains “formulaic plots” — though some mass-market fiction, like King’s meta-commentaries on the commercialization of publishing, ingeniously resists its own commodification, as Sinykin shows in a series of nimble readings.
So was publishing — and the fiction it produced — better before the onset of the conglomerate era? Yes and no, is Sinykin’s sensible answer. Mass-market paperbacks were a democratic innovation that rendered high literature accessible to everyone, and publishing operated at a more human scale before corporate leviathans took charge. But a system in which “what mattered most was who you knew” suffered from all the predictable shortcomings: It was nepotistic, insular and extraordinarily hostile to women and people of color. “WHEN did you learn to read and write?” Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House, wrote in an astoundingly tasteless letter to a female acquaintance. Sinykin may be critical of corporate consolidation, but he isn’t nostalgic for the boys’ clubs of yesteryear.
Ultimately, however, I wonder if conglomeration explains quite as much about contemporary writing and reading as Sinykin sometimes seems to think. Books are material and economic objects, but they are also aesthetic ones.
Take the case of autofiction, a fashionable subgenre in which authors blend autobiography and invention, yielding works that are somewhere between novels and memoirs. Sinykin suggests that authors have turned to this mode because “it amplifies the romantic myth of the author, her celebrity, which raises her value as a walking, talking advertisement at the same time that she is, in fact, progressively shedding control over her image and her work.” This is a clever argument and probably contains a grain of truth. But what Sinykin does not consider is that the authors he cites, among them Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick, may have opted for autofiction in part because it better suited a moment in which truth felt porous, or simply because it made for good writing. Indeed, in an essay from which he quotes, Hardwick herself offered an explicitly artistic justification, writing that “it is difficult for fiction to compete with the aesthetic satisfactions of the actual.”
Or consider Sinykin’s brief and endearing foray into autobiography, in which he recalls discovering Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” at the local Barnes & Noble when he was in high school. He writes that he loved the book because of its “challenging prose” and “lush language” — but then he deflects, proffering the obligatory mockery of his “pretension to uniqueness.”
Why not give the challenging, lush prose its due? Market forces are powerful, but they are not irresistible. Sometimes lush prose wins out, even when it is not particularly profitable, solely because it is luscious. Some of the players in the literature business “fight more for art, some more for money, but always, by necessity, a bit of both,” Sinykin writes. “Big Fiction” is a compelling chronicle of how they came to fight almost exclusively for money. Our job as readers and writers is to ensure that, in the future, they fight harder for art.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.
Big Fiction
How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature
By Dan Sinykin
Columbia University Press. 313 pp. $30