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Big Fiction
LITERATURE NOW
Literature Now
Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors
Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-

century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we under-
stand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational
in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures.
John Brooks, The Racial Unfamiliar: Illegibility in Black Literature

and Culture
Vidyan Ravinthiran, Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics
Ellen Jones, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the
Americas
Thomas Heise, The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial
Crime Novel
Sunny Xiang, Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability
During the Long Cold War
Jessica Pressman, Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age
Heather Houser, Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age
of Data
Christy Wampole, Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-
First-Century France
Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, The
Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism
Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel
Gloria Fisk, Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature
Zara Dinnen, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature
and Culture
Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the
Problem of the Present
Ashley T. Shelden, Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the
Impossibility of Union
Jesse Matz, Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in
Contemporary Culture
Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the
Contemporary Literary Marketplace
Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary
Imagination
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Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an
Age of World Literature
For a complete list of books in the series, please see the Columbia University
Press website.
Big Fiction
How Conglomeration
Changed the Publishing
Industry and American
Literature
Dan Sinykin
Columbia University Press

New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sinykin, Dan, author.
Title: Big fiction : how conglomeration changed the publishing industry and
American literature / Dan Sinykin.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2023] | Series:
Literature now | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023009636 (print) | LCCN 2023009637 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231192941 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231192958 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9780231550062 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—Publishing—United States—History—20th century. |
Fiction—Publishing—United States. | Publishers and publishing—Economic
aspects—United States. | Publishers and publishing—United States—Mergers. |
American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | American fiction—
21st century—History and criticism. | Authors and publishers—United States. |
Books and reading—United States.
Classification: LCC Z480.F53 S56 2023 (print) | LCC Z480.F53 (ebook) |
DDC 070.50973/0904—dc23/eng/20230601
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009636
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009637
Cover design: Inspired by the Vintage Contemporaries cover designs,

originally created by Lorraine Louie
Cover image: Masha Vlasova
For Richard Jean So
3
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Mass Market (I): How Mass-Market Books

Changed Publishing 23
2. Mass Market (II): How the Mass

Market Won the World, Lost Its Soul—
Then Lost the World 47
3. Trade (I): How Women Resisted Sexism and

Reinvented the Novel 71
4. Trade (II): How Literary Writers

Embraced Genre 100
5. Nonprofits: How Rebels Found Funding and

Rejected New York 126
vi i i l Con t en ts
6. Independents: How W. W. Norton Stayed Free

and Housed the Misfits 167
Conclusion 211
Glossary of Publishing Figures 225

Notes 239
Index 283
Acknowledgments
A personal record keeping of the collaborative foundations on which

creative writing is based can be found in the oft-skipped text that precedes
or closes almost all book-length works: the acknowledgments page.
— Clayton Childress
W
hen this book was only a paragraph on my website about a
fantastical “second project,” Philip Leventhal asked to hear
about it. He’s been its steadfast champion since. Across
phone calls, Zoom meetings, countless emails, and a drink once in Manhattan,
he has, for more than five years, given his time and thoughts to make this a bet-
ter book—to make it happen at all. A brilliant editor, he taught me how to tune
my voice. For most of the process, he was joined by Marisa Pagano, my guide to
and informant from the world of conglomerate publishing who gave me crucial
leads to pursue, honed my language, and engaged—refined, refuted—my theo-
ries about the industry. It would be impossible for me to recommend her highly
enough. Matt Hart joined the editorial team toward the end and his good sense
shaped my judgment about balance and calibration in the final manuscript. I
couldn’t be happier to be joining his, David James’s, and Rebecca Walkowitz’s
series, Literature Now, which features so many scholars I admire and so many
titles that have influenced me. Thank you to Caitlin Hurst, Kathryn Jorge,
Monique Laban, and the rest of the fabulous staff at Columbia University Press,
x l Ack n owled g m en ts
who made the process a pleasure. Thank you to my superb copyeditor, Glenn
Court. Thank you to indexer extraordinaire Josh Rutner.
One of the great joys of scholarly life is thinking with others, building com-
munity, and reading and learning from the work that thereby enters the world.
As I worked on this book, I collaborated with Gordon Hutner and Lee Kon-
stantinou on a special issue of American Literary History titled “Publishing
American Literature, 1945–2020” that included superb essays by Angela S.
Allan; Jacqueline Goldsby; Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie
Young; Laura B. McGrath; Mark McGurl; Kinohi Nishikawa; and Ignacio M
Sánchez Prado. As an editor at Post45, I commissioned Jeremy Rosen to guest
edit a cluster of essays gathered under the title “Ecologies of Neoliberal Publish-
ing,” which included terrific work by Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires; Mat-
thew Kirschenbaum; Laura B. McGrath; Simone Murray; Élika Ortega; and
Jeremy Rosen. Parts of this book appeared previously in different forms in Con-
temporary Literature, a special joint issue of Cultural Analytics and Post45, and
the Los Angeles Review of Books. Thanks to my editors: Michael LeMahieu,
Richard Jean So, and Sarah Chihaya.
Archives were essential to the writing of this book. I thank the archivists and
librarians at Columbia University Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, New
York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections, the University of Iowa
Libraries’s Toothpaste/Coffee House Press Records, and the University of Min-
nesota’s Upper Midwest Literary Archives. A special thanks to Erin McBrien
and Pearl McClintock at the University of Minnesota. When the COVID-19
pandemic arrived, I was beginning my work on W. W. Norton in earnest. Unable
to travel, I wrote to Norton, where I reached Louise Brockett, who was extraor-
dinarily helpful, hospitable, and kind. She facilitated interviews with John Glus-
man, Drake McFeely, and Starling Lawrence, each of whom was generous with
his time and gracious with me. I’m grateful, too, for the generosity and gracious-
ness of others I interviewed for this book, including Carol Bemis, Bob DeWeese,
Beverly Haviland, Gerry Howard, John Lane, Alison Lurie, and David Romt-
vedt. Special thanks to Jim Sitter, who spoke with me repeatedly, opening his
vast repository of knowledge about the history of nonprofit publishing. Thanks
to Elizabeth Schwartz for putting me in touch with Sitter in the first place.
Just as I had piled a teetering tower of bound annual compilations of Publish-
ers Weekly on the desk in my office to comb through, Jordan Pruett told me that
its archives had been digitized and were accessible with a paid membership,
which, as a quick scan of my works cited confirms, was a game-changing tip.
Ack n owled g m en ts m xi
I could not have completed this book nearly as quickly if it weren’t for Matt
Wilkens. He gave me time. He employed me as a postdoc for the two years when
I began this project and allowed me to dedicate myself to research. He is a
mensch. At Emory, I have been blessed with smart, supportive colleagues and,
for their friendship and for helping me finish this book, I especially want to
thank Heather Christle, Lauren Klein, Mitch Murray, Ben Reiss, and Nathan
Suhr-Sytsma. Thanks to my research assistant, Stephen Altobelli. Eric Canosa,
Tanesha Floyd, and Alonda Simms are tremendous departmental administra-
tors, whose assistance and expertise made my work on this book much easier.
The members of the Fox Center Junior Faculty Seminar provided useful
feedback on the introduction; I especially thank Chris Suh. I’m grateful for the
students of Contemporary Publishing who asked the right questions and
thought through the complexities and inequities of the industry with me. That
course was part of a larger partnership with Jenny 8. Lee and Plympton Literary
Studio: Jenny is astoundingly bright and dynamic and I’ve learned so much
about how publishing works in the third decade of the twenty-first century
from her.
Though it feels like a million years ago, I presented the first version of my
idea for what became Big Fiction at a Post45 conference and the comments I
received guided me the rest of the way. Even before then, J. D. Connor intro-
duced me to John B. Thompson’s indispensable Merchants of Culture. Angela
Allan, Xander Manshel, Simone Murray, and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma read some or
all of the manuscript and responded with essential notes. I’m deeply indebted to
three anonymous reviewers who strengthened this book immeasurably.
For their friendship and intellectual camaraderie, I want to thank Ari Brost-
off, Sarah Brouillette, Sean DiLeonardi, Gloria Fisk, Nathan Goldman, Annie
McClanahan, Laura McGrath, Kinohi Nishikawa, Ben Ratzlaff, Meg Reid,
Francisco Robles, Melanie Walsh, Sarah Wasserman, Johanna Winant, and, I
confess, all the weirdos on academic, literary, and publishing Twitter (you know
who you are), where more than a few ideas from this book were first tested, and
from where the title, via Vincent Haddad, comes. Jeremy Braddock set me down
the path toward book history a long time ago and introduced me to archival
research; for these reasons he maintains some guilt for what has transpired.
Sarah Chihaya is the best writer I know, a model to aspire to, and a brilliant edi-
tor, too, who coaxes the best writing out of me, some of which appears here.
Kevin McNellis has put an outsider’s eyes on much of this book, assisting in the
translation for a nonspecialist audience; he also canoed with me in the wilder-
ness each summer, a necessary removal from this project and everything else, to
xii l Ack n owled g m en ts
restore perspective. When I first moved to Atlanta, I frequented a small local

restaurant with an open kitchen where I befriended the chef, Nicholas Stinson,
an astounding autodidact and lover of books and music with a particular fond-
ness for pulp fiction from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It was at the counter at
Gato (RIP) and over meals elsewhere across town with Nicholas that I verbal-
ized and thus clarified my efforts in Big Fiction, and received mind-opening sug-
gestions in turn.
This book is dedicated to Richard Jean So. It wouldn’t exist without him, nor
would I still be in the academy. Back at its origins, Richard and I would sit in
Medici in Hyde Park, Chicago, and imagine possibilities for scholarship on the
U.S. publishing industry and its adjacent fields. We began collecting data on
publishers’ lists and book reviews, dreaming of a map of the total system. (For
various reasons my use of that data is understated in this book; the pursuit,
muted here, led me, in turn, to partner with Laura McGrath to build the Post45
Data Collective.) Big Fiction is the closest I could come to that map, for now,
even as it’s just a tiny step.
My parents, Stu and Carol, and my brothers, Andy and Alex, have always
supported my work, for which I’m very grateful. Zuzu, that ludicrous goose, got
me out on regular walks, where the best thinking happens. Eulia, my new
daughter, lit a fire of urgency within me to finish this project so I could be free
to meet her.
Masha is my love. She makes my thoughts thinkable.
Big Fiction
Introduction
I
t was a Monday in late February 1990, the coldest day of the year.
André Schiffrin, a natty fifty-four-year-old New Yorker, left Random
House headquarters in midtown to plod through the evening crowds.
Wind blew down from the Hudson River, tousling his graying red hair, stinging
his wide-set, mousy eyes. He shivered and pulled his overcoat tighter around
himself, heading home to his wife. He had just been fired.
For twenty-eight years, he had worked at Pantheon, which his father
cofounded and later sold to Random House. The younger Schiffrin became
Pantheon’s editorial director. He petitioned Random House for autonomy and
its executives granted it. He extended his father’s cosmopolitan vision, bringing
European ideas to the United States. He published John Berger’s G., Julio Cor-
tazar’s Hopscotch, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and Günter Grass’s The Tin
Drum. He published leftist writers—Barbara Ehrenreich, Michel Foucault,
Ralph Nader, Edward Said, Studs Terkel, E. P. Thompson—who wrote history
and theory imagined through the experiences of ordinary people. Schiffrin fan-
cied himself a bit of a subversive. After his daughters encouraged him to acquire
his FBI file, which noted a trip of his to Cuba and his protests against the Viet-
nam War, he wrote a jocular essay for the New York Times, suggesting that
the Bureau’s surveillance “adds some dignity and meaning to our efforts, to
those who fear that no one has paid any attention. By all means, let us pay for
more scissors and paste, more files and more agents. How nice to know that
someone outside the family will clip our every word.”1
2 l I n t ro d u c t i o n
THE ENEMY RISES
Rumor of Schiffrin’s firing caught the wind, which carried it through the city. A
notice appeared in the next day’s Times. It spurred the kind of convergence of
energies that we recognize in retrospect as an event. In coming days, Pantheon’s
editorial staff quit en masse, opinion pieces were written, protests were held. In
one way or another, this event touched everyone in the book world. The firing of
André Schiffrin revealed that a monumental shift had taken place, one that had
begun thirty years earlier, that everyone had watched unfold in slow motion,
had tried, some of them, in fits and starts, to stop, but no one, not even the old
giants, could stop it now. It would pull everyone into its vortex, dominating the
creation of literature for the next thirty years and more.
The enemy, according to those who rallied to Schiffrin’s defense, was con-
glomeration, which, in this instance, found its agent in Alberto Vitale, Random
House’s new president, a jowly Italian with a PhD in economics. Vitale canned
Schiffrin, and conglomeration was the inimical force that, in the eyes of Schif-
frin’s defenders, had displaced publishing’s cultural mandate in favor of the bot-
tom line. Conglomeration did not stop in 1990—it continues to this day. A
German conglomerate, Bertelsmann, acquired Random House in 1998, and,
under Bertelsmann, Random House merged with Penguin, one of the other
big six publishers, in 2013. Through these acquisitions and mergers, a vast accu-
mulation of historically independent houses whose dramas are detailed in these
pages have become Penguin Random House properties, among them Ballan-
tine, Bantam, Berkley, Crown, Dell, Dial, DK, Doubleday, Dutton, Knopf, New
American Library, Putnam, Viking—and Pantheon. The books available to us
today are products of the conglomerate era.
As his partisans took to their pens, writing letters and op-eds in support,
Schiffrin, gagged by his severance agreement, waited. He waited a decade. His
vengeance came cold in his passionate if not wholly clear-sighted polemic, The
Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing
and Changed the Way We Read.
INTO THE COLOPHON
It’s true, conglomerates took over publishing and changed how and what we
read—and how and what writers write.2 But Schiffrin was still too resentful,
I n t ro d u c t i o n m 3
too close to it, to see much other than avarice. This book defers judgment about
whether conglomeration was good or bad in an effort to explain what it has
meant for U.S. fiction and how we should read it.
Our first move requires a simple change of perspective. Publishers know that
readers pay attention to a book’s cover so they invest in its design and emblazon
it with what they want everyone to see: the title and the name of the author. If
we turn a book ninety degrees so that we are facing its spine, then look to the
bottom, we will find what is often overlooked: the publisher’s mark, its colo-
phon. Publishers take quiet pride in these: Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s three fish;
Knopf ’s borzoi, Random House’s illustration of Voltaire’s Candide’s house: a
somewhat random house. Or, if you’re holding a physical copy of this book,
Columbia University Press’s geometric crown. For centuries, such marks have
served as the publisher’s promise: “We affirm the quality of editing, proofread-
ing, design, typesetting, and printing in this book.”3
The colophon is an emblem that contains within in it a collective, all the
people who work to make the book we hold in our hands but whose names we
seldom know. Historically, and still sometimes today, publishers included a page
at the end of books with information about how it was made; this page was also
called a colophon. I want us to enter the world of the colophon, to unfetishize
the commodity, to respect the author whose name adorns the front cover by
returning her to the milieu from which she sprang. Our outsize attention to the
author alone is a trick of history, the legacy of copyright: authors needed to be
made responsible for books if they were to collect royalties; lawyers needed
someone on whom to lay the blame for libel. If we want to know what conglom-
eration did to books—why books are different now than they were—then we
need to unearth what conglomeration did to the people who live inside the colo-
phon, how it took power from some and gave it to others, transformed incen-
tives, and invented new jobs altogether.
My cast of characters is vast and spans decades. And though my quarry is the
system, it expresses itself through the people whose ambitions fill these pages:
Victor Weybright, a farm kid from rural Maryland who wanted the whole coun-
try to read Faulkner—at least his smuttier books; Jane Friedman, a Jewish girl
from Long Island who invented the author tour—or so she told every journalist
she met; Morton Janklow, a corporate securities lawyer who fought for his friend
to publish a book that made Nixon look good after Watergate, and who found
he liked to make publishers sweat—so he became a literary agent. They made
books popular, glamorous, and costly at auction. As readers at home found Stephen
King, Judith Krantz, and Danielle Steel atop the New York Times bestseller lists,
agents tippled martinis at Manhattan’s Four Seasons. I introduce the cast gradually
in the hope that, by the end, through the magic of accretion, you feel, like I do, the
intimacy, almost the incestuousness, of this influential but hidden world.
It is a competitive, dynamic world in which everyone is at all times fighting a
war for position at multiple scales: inside their own publishing house, against
peer institutions, and to dominate the field as a whole. Some fight more for art,
some more for money, but always, by necessity, a bit of both. Weybright had to
outwit his German business partner, whom he distrusted, crush the philistines
at Bantam, Dell, Fawcett, and Pocket, and get as many of us reading Faulkner’s
Sanctuary and The Wild Palms as he could. The weapons are books. The battles
are fought through style and voice, pacing and genre, covers and blurbs. To read
a book through its colophon is to read it anew. Aesthetics double as strategy.
Author and publishing house might be—often are—in tension, a tension that
plays out between a book’s lines. The game a book plays is significantly different
depending on whether its colophon is Bantam’s rooster, Doubleday’s anchor,
Graywolf ’s wolves, or W. W. Norton’s seagull, for reasons this book unfurls.
I linger over books in these pages, reading them through the colophon’s
portal, in light of the conglomerate era. I show how much we miss when we
fall for the romance of individual genius. In novels, the conglomerate era finds
its voice.
CONGLOMERATION HAPPENS (AND HAPPENS)
In 1959, U.S. publishers—unlike film and radio, which had been corporately
run and consolidated for nearly forty years—were relatively small and privately
held, usually by the founders or their heirs. They functioned like big families:
hierarchical, loyal, built on relationships: houses. Authors might stop by to chat
with editors. Editors might finagle to support an author through a bad decision
or three. Dr. Seuss visited Random House to recite his latest work. Albert Ers-
kine, an editor there, had helped keep Malcolm Lowry afloat for many years and
would soon do the same for Cormac McCarthy.
Publishers were mostly located in New York City or, to a lesser degree, Boston.
One set was established before the Civil War: Harper; Houghton Mifflin (as
Ticknor and Fields); Little, Brown; Macmillan; Scribner. A new set appeared in
the 1910s and 1920s, many created by Jewish bookmen: Knopf, Random House,
Simon & Schuster, Viking. Pocket Books brought modern mass-market publish-
ing to the United States in 1939 (imitating Penguin in the UK), followed by Dell
in 1943, Bantam in 1945, New American Library in 1948, and Fawcett in 1950.
It—1959—was a good time to be in the business of books. During World War II,
the military shipped millions of books to soldiers, creating a vast body of read-
ers, many of whom came home and went to college on the GI Bill. Universities
expanded and kept expanding to keep up with enrollments as they opened their
doors to more than white men, churning out more readers. Many classics were
free to acquire from the public domain. The economy was in the midst of one of
the greatest growth spurts in the history of capitalism.
Beginning in 1960, houses found themselves swept up by business trends far
beyond their control. People had moved from farms to cities for factory jobs
and, in many cases, to escape the terror of Jim Crow. Large industrial corpora-
tions such as Ford Motor Company, General Electric, and U.S. Steel “had
become the organizing structure for economic and social life.”4 They were run
by bureaucratic managers who were incentivized, above all, to grow the organi-
zation, “even at the expense of proﬁtability.”5 By 1960, many corporations had
reached limits of internal growth and had to look outward. Antitrust law inhib-
ited mergers and acquisitions within an industry, so corporations acquired in
others, forming conglomerates. ITT, for example, was a telecommunications
company before becoming, in the 1960s, a conglomerate that contained “Shera-
ton Hotels, various auto parts manufacturers, the makers of Wonder Bread, a
chain of vocational schools, insurance companies, and Avis Rent-a-Car.”6
Times Mirror, a newspaper company, bought New American Library (NAL), a
mass-market publisher, in 1960, inaugurating what I call the conglomerate era.
Times Mirror hired McKinsey, a consulting firm, to restructure NAL, with dire
results that I chronicle in the first chapter. The previous year—1959—Random
House became the first major house to go public and used the influx of cash to
acquire Knopf in 1960. In 1961, it acquired Pantheon—hiring André Schiffrin in
1962. In 1966, RCA, an electronics company, acquired Random House. Double-
day acquired radio and television stations in 1967, and the New York Mets in 1980.
Time Inc. acquired Little, Brown in 1968. A Canadian communications company
acquired Macmillan in 1973. Bantam went to IFI, an Italian conglomerate that
owned Fiat, the car company, in 1974. Simon & Schuster went to Gulf + Western
in 1975, Fawcett to CBS in 1977. As we will see, it hardly stopped there.7
SHAREHOLDER VALUES
It—1977—was a bad time to be in the book business. Economic growth had

stalled. Inflation hiked the price of books even as consumers had less money to
buy them. Conglomerate owners, who, unlike Times Mirror, had in many cases
refrained from interfering in their publishing properties, became more involved
in concert with a transformation in the theory of the corporation. The old
notion of the large corporation as a social institution that considered the com-
mon good was out. Executives came to treat corporations as the legal fictions
they are, mere means for their one goal: increasing shareholder value. That
meant executives needed to squeeze every drop from all of their properties,
including publishers. Ed (“Bottom Line”) Griffiths, the new president of RCA,
began pressing Random House’s head for quarterly growth and five-year plans.
Editors had once been the uncontested suzerains of title acquisition. Their
tastes drove lists, front and back. In the 1970s, however, they watched their
power wane. Aggressive literary agents staged high pressure auctions and came
for subsidiary rights. Houses brought in directors dedicated to selling those
rights—for reprinting, translation, and film and television adaptation. Market-
ing departments grew and gathered influence, producing baroque campaigns of
total saturation for top titles.
Authors, observing these developments, became anxious. They worried that
houses would focus their energies on just a few potential blockbusters by newly
stratospheric brand names who could carry a budget: Stephen King, Judith
Krantz, Danielle Steel.8 At the other end, houses hired cheap writers to crank
out formulaic genre fiction or serial novelizations of popular films and TV
shows. In late May 1977, Star Wars debuted in theaters, on its way to instituting
the tentpole, synergistic, franchise entertainment model that would lead to the
Marvel Cinematic Universe in film and endless genre series in publishing. Worst
of all, authors feared that houses would abandon literature altogether for the
surer bets of cookbooks and celebrity memoirs.
On June 6, 1977, John Brooks, John Hersey, and Herman Wouk, representing
the Authors Guild—an advocacy group for professional writers—held a press
conference at which they “called for the Justice Department and the Federal
Trade Commission to start proceedings that would eventually end the process of
mergers and acquisitions in the book publishing industry.” Wouk was quoted in
the Washington Post the next day, calling conglomeration “a sinister process,”
noting that “in a conglomerate there is a narrowing down of margins—of what is
safe and what is publishable,” given the responsibility to shareholders.9
The press conference led to a Senate hearing on March 13, 1980, before the
Subcommittee on Antitrust, Monopoly, and Business Rights, headed by Sena-
tor Howard M. Metzenbaum, Democrat from Ohio. In his opening remarks,
Metzenbaum made his position clear, saying, “We see in the publishing busi-
ness a trend that exists in too many sectors of today’s economy—and that is
acquisition by larger firms of their smaller competitors and the entry into diverse
industries by the large conglomerates.”10 A series of prominent writers and pub-
lishers then spoke and were questioned by senators afterward.
The two groups testified fiercely in opposition to one another. E. L. Docto-
row, speaking as a writer and the vice president of the American Center of PEN
International, acknowledged that his own work had been published by a con-
glomerate, and that in his experience with his house, “attention is paid to serious
works in all fields of thought—fiction, the social sciences, politics, and even to a
small extent, poetry.” He avoided the righteousness in evidence earlier in the
proceedings in a statement by Maxwell Lillenstein, general counsel for the
American Booksellers Association, who said that “selling books is a unique busi-
ness, involving the sale of ideas that can determine the fate of civilizations.
Books are not commodities to be marketed like toothpaste or soap.”11 Docto-
row, instead, averred that “nobody is objecting to commerce or to making
money. Publishers have always wanted to make money.”12 “Traditionally,” he
observed, “a publishing list has always reflected the tension between the need to
make money and the desire to publish well.” He worried, though, that “this deli-
cate balance of pressures within a publishing firm is upset by the conglomerate
[that] values the need for greater and greater profits,” until, eventually, the need
for profits “overloads the scale in favor of commerce.” He worried about the
“tendency of the publishing industry to be absorbed by the entertainment indus-
try, with all its values of pandering to the lowest common denominator.”13
Executives from Doubleday, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Simon &
Schuster—all known for their commercialism—defended conglomeration.
They pointed to the persistent growth both in the number of publishers and
titles in the industry. William Jovanovich showed no patience for arguments that
publishers should look beyond the bottom line. “It is a business,” he said. “It is so
purely a business that book publishing was the first enterprise in modern history
to display all the crucial characteristics of capitalism.”14
A few months later, the country elected Ronald Reagan president. Reagan’s
government did the opposite of what Senator Metzenbaum and the Authors
Guild wanted. It loosened the barriers to consolidation and vertical integra-
tion.15 Magazine magnate Si Newhouse bought Random House in 1980, build-
ing a media empire that included Condé Nast and would soon add the New
Yorker. The German conglomerate Bertelsmann acquired Doubleday in 1986
and took Random House off Newhouse’s hands in 1998. Rupert Murdoch’s
News Corp swallowed Harper & Row in 1987, creating HarperCollins. The
next year, Murdoch’s rival, Robert Maxwell—the two were in the midst of
warring through British tabloids they owned—nabbed Macmillan. Simon &
Schuster, at that point, had been on an extensive shopping spree with Gulf +
Western money, accumulating profitable educational and professional publish-
ing imprints, arriving, by 1991, at the position from which its president, Richard
Snyder, could say with impressive frankness, “We are not a publisher, we are now
a creator of copyrights for their exploitation in any medium or distribution sys-
tem.”16 Books were now content.17
CONGLOMERATE AUTHORSHIP
But this book is not only a narrative of the conglomeration of publishing. It also
tells how fiction was transformed. It transformed because conglomeration
changed what it means to be an author.
It would be a ridiculous exaggeration to say that authors are merely the
humans attached to books to fulfill the legal requirements of authorship and the
cultural expectations of creative originality.18 Yet such an exaggeration is useful
to break our habit of romanticizing authorship and begin instead to see the
author through the colophon’s portal.
The idea is that authorship is social and distributed widely. Some version of
this picture has been advanced often by artists, critics, and theorists, though it
has been difficult to sustain. Jack Stillinger devoted a book to “the joint, or com-
posite, or collaborative production of literary works that we usually think of as
written by a single author,” a phenomenon, he argues, that is “extremely com-
mon.”19 It is an editorial norm, established by Maxwell Perkins in the 1920s, to
aim for invisibility, insisting that the editor only facilitates an author’s vision,
adding nothing of their own, no matter how false this often is.20 A good finan-
cial reason explains the dogma. As Abram Foley writes, corporate publishers,
“have a vested interest in promoting their authors in such a way that the guiding
hands of editors, publishing houses, marketers, and the market remain invisible.
In corporate publishing, the author’s name, more than the publishing house’s
colophon, is the most valuable sign.”21 We tend to revert to the image of the soli-
tary author toiling away—in a cabin in the woods, at their cluttered desk in a
book-filled room—to produce the text that arrives like a missive from their
mind to ours.22
One version of the epiphenomenal author is the romantic author’s obverse.
Here the writer becomes a vessel who channels something greater: culture, gods,
tradition, the unconscious. Homer asks the Muse to speak through him at the
opening of The Odyssey. “Who is the poet?” asks Hugh Kenner, in his study of
modernism, “A medium?”23 The Surrealists came up with practices like auto-

matic writing and the game exquisite corpse to ease the artist’s metamorphosis
into a vessel. The poet Jack Spicer argues that the work of the writer is to get out
of her own way so that she could let what he called Martians speak through her.
The novelist Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, hears voices who guide her
writing. The musician Grimes—inspired by large language models that learned
to imitate human writing after ingesting most of the scrapeable internet—said,
“we all kind of function like AI; we’re all a product of all the content that we
feed ourselves. And so, it’s just funny to be like, ‘Oh, this is my work.’ In reality,
it’s the result of thousands of years of human art making.”24 Modern psycholo-
gists call the state that authors enter of total absorption that doubles as dissolu-
tion: flow.25 In such states, the life of the author is not solitary but suffused with
social plenitude.
A second version was advanced by French theorists in the 1960s. These theo-
rists were captured by their enthusiasm with the thought that the era inaugu-
rated by modern philosophy and political liberalism might almost be over, that
we might overthrow the concepts of rationality and of man, that we might tran-
scend what they called the sciences of man, or the social sciences. Major works,
in 1966, by the feuding Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault—the latter pub-
lished by Schiffrin at Pantheon in the United States in 1970—ended the same
way: with prophetic trepidation that an epoch characterized by preoccupation
with humanity was ending, that “man” might “be erased, like a face drawn in
sand at the edge of the sea.”26 Both were trying to persuade us that language as a
system was more consequential than the pretense of individuals.27 The next
year, 1967, their elder, Roland Barthes, penned a short playful essay riffing, half
in jest, on their self-serious ideas. “The image of literature to be found in con-
temporary culture,” he lamented, “is tyrannically centered on the author, his
person, his history, his tastes, his passions.” This was bad theology, a reification
of a much more interesting and complex process. He proclaimed, “it is language
which speaks, not the author.” The text, he said, “is a tissue of citations, result-
ing from the thousand sources of culture.” He called it “The Death of the
Author.”
A third version was propounded in the discipline of textual scholarship and
began as a retort to the French theorists and their followers.28 Their obsession
with language, argued Jerome McGann, left them oblivious to what he consid-
ered fundamental aspects of a text’s meaning: its materiality and its sociality. He
advocated attention to “the physical form of books and manuscripts (paper, ink,
typefaces, layouts),” which others have extended to include tools.29 Think of
Jane Austen’s desk, Emily Dickinson’s fascicles, George R. R. Martin’s word
processor.30 McGann posits texts as “social acts”31: many people work together
to produce them.32 “Literary production is not an autonomous and self-reflexive
activity; it is a social and an institutional event.”33 Such attention to the physical
form of books and the people who produce them motivates the dynamic field of
book history.34 John Young argues that textual studies has not gone far enough
in decentering the author. Drawing on insights from African American studies,
Young asserts that any adequate analysis would incorporate the “broader social
dimension” of a text, such as the racism that constrains the possibilities for all
whose hands and minds shape it.35
Each of these formulations urges us to see the author as a portal through
which collectives find expression. They challenge the notion that we can attri-
bute a published work of fiction to a single individual. Authors access a world
beyond their conscious selves. That world goes by different names: the uncon-
scious, language, the imagination. The published author also channels the
norms of a cultural system, its sense of literary value. She forges a commodity
that will appear attractive to scouts, agents, editors, marketers, publicists, sales
staff, booksellers, critics, and readers. Its attractiveness depends on which sector
one hopes to publish with. Sometimes this is egregiously explicit: Lester del Rey,
a mass-market editor, sensed demand for an inchoate genre that would become
“fantasy” based on the rabid fandom of Lord of the Rings. For mass-market
books in the 1970s, under pressure because of conglomerate interventions, for-
mulas and seriality became increasingly important techniques for securing sales
numbers. Del Rey provided a template for would-be authors to follow, taken up
by Piers Anthony who used it to write his Xanth series, which frequently landed
on the New York Times bestseller lists.36
Sometimes the norms are subtler, or emerge unbidden through incentives
generated collectively, as when Cormac McCarthy fell in with an ambitious
agent, editor, and publicist and transformed his style from dense prose and aim-
less plots to more crowd-pleasing literary Westerns. At around the same time—
the late 1980s and early 1990s—Joan Didion wrote her most genre-bound
thriller, E. L. Doctorow did a crime novel, and Morrison’s Beloved capitalized
on the new market for horror created by the success of Stephen King. Conglom-
eration, that is to say, generated the incentives for literary genre fiction. Mean-
while, nonprofit presses, which rose in response to conglomeration, rejecting its
values, needed, in the 1990s, to embrace multiculturalism, leading authors who
published in that sector to write dazzling allegories in which they toyed with the
racialized demands placed upon them through their narratives. Successful
authors learn the rules by which they are judged. They internalize these rules in
what sociologists call anticipatory socialization. Sometimes they even know it:
“I think writers in a lot of ways write to the acquisition editors,” one author told
a sociologist. “Like, we are aware.”37
Conglomeration rationalized (through bureaucracy) and mediated (through
agents) the relationship between authors and publishing houses. At different
speeds, conglomerates worked to increase the profitability of publishing by
rationalizing it, to the extent possible. Publishing managers came to see “the
acquisitions process as the building of a portfolio of risk.” Although the success
of literature remains unpredictable, “there are things you can do to inform and
guide acquisitions decisions—you can look at the historical performance of sim-
ilar titles, you can introduce more formalized budgeting procedures, you can
give sales and marketing directors some role in acquisitions decisions.”38 These
calculations are quantified by editors in profit-and-loss statements when they
decide on whether to publish the work of an author and how much to pay
them.39 Successful books become comparative titles (comps), required for prospec-
tive acquisitions, institutionalizing a feedback system by which homogeneity—
and whiteness—is encouraged.40
Over time, conglomerate rationalization made the work of editors more
managerial, less editorial.41 By 1993, when Grove published Gerald Gross’s
Editors on Editing, the notion that editors no longer edit was a cliché. Time
must be devoted to “unceasing reports, correspondence, phoning, meetings,
business breakfasts, lunches, dinners, [and] in- and out-of-office appoint-
ments” where editors attempt “to explicate author and house to one another.”42
One editor could write, “today’s editors must master an entire gamut of disci-
plines including production, marketing, negotiation, promotion, advertising,
publicity, accounting, salesmanship, psychology, politics, diplomacy, and—well,
editing.”43
Because editors are busier with the business and marketing side of publishing
and have less time, agents—along with “copy editors, writers’ groups, book doc-
tors, packagers, and well-meaning friends”—do much of the labor of nurturing
and editing authors.44 Agents “spend time with their clients discussing their
next book, and may read draft chapters and give them advice and feedback.”45
Agents have played a formal role in talent management since the advent of mod-
ern copyright laws, but only with conglomeration have they become essential.46
As one prominent editor complained in 2000, “forty years ago, agents were mere
peripheral necessities, like dentists.”47 Editors depend on agents to suss out the
market’s desires: “editors have, in effect, outsourced the initial selection process
to agents.” Therefore, agents have become “the necessary point of entry into the
field of trade publishing.”48 They play the role of diviner of the market and vet-
ter of the author: the publishing industry’s invisible hand, which they enact
through their cultivation of “corporate taste,” their transmutation of perceived

demand into claims of aesthetic sensibility and professional ability—their
brand.49
Myriad figures introduced or empowered by conglomeration exercise influ-
ence on each stage of a book’s life, from conception to its acquisition and editing
to publicity: subsidiary rights specialists, art directors, marketing managers,
sales staff, wholesalers, chain book buyers, philanthropists, government bureau-
crats. We will meet many of them. Each working interdependently with the
others produces conglomerate authorship.
Conglomerate authorship operates according to the model of emergence.
Emergence is sometimes proffered as a theory of consciousness. Consciousness
does not reside in single neurons. But when billions of neurons interact, con-
sciousness, which cannot be attributed to any individual part of the brain,
emerges. Emergence also accounts for the behavior a colony of bees or ants, who
“practice agriculture and animal husbandry” and are considered, as a unit, “an
individual of a higher order, a ‘superorganism’ with unique emergent proper-
ties.”50 Individually, an ant or bee will appear to behave erratically. Thousands
together, though, display an extraordinary intelligence unattributable to any
single element. That intelligence is emergent. Unlike the individual units in
these examples, people in publishing experience, one hopes, consciousness, and a
sense of at least some degree of rational decision-making; the point is that like
an ant farm or a beehive or consciousness itself—or a Hollywood film—
conglomerate era fiction displays properties attributable not to any one individ-
ual but to the conglomerate superorganism.51 This book charts the emergent
properties of conglomerate era fiction.
DIALECTICAL FRACTAL
A logic of sameness and differentiation repeats itself across the many scales of
publishing. This is true at any given moment in time. Because we’ve already
been lingering there, let’s take 1990. If we were to survey the industry, we would
notice that Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) and Random House (RH), writ
large, had staked out roughly elite versus middlebrow positions in the literary
field, established across the previous decades by representative authors such as
Susan Sontag (FSG) and Gore Vidal (RH).52 These positions were reinforced
by the fact that FSG was independent and RH was conglomerate: Roger
Straus at FSG could, and did, lob regular accusations to the press about how
conglomeration led RH to become vulgarly commercial. Let’s drop a level, to an

individual conglomerate, where, within Random House, Pantheon hovered
nearer the avant-garde pole whereas Crown, acquired in 1988, homed in on the
commercial pole, with novels on its lists from Douglas Adams, Jean Auel, Ken
Follett, Judith Krantz, and Richard North Patterson. Knopf was closer to Pan-
theon, Random House was between Knopf and Crown. Drop another level and
within Random House itself, as an imprint, we find editors who span the dis-
tance between Joe Fox’s narrower and Joni Evans’s more catholic taste. At the
scale of the individual editor, authors range. Joe Fox edited Renata Adler and
John Irving. Joni Evans did Ann Beattie and Mario Puzo. Individual authors
might contain such differentiation within their oeuvres, as with Cormac
McCarthy’s alienating, difficult masterpiece, Blood Meridian, and his popular,
National Book Award–winning bestseller, All the Pretty Horses. Even within a
single work, such as All the Pretty Horses, the logic of sameness and differentia-
tion replicates itself, in this case containing at once the popular genre of the
Western and McCarthy’s Faulknerian style, however lightened. All the Pretty
Horses is internally differentiated because it internalizes the conflicted logic in
play at every scale above it, set in motion by agents, editors, executives, and
publicists.
Making all this more difficult, each position on the literary field shifts over
time, and with each shift, new possibilities emerge for the aesthetics of the novel.
In 1994, Holtzbrinck, a German conglomerate, acquired FSG, compromising its
Sontagian elite standing, bringing it closer to Random House, and therein cre-
ating the conditions that would enable a new leader, Jonathan Galassi—once
fired by Random House—to enact what I later call the (Jonathan) Franzeniza-
tion of FSG. Nearer the elite pole, nonprofits were, in 1994, solidifying as a
coherent sector of the literary field. They became possible in the first place as
a reaction against the dominance of conglomerates. Nonprofits, in turn, pub-
lished fiction that was too risky for conglomerates—unless it succeeded for the
smaller presses first. But even the same author, the same idea, the same strategy
would be transformed through its new locus of publication.
The mention of Holtzbrinck alerts us to this book’s largest lacuna: the
world.53 To accomplish an account of U.S. fiction from the 1960s through the
present, I have restricted my purview to U.S. writers and the U.S. literary field.
No study can be unbounded. This restriction, though, introduces artificiality.
Sontag, for example, rejuvenated the elite form of the novel for FSG by turning
to France.54 Czech writers proved crucial interlocutors for Philip Roth and John
Updike.55 Foreign markets gained in importance across the conglomerate era,
and with them the clout of the Frankfurt Book Fair.56 I have less to say about the
extraterritoriality of conglomerates and the consequences for fiction than I

might.57 Work in translation receives short shrift in the coming pages.58 By lend-
ing focused, sustained attention to U.S. literature, this book attempts the other-
wise impossible task of limning one crucial node in the world literary system.
The fractal, dialectical nature of publishing means that to state flatly the tidy
takeaways from the conglomerate era is to make dynamic phenomena appear
static. Danielle Steel is deeper than you think. What it means to write elite or
middlebrow fiction is different every day. Autofiction is not one thing. Literary
genre fiction is not one thing. Multiculturalism is not one thing. Each changed
depending on who was using it, when, after whom else, under which financial
constraints. Each is a mode, a strategy, a tactic deployed by the hundreds of play-
ers playing the game. Each was, and is, fundamental to the conglomerate era. I
strived to include much that is left out of literary history as it’s been told. You
can’t understand the conglomerate era without the details. I offer them in
the spirit of building: toward a better collective understanding of literary
production.59
BEING AND TIME WARNER
In 1989, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications. Little, Brown,

owned by Time, became a division of the new—and world’s largest—media con-
glomerate, Time Warner. In 1992, Michael Pietsch, newly an editor at Little,
Brown (as I write, the CEO of Hachette Book Group), acquired what would
become David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a long and difficult novel that
decries the destruction of cultural life at the hands of corporate power and the
hegemony of entertainment.
The parallels between Time Warner’s aspirations and Wallace’s dystopian
vision are not merely gestural. In 1991, Time Warner’s CEO, Steve Ross,
announced a plan to augur “the third age of television”: first networks, then
cable, now interactivity. As the New York Times reported, Time Warner had
“started putting a 150-channel interactive cable system into Queens that Ross
believes is a precursor of a world in which the television set will become an
all-purpose computer-cum-entertainment box.”60 Wallace included a similar
device in his novel, written in such a way as to ensure readers understand that he
understands the conglomerate economy within which he writes, “What if a
viewer could more or less 100% choose what’s on at any given time? Choose
and rent, over PC and modem and fiber-optic line, from tens of thousands
of second-run films, documentaries, the occasional sport, old beloved non-

‘Happy Days’ programs, wholly new programs, cultural stuff, and c., all pre-
pared by the time-tested, newly lean Big Four’s mammoth vaults and production
facilities.”61
Ross rationalized the implementation of interactive TV in service of peda-
gogy. “One of the ways you have to educate is to make it entertainment,” he said.
“If you don’t make it entertaining, if you are unable to get the right equipment
in the home to sell education, we will not be able to educate America.”62 But,
trying to explain how entertainment would encourage, say, reading, Ross lost
the thread: “So anyhow,” he said, “getting back to . . . I don’t even know what we
were talking about. . . . The written word is the key.”63
Wallace wanted Infinite Jest to teach readers to extricate themselves from
addictive entertainment that, he felt, ultimately made them lonely. To do so, he
needed the novel to be entertaining enough to keep readers interested so they
could swallow their medicine. He calibrated—in collaboration with his agent,
Bonnie Nadell, and Pietsch—a balance between entertainment and edification
that would allow him to seduce readers but ultimately criticize the culture of
entertainment that Time Warner hoped to profit from by the novel’s publica-
tion. How much could he try the reader’s patience? In Wallace’s words, he
wanted “to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility
has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop
culture machine.”64 This artistic position is occupied in the novel by James
Incandenza, an avant-garde filmmaker whose ultimate ambition is to use his
technical expertise to create a film so entertaining that it will, of necessity, draw
his inward son, Hal, out of himself. The film, called Infinite Jest, ends up being
too entertaining: anyone who watches it dies from lack of desire to do anything
ever again but watch the film. Instead of arriving at a narrative climax, the novel
descends into stasis before ending abruptly. With its anticlimactic ending, Wal-
lace aimed to deny the pleasures of catharsis in hope of turning readers away
from the novel and their selves toward recognition of a common malaise, toward
something like the communities and gift economies engendered through Alco-
holics Anonymous.65
Pietsch, a Harvard alum, had a knack for marketing and a feel for popular
taste; early in his career, he served as the marketing coordinator for Scribner; he
moved to Crown in 1986, where he acquired business titles, nonfiction about
Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and fiction by Mark Leyner (“the writer for the
MTV generation”) and the flashy British writer Martin Amis.66 At Little,
Brown, he continued to acquire in music, including biographies of Elvis, Hank
Williams, and Muddy Waters.
He had little interest in the midlist, saying, “It’s hard to make money on
books that sell only 10,000 copies. We’re looking for writers who can break
through to a larger audience.”67 He long felt that Wallace was one of those writ-
ers. He courted him as early as 1987, inviting Wallace, in a letter, to “remember
that you’ve got a fan here at the home of Martin Amis, Stephen Wright, Chuck
Berry, and Little Richard.” Manuscript in hand, Pietsch worried that its size and
erudition would put off readers. Like a latter-day Maxwell Perkins with Wallace
as his Thomas Wolfe, he cut hundreds of pages and made “numerous micro-
changes” for the sake of preventing “readerly alienation.”68 Wallace agonized
over the cuts, writing to Don DeLillo that he felt “uncomfortable” doing them
for “commercial reasons.”69 Wallace’s collaboration with Pietsch was friendly
but not harmonious, pitting his artistic pretensions against Pietsch’s conglomer-
ate sensibility, a conflict Infinite Jest expresses as its core preoccupation.70
As publication neared, Pietsch and Little, Brown launched a hype campaign,
a kind of literary striptease, sending a series of postcards to thousands of review-
ers and booksellers that promised, among other things, “infinite pleasure.” It
worked: Infinite Jest became a hit and Wallace a literary superstar. The market-
ing, though, unnerved Wallace. Nothing could be more antithetical to the nov-
el’s project than the promise of infinite pleasure. On one hand, many readers
gave up on Wallace’s novel after two hundred pages, just before the various plot-
lines begin to merge. On the other, Infinite Jest often made readers—if they
passed the two-hundred-page mark—insatiable in their desire for Wallace and
his work, a horrific reductio ad absurdum that could have come out of the pages
of a Wallace story.
In the end, Infinite Jest was a win for everyone at Little, Brown. It worked.
They understood the meaning of the book—or, at least, the system within
which it was written, marketed, distributed, and consumed—better than Wal-
lace himself. His dream of saving America from itself was a fantasy that allowed
him to complete the project but had little to do with the phenomenon that
spurred decades of debates, listicles, and personal essays about the myth of
genius, his bandannas and misogyny, and the cultural politics of men recom-
mending books to women. The house’s investment paid out handsomely.
The example of Infinite Jest demonstrates the limits of authorial agency in
the conglomerate era. Wallace’s error was to put too much faith in the ability of
his writing to transcend its conditions of production. He overestimated the
power of his message and underestimated that of his medium. His voice proved
fascinating, enchanting, addictive. The moral of the story, for many, was lost in
the fireworks of his prose and the hype of his promoters. In some small way, his
critique of media conglomerates did the opposite of what he intended, handing
Time Warner an ability to demonstrate the editorial freedom it allowed its pub-
lishing properties. If the novel was, on its own terms, a failure for Wallace, it was
a triumph for Pietsch, who, with his marketing sensibility and his distaste for
the midlist, was an exemplary conglomerate era editor. For the fullest under-
standing of the meaning of the novel, we need to recognize its provenance and
the forces that carried it through: Wallace’s mind, saturated by the culture and
threat of Time Warner; Bonnie Nadell, his agent, who provided aesthetic coun-
sel; Pietsch’s red pen that cut and rearranged hundreds of pages; the publicists
who planned the promotional campaign; the reviewers who made it the it book
of 1996; the book buyers for Barnes & Noble and Borders who embraced the
sales potential of a massive brick of a novel; in short, conglomerate authorship.
One mode of conglomerate authorship, on display in Infinite Jest, is allegory.
Conglomeration led to the production of fiction that allegorized conglomera-
tion itself.71 No one, to my knowledge, has interpreted Infinite Jest as an allegory
for the conglomerate publishing industry. It is a novel about addiction set at an
elite tennis academy and a halfway house. It features no figures from publishing.
Yet an investigation into Wallace’s compositional method and the introduction
of the most immediate and materialist context brings into focus the tale the
novel tells of a heroic artist hoping to cut through a culture overwhelmed by
media conglomerates with a work called, in the novel, Infinite Jest. We will see
such allegorical storytelling repeat itself in heavy-handed commercial instances,
such as Stephen King’s Misery and Michael Crichton’s Disclosure, but also in
more surprising, veiled cases such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Joan Didion’s
The Last Thing He Wanted.
OVERTHINK IT
Infinite Jest is populated by characters who worry that they overthink things,
that they are too self-reflexive. Their concerns, which have become ubiquitous,
are characteristic of the conglomerate era, in which reflexivity is expressed as
allegory, ironic multiculturalism, and the genre called autofiction. This ten-
dency to turn inward, to write about the conditions that make writing possible,
is not an effect of conglomeration alone. Literary critic Mark McGurl attributes
the “reflexivity of so much postwar fiction” to the fact that more and more writ-
ers labored within the “programmatically analytical and pedagogical environ-
ment” of creative writing programs, which—following the work of sociologists
Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens—he saw as merely one component of the
much broader “disintegration of traditional communities (Gemeinschaft) into

the impersonal, rationalized, and highly mediated collectivities (Gesellschaft)
of modernity.”72 We are going to discover how fruitful it can be to investigate
conglomeration—which took as its aim precisely to make publishing imper-
sonal, rationalized, and mediated—as a reflexivity engine that produces charac-
teristic forms of fiction.73
Autofiction is the latest name for a long-standing novelistic practice in which
the author uses their own life transparently as the source of their story. It is a
mistake, as Pierre Bourdieu long ago noted with reference to Gustave Flaubert’s
Sentimental Education, to think that this use of the author’s self entails the
“complacent and naïve projections” of strict autobiography. Bourdieu argued
that we should instead “perceive an enterprise of objectification of the self, of
autoanalysis, of socioanalysis.”74 Explicitly not writing a memoir, the autofic-
tionalist invents a fictional avatar through whom the author can submit the lit-
erary world to their (hopefully) penetrating scrutiny. Readers are not wrong to
spy John Irving in the figure of T. S. Garp, Vladimir Nabokov in Timofey Pav-
lovich Pnin, Percival Everett in Thelonius Ellison, Sheila Heti in Sheila Heti,
or Philip Roth in Philip Roth—even if we ought to recognize the character
transfigured.
Just because autofiction is old, though, does not mean its mode of deploy-
ment is unchanged. That it has a new name ought to tip us off. It, for one, is
another kind of genre play that makes a bid for a large readership under the cur-
rent market dispensation. “Think of the large audiences still commanded by
biography, history, and memoir,” writes McGurl, suggesting that autofiction “is
hungry for some of that action.”75 Autofiction also plays to the popular desire
for gossip, a peek behind-the-scenes, a point Amy Hungerford makes about the
publishing habits of McSweeney’s and Dave Eggers’s memoir A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius. Beyond whatever literary innovations it is or is not
making, autofiction has become a kind of literary genre fiction.
It is also the perfect form for conglomerate marketing. 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 shed-
ding control over her image and her work, making her at once more useful and
more disposable. The author gets to feel more authorial and the publisher gets to
obscure the unsexy conglomerate rationalization that has diminished the status
of the author. Conglomerate authorship always wants to hide itself, and never
more than in autofiction. It is, in Lee Konstantinou’s phrasing, “literature that
addresses the becoming institutional of the individual,” which explains why so
many works of autofiction—by Rachel Cusk, Helen DeWitt, Percival Everett,
Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Ben Lerner, among others—are preoccupied with
the book industry.76 Autofiction projects the fantasy of victory over the systems
that threaten to interfere in the cultivation of the expressive self, whether the
creative writing program or the conglomerated publishing industry, which is
why it is so useful in the conglomerate era.77
THE CONGLOMERATE ERA
This is a book of literary history. It tells a single story—with many subplots—

about U.S. fiction since 1960, a field that, in the words of Mark McGurl, “has
grown so large and internally complex that few scholars even attempt anymore
to gather its splinters.”78 I have attempted it, and in doing so have elided much
that others would include, an inevitable limit given my hope to keep this from
becoming a tome of unwieldy size, elisions that I hope readers take in a genera-
tive spirit, as occasions to expand on what I have begun.
The story I tell is about what I call the conglomerate era, a term that pays
homage to Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, the book that inspired me to begin
this quixotic investigation. His argument is simple. The rise of the creative writ-
ing program after World War II transformed U.S. literary production. It made
writers into professors, which altered the meaning of their work, and it
ensconced the values of modernism, as inaugurated by Henry James, in institu-
tions. These values are captured and banalized by clichés: show don’t tell; find
your voice; write what you know. Productive dialectical tension cleaves the insti-
tution itself, given its definitional creativity and its necessary concession to the
programmatic. The Program Era is capacious. It reached back in spirit to Hugh
Kenner’s exuberantly written The Pound Era, which delivered its readers to the
immersive junction of biography and close reading, poetics and institutions,
staging the human stakes of formal choices. Like McGurl, I hope to show how
attention to an institution enables interpretive vim and helps make clear how
fiction works and why it changed.
The incentives and agendas of a house and everyone in it depend on its sector.
Bantam, a mass-market house, acquires for a markedly different set of exigencies
than Knopf, a trade house. Knopf has an utterly different financial logic it needs
to obey than Graywolf, a nonprofit. By 1995, only one large trade house remained
independent—and remains so today: W. W. Norton, which, because it is
employee owned and has a flourishing relationship with colleges and universi-
ties, operates uniquely. What happens in one sector affects the others. They
define themselves against each other, fight for markets at the boundaries where
their audiences meet, and experiment with tactics that others have tried. This
book is thus divided into six chapters: two each for the mass market and trade,
and one each for nonprofits and independents. Within each chapter, I explain
how the changing logic of that sector in the conglomerate era transformed how
individual publishers published fiction, laying the groundwork on which, by
this book’s end, I will have built a vision of how the sectors behave interdepen-
dently to form the logic of the industry, which thus shapes the literary field.
I begin with the mass market, which vastly expanded the numbers of book
readers in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. I follow E. L. Doctorow—
who grew up loving these cheap little books—as he found a career publishing
them at New American Library and Dial before, in 1975, selling his own novel,
Ragtime, for the highest advance to that point in history. That year was a peak
for literary fiction, the fortunes of which fell steeply as aggressive agents, empow-
ered publicists, and buyers for the new chain bookstores elevated brand-name
writers of genre fiction such as Jean Auel, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Judith
Krantz, and Danielle Steel. In the later years of the conglomerate era, the format
itself would fall dramatically out of favor. It gave way to trade paperbacks,
invented by Jason Epstein at Doubleday in 1953, which is where I begin the sec-
ond chapter, which is about the conglomeration of trade publishing. Epstein,
who moved to Random House in 1958 and stayed there for decades, was a lead-
ing figure in a culture of misogyny. I show how leading women writers who pub-
lished with Random House in the 1960s and 1970s turned to autofiction to give
themselves space to experiment with new novelistic forms, devised in response
to the misogyny of publishing. Beginning in the 1980s, we find conglomerate
authorship expressed in the form of literary genre fiction in novels by Toni Mor-
rison, Cormac McCarthy, and Joan Didion.
In the hope of freeing houses from the market demands of conglomerate pub-
lishing, a little-known literary impresario named Jim Sitter began an epic cam-
paign to subsidize literary publishing, which became the nonprofit publishing
movement. I follow it from its roots in Port Townsend and Iowa City to its mat-
uration in the Twin Cities where Coffee House, Graywolf, and Milkweed took
root, publishing fiction that commercial houses did not consider viable, such as
the oeuvres of Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita. I spend the sixth chapter
with W. W. Norton, whose status as an employee-owned house and its robust
relationship with higher education allowed it to publish misfit fiction: Patrick
O’Brian’s seafaring novels, Walter Mosley’s black detective fiction, the lad lit of
Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh, the complete works of Isaac Babel and
Primo Levi, the graphic novels of R. Crumb.
The 2007–2008 financial crisis transformed publishing and ushered the con-
glomerate era into a new phase. Amazon launched its Kindle and created a vast
publishing ecology of its own, which cut into the power of legacy publishers. Con-
glomerate and nonprofit publishing, though, remain at the center of what we
might call mainstream U.S. literary culture. The financial crisis and competition
from Amazon led to intensified managerial interventions among conglomerates
in the name of customer service and profit growth. When the financial crisis hit,
young members of the Silent Generation and old Boomers had only recently
retired or were in the twilight of their career, people like Jason Epstein, Robert
Gottlieb, and André Schiffrin, who entered publishing during the postwar boom,
when editors held sway, it was a more personal business, and business was good.
They resisted the managerial revolution and clung to the idea that their work was
about the cultural life of the nation, not economics. With them out of the way,
and a financial crisis to take advantage of, some members of the next generation,
who got their start in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, often as marketers, publicists, or
subsidiary rights managers, accelerated the neoliberalization of publishing. Con-
glomerate publishers now have corporate marketing managers, directors of social
media, digital marketing managers, business intelligence analysts, and directors of
media planning and mass merchandising. I describe the consequences of the con-
temporary phase of the conglomerate era in the conclusion.
SCHIFFRIN, REDUX
Later, André Schiffrin would say that the day he was fired—possibly even as he
was heading home to his wife on that coldest day of the year—he began plan-
ning his next move. With former Pantheon editor Diane Wachtell, he cofounded
The New Press as a nonprofit. Although it is known for its nonfiction, The New
Press published prominent global fiction by Marguerite Duras, Abdulrazak
Gurnah, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Henning Mankell, Lore Segal, and Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o. It published The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander in 2011 with a
very modest first printing of three thousand copies, but which went on to spend
many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Schiffrin launched an internship program designed to bring underrepre-
sented voices into the extremely white publishing industry. In 1996, the house
received a $1.1 million grant—$2 million in 2022 dollars—the largest in publish-
ing history to that point, to extend its outreach programs.79 It has sent dozens of
former interns into jobs at Hachette; Little, Brown; Routledge; Riverhead;
Scribner; and Penguin, among other houses; and the revered scouting agency of
Maria B. Campbell Associates.80
He and his wife held frequent parties on the wraparound terrace of his pent-
house on the Upper West Side, where Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the
City, rubbed shoulders with Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and Studs Ter-
kel, chronicler of the working class. “You’d think it’d all be tweeds and pipes
with André,” said one occasional guest. “No, not at all.”
Schiffrin’s career was emblematic of the conglomerate era. He reappears from
time to time in the coming pages because he touched every sector of publishing.
His first job was at New American Library, a pathbreaking mass-market house.
The year after he arrived, it was purchased by Times Mirror, which hired McK-
insey to restructure the place, leading to an editorial exodus: the conglomerate
era’s opening act. Schiffrin left for Pantheon, owned by Random House, until
conglomeration came for him there.
André Schiffrin was not just a victim of conglomeration, but also a figure
whose career paralleled the conglomerate era. It is an era that would outlive him.
We remain ensconced as I write. But he gives us our start, an entrée into an
opaque world that shapes our lives with books.
1
Mass Market (I)
How Mass-Market Books Changed Publishing
S
tu watched from his dorm room window as students marched down
Washington Avenue. “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your
fucking war!” they chanted. Two days earlier—on May 8, 1972—
President Nixon had announced that the United States would prolong its war in
Vietnam. In response, Stu’s classmates, students at the University of Minnesota,
organized a historic protest for peace.
Stu watched the protestors marching from the east carrying eggs and rocks.
The well-armed riot police approached from the west. The two groups collided
in the street beneath him. The police drove a wedge through the student body,
shearing off sections and leaving many bloodied, injured. The next day, Stu
would find himself accidentally thrown into the chaos, sprinting to escape blows
from a baton-wielding cop as a helicopter dropped tear gas over the campus. But
now he chose to turn from the window, grab a worn, mass-market copy of
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, and, as he would tell me decades
later, “escape.”1
TALISMAN
In 1972, college kids across the country were grabbing Tolkien’s trilogy.
Although it had been in print since the 1950s, it only began to take off in the
United States in 1965 with the publication of competing cheap mass-market edi-
tions by Ace Books and Ballantine. Over the next seven years, the series became
a campus sensation, supplanting The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies as
24 l M ass M a r k et (I)
the novels of choice for disaffected youth, causing cultural commentators to

compare the frenzy to Beatlemania and to term it—with its accompanying Elv-
ish and “FRODO LIVES!” paraphernalia—a cult.2
My aesthetic education begins here, with these books. Stu is my father. He
graduated, found a job as a sales representative in the furniture business, got mar-
ried, had kids, and moved to the suburbs. He and my mother are avid readers. He
sought out the latest bestsellers at B. Dalton; she made monthly selections from a
book club. When I was a colicky baby, they quieted me by setting me in front of
shelves to be distracted by the variegated spines and their colophons.
Tolkien’s paperback success in the United States revealed to writers and pub-
lishers the possibility of a new genre: fantasy. But it didn’t take off until 1977,
when Ballantine editors Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey started their own imprint
and had quick success with books by Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson.3
They also published Piers Anthony, a forty-something science fiction writer,
born in England, but living in Florida, the grandson of a wealthy mushroom
tycoon. Under the aegis of the del Reys, Anthony wrote his first fantasy
novel—A Spell for Chameleon, set in the magical land of Xanth—as a Ballantine
mass-market paperback original in 1977.4 By the time I picked up Spell it was
1994; Anthony had published seventeen more and was still going strong.
Now, almost thirty years later, I remember them as they looked on the shelves
dedicated to fantasy at the Barnes & Noble in the Har Mar Mall in Roseville,
Minnesota. Each summer my family spent a week in a cabin near the border
with Canada. We had a ritual: the night before we left, we went to Barnes &
Noble; each of us kids could spend twenty-five dollars. Passing through those
paired doors, through the anteroom with discounted self-help titles or cook-
books, into the wide airy earth-toned space felt like entering a temple to poten-
tiality. It smelled like new ideas and coffee. A Starbucks was located in the mid-
dle, slightly elevated, where my parents sat while we shopped. I took my time. I
roamed. But I always ended at Xanth. The spines stood in a long row with titles
whose puns struck me as signs of wit: Night Mare, Heaven Cent, Isle of View.
Over the years, I worked my way through them.
Eventually, I outgrew Xanth. My parents recommended what they liked:
Conroy, Crichton, Follett, Grisham, King, Michener, Uris, Vonnegut, and
Wouk. But Follett and Grisham and Michener seemed, to me, expressions of a
cookie-cutter suburban culture long ago dubbed middlebrow. That was our
world. I wanted out. I was now drawn to Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Heller and
Salinger. Their tales and how they told them—even more, their cultural cachet,
how they were marketed—reflected my adolescent aspirations for East Coast
reinvention, for travel in Europe, for sophistication and worldliness. That all of
M ass M a r k et (I) m 25
these, from Conroy to Salinger, were white men reveals as much about the
homogeneity of the publishing industry as it does my family’s gendered and
raced purchasing habits.5
I came to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow via an online list providing
recommendations for the AP English exam. I tracked the book down at Barnes
& Noble. I found the Penguin trade paperback edition, bound with a dark blue
cover etched with outlines of V-2 rockets. No one I knew had heard of the book,
so it felt like I had made a discovery. (No matter that it was in print and in stock
at Barnes & Noble.) It became my talisman. The tale the novel told was Tolkien
in a funhouse mirror. An epic quest across wartorn Europe, a battle fought
between good and evil—except this time evil would win. Pynchon’s hopes were
modest: ephemeral utopias, oblique liberation. Carrying the book made me feel
unique, and reading it made me feel smarter than everyone else, but it was more
than that. The language was exhilarating, the sensibility hilarious, the politics
strange and enchanting. Gravity’s Rainbow gave me everything I needed to
become, years later, an English professor: a talismanic object, with its teal spine
and blueprint design, later to be held together with a strip of duct tape; a lesson
in how to distinguish myself from others based on my taste; a fondness for lib-
eratory politics; and a love of challenging prose, lush language.
It would be many more years before I learned to narrate my aesthetic educa-
tion not as a triumphant journey of self-discovery but as a slightly embarrassing
cliché: my pretension to uniqueness, through Pynchon in particular, was
repeated by cocky young white men across the United States. I was a type and
played to it. In graduate school I met iterations of myself, again and again.6
If this book has a villain, it is the romantic author, the individual loosed by
liberalism, the pretense to uniqueness, a mirage veiling the systemic intelligences
that are responsible for more of what we read than most of us are ready to
acknowledge. To make this claim is already a derivative act, preceded by, among
countless others, Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel that imagines that, against the all-
consuming military-industrial complex, we either succumb, hopelessly resist, or
disintegrate, losing all sense of personhood, becoming vessels through which
flow the currents of culture.
POLARIZED
Books serve our self-image. The books we like say a lot about us, whether we
know it or not. This is a common enough observation, associated with the
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who showed that—at least in France in the
1960s—aesthetic taste correlates with socioeconomic class. Yet scholars of con-
temporary U.S. literature rarely reflect on how we’ve tacitly selected a tiny canon
of objects of study and what that says about us.7
To be clear, scholars spent considerable time in the 1980s and 1990s debating
which authors should be among the elect. More white women and people of
color, fewer white men. We have spent less time, though, studying the ramifica-
tions of our narrow purview in the first place.8 It turns out we have predictable
habits. Scholars of contemporary U.S. literature have written reams on Bechdel,
Cisneros, DeLillo, Erdrich, Kingston, McCarthy, Morrison, Pynchon, Robin-
son, Roth, Wallace, and Whitehead. We’ve written much less on Auel, Clancy,
Crichton, Follett, Grisham, Koontz, Krantz, McMillan, Picoult, Steel, and
Woods.9 At the time of writing, Toni Morrison generates 3,109 hits on MLA
International Bibliography, Danielle Steel six. We avoid authors who sell the
most books. Too often, we let the authors we choose—or who have been quietly
chosen for us, through the work of publishers, reviewers, booksellers, and prize
committees10—stand in for literature itself in the arguments we make.
How we read is historical. What it means to open a book changes depending
on where we are, and when. Amid the morass of the Vietnam War, Tolkien’s
novels offered the fantasy of moral clarity. Audiences weren’t always so polarized
between popularity and prestige. “It used to be thought that ‘serious writing’
and ‘best-sellers’ were mutually exclusive categories,” wrote the eminent critic
Malcolm Cowley in 1958. “The popular book never had literary merit, and the
work of distinction would never be popular. The paperback experiment has
destroyed that superstition.”11
Mass-market paperbacks were printed in unprecedented numbers after
World War II to keep pace with the rapid increase of readers in the postwar
United States. Mass-market houses multiplied like suburban subdivisions. They
used the format—small, pocket-sized, printed on cheap paper—to publish and
promote Philip Roth alongside Harold Robbins, William Faulkner alongside
Mickey Spillane. The covers were provocative.12 The impulse behind their
design often was about democracy as much as profit: get a wide range of books
in as many hands as possible.
For the first several decades of the twentieth century, if you didn’t live in an
East Coast city, books were hard to find. Bookstores were few and far between.13
Mass-market paperbacks changed the game. These cheap and portable books
could be placed “on newsstands and in drugstores, variety stores, tobacconists,
railroad stations, and other locations visited by thousands of people who might
never have entered a bookstore.”14 Young John Updike was thrilled when
mass-market novels first appeared in his small Pennsylvania town.15 The well-
established Henry Miller, meanwhile, in New York, thought the format was
trash, degrading the value of a book. Writing in 1954, Kurt Enoch, head of New
American Library, one of the most profitable paperback houses, took a high-
minded view. “It is no longer safe, or indeed possible, for the sort of diverse com-
munication ‘in depth’ afforded by books to be confined to an elite.”16 The ethos
of the mass market was to unify, not stratify.17 “Winners of Nobel prizes, Pulit-
zer prizes, National Book awards, and other literary accolades, and talented nov-
elists from many countries in the world, appear side by side on drugstore display
racks,” wrote Enoch.18 For the first forty years—1939 to 1979—Faulkner, Rob-
bins, Roth, and Spillane, not to mention Baldwin, Kosinski, Susann, and Von-
negut, shared real estate on bestseller lists because publishers launched them
together.
During the flush years of the postwar boom, mass-market publishers rein-
forced (by instituting genre categories) and subverted (by publishing all fiction
as cheap commodities) notions of high and low. Large media conglomerates
began buying mass-market houses in the 1960s, but in the 1970s the boom bled
into a downturn, and the book business slowed. Wages stagnated and inflation
grew, hollowing out the middle class. Conglomeration intervened, creating a
class of mega-bestsellers, engineering the harder (if still porous) divide between
popularity and prestige that we live with today. By 1980, market segmentation
and sales prioritization had become the norm, bestseller lists populated by a
small group of brand-name authors. Between 1986 and 1996, “63 of the 100 best-
selling books in the United States were written by just six authors: Tom Clancy,
Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Danielle
Steel.”19 Meanwhile, the mass-market distribution model introduced in 1939—
sell books like magazines and candy, in between necessities and novelty items at
kiosks, supermarkets, and airports—had been cannibalized by trade paperbacks
and hardcovers. Only a few books make it into Walmart and O’Hare, but those
that do sell in outrageous numbers.
In short, conglomeration stratified reading. The world of books changed:
how they were written, sold, read. This chapter describes the rise of the mass
market, its invention and expansion. More money was flowing through the
industry than ever before. Artists and hacks alike cashed in. Littérateurs could
be celebrities: James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal.
Even hermetic Pynchon’s V. sold two hundred thousand copies on the mass mar-
ket. Gravity’s Rainbow reached the bestseller lists in 1973.
The great divide was 1980. Conglomeration had arrived. The second chapter
begins then, at the mass market’s peak, the glitzy realm of Judith Krantz and
Danielle Steel. The 1980s also witnessed the triumph of formulaic romance nov-
els and middlebrow blockbusters and the decline of original science fiction in
favor of profitable series. But even as mass-market authors like Steel and Krantz
were becoming more profitable, the mass-market format was losing readers, a
victim of its own success, cannibalized by trade.
The writers in these two chapters—E. L. Doctorow, Danielle Steel, Judith
Krantz, Piers Anthony—wrote for the mass market. That meant that they were,
in a sense, industrial writers: they wrote from within an increasingly complex
bureaucracy struggling to maximize its returns on investments; they were those
investments, and they knew it. Their writing was not their own. It was property
that their publisher would copyright, per Simon & Schuster’s Richard Snyder,
for “exploitation in any medium or distribution system.”20 Each of these four
writers negotiated their peace in their own way in their work. I read them among
their industrial collaborators, the agents, marketers, wholesalers, and booksell-
ers who made them rich. In the process, the contours of a new literary history—a
first step toward synthesizing popular culture, postmodernism, the rise of the
creative writing program, and the institutions of literary prizes—begins to take
shape.
APOTHEOSIS
Edgar was extremely thirsty. His appendix had burst. He was eight years old. A
reader in a family of readers—he was named after Poe—Edgar found consola-
tion in books. (Years later, he narrated the event in a work of autofiction.)21 As
he lay in the hospital, recovering from surgery, his parents brought him a gift, “a
book that could fit into your pocket, a pocket book or paperback that cost only
twenty-five cents.”22 In fact, they brought him three. Published by the aptly
named Pocket Books, Edgar’s gifts were chosen from a line of ten mass-market
paperbacks Pocket had just introduced. Among the titles were Bambi, Lost
Horizon, and Wuthering Heights, each now placed in Edgar’s hands. They
sparked an obsession.
Pocket had announced its inaugural list with a full-page ad in the New York
Times on the day of the launch, July 19, 1939: “Never again need you dawdle idly
in reception rooms, fret on train or bus rides, sit vacantly staring at a restaurant
table. The books you have always meant to read ‘when you had time’ will fill
these waits with enjoyment.”23 Pocket’s inexpensive, mass-produced books were
a success. Within a few years, a slew of imitators followed. The leaders, in terms
of market share, were, along with Pocket, Dell (1943), Bantam (1945), New
American Library (1948), and Fawcett (1950).24 Demand was high and these
publishers flooded the market with books.
When Edgar grew up, he secured a position as an editor at NAL. He later
wrote that he felt lucky, “getting paid to find and read good books and buy the
rights and print up a hundred thousand, say, of a good obscure first novel, give it
a jazzy cover, and ship it out to all the airports in the country, all the drugstores
and railroad stations.” Genre fiction—then often called category books—
turned out to be the mass market’s bread and butter: mysteries, romances, and
Westerns sold well during the format’s first decade and included science fiction
by the time Edgar entered the game in 1959. His work inspired him to write his
own Western, Welcome to Hard Times, followed by a science fiction novel, Big as
Life. Tired of pulp, Edgar originally intended Hard Times to be a parody, but as
he kept at it, his “desire to destroy the genre forever turned into a serious engage-
ment with its possibilities.”25 After ten years, he quit the publishing industry to
build a career as a novelist.
Although he is read less and less, Edgar—known as E. L. Doctorow—would,
with his fourth novel, Ragtime, earn a staggering $1.85 million mass-market con-
tract in 1975 (about $10.5 million in 2022 dollars). “It’s really the first time that
so much money has been connected with a book of such high quality,” said an
industry source in the New York Times.26 It would be one of the last times.27
The coming divide between popularity and prestige would limit the financial
ceiling for books deemed, by the industry, as quality.
Ragtime was notable, too, for its breadth of appeal: it topped the bestseller
lists in 1975, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was respected by
the academy. Fredric Jameson, the influential literary theorist, called Doctorow
“one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists at work in the United
States.” He read Ragtime as an exemplary postmodern novel, a “peculiar and
stunning monument.”28 It was the apotheosis of the egalitarian impulse of the
mass market.
ENOCH AND WEYBRIGHT, WEYBRIGHT AND ENOCH
Kurt Enoch’s publishing partner at NAL, Victor Weybright, offered Doctorow

a job in 1959. The house had just lost its only Jewish editor to Dell, and Docto-
row, also Jewish, arrived at the right moment to fill what he would later call
NAL’s “Jewish seat.” (One of his colleagues, hired the same year in the college
marketing department, was André Schiffrin.) NAL was the most progressive
big house. In 1950, it published Richard Wright’s Native Son, establishing itself
“as the only mass-market reprinter willing to consistently handle serious work
by black writers.”29 NAL went on to publish James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison,
Chester Himes, and Ann Petry. Weybright built a relationship with the “Negro
leadership of the 1940s” and advocated “the distribution of books in predomi-
nantly Negro neighborhoods such as Harlem, South Chicago, Atlanta, and Bal-
timore, where previously the magazine wholesalers had insisted that self-service
book racks would be doomed by excessive pilferage.” NAL’s experience “demon-
strated the very opposite.”30 In 1957, Fawcett staked a claim to black sleaze with
Mandingo, a historical plantation novel about slave breeding that sold millions
of copies in the United States and Canada.31 Mandingo’s outlandish success set
the stage for Holloway House to publish Iceberg Slim’s classic novel, Pimp, a
“major force behind diversifying the pulp and genre fiction industries in the late
twentieth century.”32
At the end of his life, Weybright was nostalgic for his childhood in Maryland
farm country, for its heavy horses and camaraderie born of hard work, its integ-
rity and “gentility,” its “splendid rural culture” that had given way to urbaniza-
tion. “The automobile and the movies,” he wrote, “seemed to be creating only an
illusion of happiness, tempting people to false escapism,” unlike the noble lei-
sure of books. Weybright claimed that he learned to read “simple adult books”
by the age of four, that he was reading Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth by six,
and Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo by nine.33 He moved to New York City
in the 1920s, immersing himself in its literary world, dominated by figures who
would be responsible for some of the most consequential twentieth-century lit-
erary institutions: John Farrar, of the future Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Horace
Liveright, of Boni & Liveright, which spawned Random House; H. L. Mencken,
whose American Mercury was publishing Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, and
James Weldon Johnson; Condé Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair; and Harold
Ross, who founded the New Yorker. At the outset of World War II, Weybright
was stationed in London at the Office of War Information with poet Archibald
MacLeish, who was assistant director there and, simultaneously, the Librarian
of Congress.34 Weybright’s disposition was moralistic, his taste catholic, and his
milieu that of high literary distinction, positioning him to take advantage of the
new infrastructure to bring modernism to the masses.
After the war, Weybright was asked by Allen Lane, the head of Penguin
Books in the UK, to help his struggling U.S. branch. Weybright bought the first
hundred mass-market paperbacks he saw: Pockets, Dells, Bantams. He found
almost nothing, to his mind, of literary merit: “not a trace of Faulkner, Farrell,
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protest anywhere, the entire male population of the country between
the ages of twenty-one and thirty, inclusive, went to the registration
booths and registered for military service, and practically all the
returns were in Washington within twenty-four hours. Two
subsequent registrations of young men who had reached the age of
twenty-one after June 5th brought the number of registrants up to a
little more than 10,000,000 men.
On September 12th, 1918, occurred the registration under the
extended age limits of eighteen to forty-five when over 13,000,000
names were added to the list. Thus in a year and a half of war
America listed and classified as to physical fitness and occupational
and domestic status her full available power of 23,700,000 men. Out
of the first great registration and the two small ones supplementing it
and from the Regular Army and the National Guard there had been
sent overseas at the signing of the armistice, November 11th, 1918,
a little more than 2,000,000 men and there were in the United
States, ready for transportation to France, 1,600,000. The American
Army totaled at that time 3,665,000. A few of those who had gone
were in Italy, Russia, or elsewhere, but nearly all of them were in
France, trained, equipped and either on the fighting line, in
supporting divisions, or waiting in the rear ready for the front. Those
in the American training camps were being transported to France at
the rate of from 200,000 to 300,000 per month and would all have
been overseas by early spring of 1919. The work of classifying the
registrants of September, 1918, and of making the selections for
military service was already under way and the flow of these men
into the training camps had begun. The plans were all ready for
operation for calling into military service 3,000,000 more men from
this registration, for training them in the American camps two or
three months and then sending them to France for a final training
period of six or eight weeks. If the war had continued until the next
summer, as it was then universally believed it would, the United
States would have had ready for service at the front, within two years
of its declaration of war, an army of between 6,000,000 and
7,000,000 men, taken from civilian life, trained, equipped and
transported across the Atlantic Ocean within that time.
The mechanism by which this army was gathered, examined,
selected, classified and sent to training camps worked as smoothly,
as efficiently and as swiftly as if the country had been trained for a
century in martial methods. The quotas to be furnished by states,
counties and smaller districts were apportioned and local boards
were appointed to have charge of the task of calling the selected
men, examining and classifying them and sending to the training
camps those finally chosen as physically fit for the service and able
to serve without injury to dependents or to essential industry.
Registration also had been carried on under these local boards,
each registrant being numbered in order. The draft call was made by
means of a lottery drawing in Washington where each number that
was drawn summoned all the men of the same registration number
in all of the 4,500 local boards throughout the country. The local
boards called in the men whose numbers were chosen, examined
them as to physical condition, considered their claims to exemption,
if such were made, on the ground of being the necessary support of
dependents or of being engaged in an essential industry, decided for
or against them and certified their names to the district board, which
acted as a board of review for local boards, as exempted or held for
service. If approved for service by the district board, the local board
inducted them into the service and sent them to a cantonment or
camp to begin their military training. Each of these 4,500 local
boards was officered by three men, one of whom had to be a
physician. All of them were civilians who worked practically without
pay, until, after some months, a small allowance was made for their
remuneration. They carried through the arduous work, frequently
entailing many hours per day, in addition to their regular business or
professional affairs, which had to be much neglected meanwhile, in
order that they might offer this important service to their country at
the moment of need. The draft organization, besides these 13,500
local board members, included over 1,000 district board members,
medical, legal and industrial advisers, clerks, Government appeal
agents, and others amounting, all told, to a compact, nation-wide
body of over 190,000.
The democratic ideals of America have never had a more
searching trial or a more triumphant vindication than was afforded by
the swift and efficient making of this Army of Freedom. Columbia
stretched out a summoning finger, saying, “I need you!” and there
came to her service millionaire’s son and Chinese laundryman,
descendant of generations of Americans and immigrant of a day,
farmer, banker, merchant, clerk, country school teacher, university
professor, lawyer, physician, truck driver, yacht owner, down-and-
outer, social favorite—from village and country and town and city
they came, representing every occupation, every social grade, every
economic condition in the republic. On the democratic level of
service to the country they gathered in the barracks and without a
whimper or a word of protest the millionaire’s son cleaned out
stables, the young man reared in luxury washed his own mess kit
and served on the kitchen police, and all of them worked at their
training and their drill as hard as day laborers from dawn till dark.
Fourteen tribes of American Indians were represented among the
soldiers of the National Army, as the forces formed from the
Selective Service were called for more than a year, to distinguish
them from the Regular Army and the National Guards. Then all three
were merged into the single organization of the United States Army.
Among the most efficient soldiers were several regiments of
negroes. Every civilized nation on the face of the globe, every
language, and every important dialect were represented in the ranks
of the soldiers of freedom who carried the Stars and Stripes on the
battle fields of France. Through the office of the base censor of the
American Expeditionary Forces passed letters in forty-nine
languages. Chinese, Syrian and Dane, Persian and Irishman,
Japanese and Italian, Latin American and Swede, vied with the New
Englander, the Kentuckian, the Texan and the Kansan in loyalty to
the United States, in enthusiasm for our ideals and willingness to
defend them with their lives. In the September registration men of
fifty-two different tongues were listed in New York City. In the first
draft men were called and accepted who claimed birth in twenty-two
separately listed countries, while a contingent from Central and
South America was not credited in the official report to the separate
nations they represented and nearly two thousand men from
scattered and small countries were lumped together under the
designation of “Sundries.” But all of them zealously fought for
America.
A great many of these foreign-born men already spoke English.
And the education of those who did not began as soon as they were
inducted into the army and was continued along with their military
training. In every cantonment to which came men who did not
understand English schools were established in which they were
taught to speak, read and write the language. All the training and all
the life around them were in English and this constant association
and the daily lessons soon made most of the men fairly proficient.
Along with the training in English went instruction in American
ideals, in the reasons why America was in the war and in what the
war meant to them individually. The aim was to give to these foreign-
born men the kind of training in patriotism and in democratic ideals,
condensed into a few weeks, that the American gets by birthright
and surroundings. Many, varied and ingenious were the ways by
which this was done. There were short talks on war news, on
American principles of government, on why America was in the war,
on why it was a war for freedom, and similar topics. The special days
and the heroes of nations that have their own traditions of revolt
against tyranny were celebrated by “national nights” to which came
all the sons of that nation in the camp and as many others as could
crowd into the auditorium. There were music and speeches and
national songs and the hymns of the Allies and in all the talking the
speakers would link up American democracy, its mission in the world
and the reasons why America was in the war with the traditions of
freedom, the heroes of liberty and the sacrifices for democracy and
justice of the nation whose celebration was being held. Pamphlets
and leaflets, written by men of their own nationality, in English
usually, but in their own tongue for those who could not yet read
English, which explained the causes of the war, the aims of the
combatants and America’s motives and outlined American history in
a simple and readable way, were circulated among the men. In a
word, these foreign-born soldiers-in-the-making were educated and
broadened and so imbued with democratic principles and American
ideals that in spirit they rapidly became good Americans, even if they
elected to continue citizens of their native land.
But all who wished could be naturalized during their military
training. In every cantonment was a court of naturalization and by a
special law it had been made possible to shorten the time ordinarily
needed for this process. Any man who was going forth to fight the
battles of civilization in the American army could become an
American citizen, even if he had not previously declared his
intention, while he was being trained. In one day at one of the
cantonments men of fifty-six nationalities were naturalized. At this
camp sessions were held from eight till five o’clock and were often
continued until midnight, so many were there who wished to become
citizens. The majority of the aliens in the selective service did so
choose and the great bulk of the foreign-born part of the huge army
that was ferried across the Atlantic had acquired American
citizenship. Aliens who did not wish to serve could, and some
thousands did, claim, and were granted, exemption on that ground.
Now and then Columbia’s summoning finger brought to the
training camp a slacker, or a religious or a conscientious objector.
Patient and careful inquiry was given to every case and no effort was
spared to make sure that each was receiving exact justice. The
official report of the Provost Marshal General for the first draft
reckoned that out of the more than 3,000,000 called for service no
more than 150,000 of those who failed to appear on time were not
accounted for by enlistment, transference or death. The reports of
the local boards showed that the bulk of this residue was composed
of aliens who had left this country to enlist in their own armies. Out of
the remainder of 50,000 a great many of the failures to report were
due to the ignorance or heedlessness of workingmen who had
moved, between registration and the call, from one job to another in
a different locality.
The exemption usually given to religious objectors was extended,
after a few months, to include those who based their objections to
sharing in warfare upon grounds of conscience even if they were not
members of a religious organization. Out of the 3,600,000 men
inducted into the service a little less than 4,000 were accepted or
recognized as conscientious objectors. A large number of these
were assigned to work on farm or industrial furloughs. Some entered
non-combatant service and a few were allowed to join the Friends’
Reconstruction Unit. Several hundred refused any service whatever
and were sent to prison. In the training camps the conscientious
objectors were segregated and placed in the charge of an army
officer who was often able by tact and persuasion to influence them
to a different point of view. Some swallowed their objections very
soon, took up the work of training more or less sullenly, and
presently, seeing a better light and feeling the influence of the
patriotism and enthusiasm surging round about them, became as
good soldiers of Uncle Sam as any of their comrades. The problem
of the slacker and the objector was a small one in the making of the
great army that was sent overseas, but it was a vexatious one for the
honest-hearted men who had charge of it and who took infinite pains
to dispense even-handed justice in every case. “My company,” said
the captain in one large cantonment under whose command were
grouped the slackers, the religious objectors and the protesters for
conscience’s sake, “is the most interesting one in the camp—and the
most trying.”
Development battalions were established in nearly all the
cantonments and did a good work in raising the efficiency of some of
the men of the army by helping them to reach better physical
condition. To these battalions were sent men who developed minor
physical defects and the men sometimes received from the local
boards who fell short of the physical standards set by the army.
Medical treatment, courses of physical training and, if necessary,
surgical operations brought many of them to so much better bodily
condition that they could undertake limited service. Many were sent
to the forests of the Northwest as part of the regiment that did most
necessary work in helping to get out spruce lumber for airplane
construction. Others were prepared for clerical and semi-civilian
work in the army, thus releasing for active service those who had
had it in charge. A goodly number improved so much under
treatment that they were enabled to undertake active army service.
All told, about 250,000 men passed through the development
battalions, of whom nearly half were made fit for duty in either the
first, second or third class. Educational work was also carried on in
the battalions and many who were either illiterate or had had very
little schooling received elementary instruction from former school
teachers, of whom there were many in the ranks. Short talks on the
duties of citizenship, phases of American history, public questions,
and the causes and progress of the war and the encouragement of
discussion broadened the outlook and stimulated the minds of the
men.
The necessity of organizing and training a huge army in a few
months made equally necessary a revolution in some army methods,
a revolution that was brought about by the Committee on the
Classification of Personnel appointed early in the war. For most of its
work, which constantly broadened and became more and more
important, it had no precedents, for, except a little experimenting in
the British army, nothing like it had ever been attempted before. In
scope and function and purpose it was one of those bold innovations
upon army traditions and methods which the Secretary of War
introduced into the training of this new army of democracy, with
results so successful and important that when the complete story of
them is known it will be seen that they put a new spirit into military
training and were in no small measure responsible for the splendid
record made by the American army.
The Director of the Committee was a civilian, a university
professor and specialist in psychology who had won distinction by
his ability to give that science practical and fruitful application in daily
life. Its work was so varied and so well developed in all its phases
that it is possible to give here only the barest resume of its
achievements. By the methods it devised all the men who entered a
cantonment, after they had passed their physical examinations,
underwent psychological tests to determine the speed and accuracy
of their mental actions, the quality of their native intelligence and the
extent of its development. Then they passed on to interviewers who
examined and classified them according to their education and
training, their occupations and degree of skill. Afterward came trade
tests to discover whether or not the men had truly reported their
occupations and ability.
These trade tests and the methods of their application, as finally
developed, were the result of much work and investigation by the
Committee that had brought in the services of psychological experts,
employment experts, statisticians and others. Their purpose was to
procure a dependable record of the special ability of every soldier
who possessed any kind of skill that would serve any one of the
army’s varied needs. Every army unit must have specialists of
several kinds and in an army that had to be built up at high speed it
was necessary to find these specialists among its numbers. Bitter
experience developed the fact, very soon, that the account of
themselves which the men gave in answer to the questions of the
interviewers frequently could not be depended on and the trade
tests, which were of three kinds, oral, picture and performance, were
devised to meet this necessity quickly and easily.
As the soldier passed through these various examinations his
interviewers entered upon his record card his physical and mental
qualifications, his trade or profession and his degree of proficiency.
Thus was tabulated, for the first time in the history of any army in any
nation, the exact physical, mental and industrial ability of every
soldier in the American army. These records were kept by the unit to
which the soldier was assigned, and followed him if he was changed
to another, for the information of the officers under whom he served.
A glance at such a card gave to an officer the knowledge he should
have concerning the aptitudes, the abilities and the character of any
of his men whom he might wish to assign to some particular service.
If skilled men were wanted in any of the scores of special
occupations which the modern army demands they could quickly and
easily be brought together, with the sure knowledge that they would
be able to do what was expected of them. One of the greatest of the
many problems facing those who had to make an army of millions of
men out of raw civilians in a few months was to be sure of getting the
right man for the right place, and the Committee on Classification of
Personnel, an innovation in the making of armies, solved it.
Similar tests helped to determine the qualifications of officers and
enabled their superiors to judge their fitness for any specified duty
with accuracy. The Personnel work was conducted by men chosen
for it because of their aptitude and their experience in civil life and
they were then trained especially for it in schools for that purpose
instituted at army camps.
These individual records and the service records of the entire
army, both privates and officers, with the history of each unit, are to
be preserved among the archives of the Government.
This great army, growing at the rate of a hundred thousand per
month, nearly the whole of it composed of civilians who had been
entirely lacking in military knowledge and training, without interest in
martial affairs and, in large part, averse to the principle of warfare as
a means of settling human disputes, had to be trained in the quickest
possible time for participation in the greatest, the most shocking and
the most scientific war of all history. The Regular Army and the
National Guard together could furnish no more than 9,500 officers, a
mere handful compared with the number needed. Beginning in May,
1917, four series of Officers’ Training Camps were held, each series
lasting three months, at which men studied and drilled with grueling
intensity twelve hours a day, fitting themselves for the work of
training the Selective Service men who began to be gathered into
the cantonments early in September. At these camps were trained,
all told, 80,000 officers, from second lieutenants to colonels,
although the higher commissions were granted only at the first two
series because of the urgent need, at first, for officers of all grades.
There were also several special training schools, one for colored
officers of the line, and others in Porto Rico, Hawaii and the
Philippines. Several thousand officers were trained and graduated
also from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps units established at over
a hundred colleges and universities.
French and British officers and British non-coms were sent by their
governments to the United States to aid by giving practical training
out of their own experience and their assistance was of great value.
After our own men began to go overseas and have training and
experience at the front many of them were brought back for the
higher importance of the instruction they could give.
View Across One End of a Cantonment Three Months After
its Construction was Begun
Training a Machine Gun Company
From the training camp schools of intensive study and drill many
thousands of young men were assigned for work at the special
officers’ training camps where officers were prepared for the
specialized duties of the Signal, Engineer and Quartermasters
Corps, and for coast and field artillery and machine gun work. Here
also there were long hours and steady, close application. From these
special training camps 60,000 officers were graduated. A shortened
and intensified course at West Point greatly increased the number of
its graduates ready for officers’ service with the army.
In the autumn of 1918 five hundred colleges and universities
became a part of the great program of the War Department. Each of
these institutions was transformed into a martial training school and
nearly all the men students of the whole five hundred, about 170,000
in all, joined the Students’ Army Training Corps, thus becoming
members of the United States Army. But while these youths spent
much time on drill and training they also were expected to keep up
their other studies. For this was a scientific war and demanded for its
prosecution men skilled in many branches of learning. The young
men were being trained to be not only soldiers but also engineers,
chemists, physicians, geologists, physicists, and specialists in many
other lines. From their ranks the most promising were selected and
sent to military camps for six weeks of a course of rigid and intensive
military training in some special line of military service. West Point
graduates, army officers with experience on the other side, officers
loaned by our Allies, had charge of the military supervision and work
of this great body of students. And during the summer of 1918 7,000
members of university and college faculties attended special training
camps to prepare themselves to assist in this work. The school
year’s training was expected to yield, by the spring of 1919, from
60,000 to 70,000 officers.
Thus, by training, selection, rigid test, more intensive training, the
hardest of hard work, and still more training under men who had
proved their worth in battle and had brought back dearly won
knowledge of present day methods of warfare, the need for more,
and more, and ever more officers for the rapidly expanding army was
met. And in the camps and cantonments the daily drill, drill, drill, and
again drill, drill, drill, of a million and a half of soldiers was constantly
carried on.
Early in the course of all these activities it was perceived that it
would be advisable to reconstruct the entire plan of organization of
the army in order to make the size and number of its fighting units
correspond with those of the English and French armies and thus
simplify the brigading of our troops with the others and the
exchanging of units in the front lines. This reorganization was carried
out, as was also the merging together into one body of the three
organizations, Regular Army, National Guard and National Army, in
the midst of all the high-speeded preparations for war.
Another revolution in army methods, the result of the imperious
necessity for the highest efficiency possible to obtain, whether from
soldier or officer, individual or army, was the sweeping away of the
old system of promotion by seniority. All officers below the rank of
Brigadier-General, under these new regulations, had to undergo the
passing of judgment upon them every three months by their
immediate superiors. They were rated according to their physical
and personal qualities, capacity for leadership, intelligence, and
value to the service, and promotion depended upon how well they
passed these tests.
CHAPTER II
HOUSING THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR SUPPLIES
While the machinery was being devised and set in motion for
forming a great army by means of the selective draft and officers
were being schooled for its training, immense camps had to be
provided in which hundreds of thousands of men could be trained,
warehouses had to be built in which to gather and store the
enormous amounts of supplies necessary for their maintenance and
equipment, huge plants had to be constructed for the making of
certain kinds of ordnance, and included in the vast scheme of
construction work, all of it necessary almost at once, were also flying
fields, embarkation depots, port and terminal facilities.
The work of building the cantonments was, alone, a very great
engineering achievement. It called for an expenditure within three
months of $150,000,000, more than three times that of the largest
year’s work on the Panama Canal, and it demanded the construction
of nearly a score of goodly sized cities, to be ready for occupancy by
the following September. For this huge job, when war was declared,
there was one colonel with four assistants and a few draughtsmen,
clerks and stenographers. Around that lone colonel there was built
up, almost over night, by telegraph and telephone, the organization
of the Government’s Construction Division, that carried through
successfully the whole vast program. For the building of the
cantonments, engineers, town planners and civilians having expert
knowledge came to its assistance, investigating possible sites and
studying their water supply, transportation facilities and availability of
construction materials. Contracts were let for sixteen National Army
cantonments and as many National Guard camps. These were all
signed between the fifteenth and twenty-seventh of June and in
three months some of them were in use, while in six months all the
work had been finished, plus many additions and betterments.
The building of each meant the creation of a city that would house
from forty to eighty thousand people. The ground surface had to be
prepared, hills leveled, valleys filled, trees uprooted, brush cleared
away and roads built. Then began the construction of barracks for
the men, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, hospitals, repair shops, and
all the other buildings necessary for the varied activities of the camp,
amounting to more than 1,400 separate structures in each
cantonment. Sewage systems and steam heating and electric
lighting plants were installed. An ample water supply, with plenty of
shower baths, was provided, allowing fifty gallons per day per capita,
which is eighty per cent more than the average allowance in
European army camps. Every care was used to assure the purity of
the water. When taken from rivers it was filtered and sterilized.
The total cost of the thirty-two cantonments and camps was
$179,607,497. Additions and betterments during the next six months
added $22,000,000. Every camp had its garbage incinerator, coffee
roasting plant, theater, repair shop and other buildings that added to
the comfort and morale of the men and the efficiency of the camp’s
work. Such care was taken in the sanitation of the training camps
and in the assuring of a pure supply of water—sometimes making
necessary the draining of surrounding areas—that the reports of the
Surgeon-General showed the practical elimination of water-borne
diseases among the troops in training.
Almost as rapid as the work on the cantonments and camps was
that which had to provide hospitals, flying fields with all their many
buildings for varied uses, huge storehouses and port and terminal
facilities. At half a dozen of the Atlantic Coast cities port terminals
with warehouses and wharves had been completed or were nearing
completion at the end of hostilities unprecedented in size and
completeness of equipment in our own or any other country. One
storage warehouse provided 3,800,000 feet of storage space and
another, for ordnance supplies, had 4,000,000 square feet of space
into which were fitted seventy-five miles of trackage and 9,000 lineal
feet of wharf frontage.
For the production and storage of certain kinds of ordnance great
plants had to be built at the highest speed and, for the most part,
because of their dangerous possibilities, in out of the way places
where the problem was complicated by the necessity of providing
housing not only for the workers who would operate the plant but
also for those engaged in its construction. An instance of one of
these, and there were many others, was a smokeless powder plant
the building of which in eight months transformed farm land along a
riverside to a busy town, containing 3,500 people, into which had
gone 100,000,000 feet of lumber. It had rows of barracks for single
men, blocks of cottages, other blocks of better residences, huge
storage houses, laboratories, manufactories. A pumping and
purification plant built among the first of the structures took from the
river 90,000,000 gallons of water per day and made it fit for use.
While the plant was being erected from 200 to 400 cars of freight
were unloaded daily. Construction projects of this class, including
plants for the production of gas, nitrate, picric acid, powder and high
explosives, presented complicated problems and their cost ran from
$15,000,000 to $50,000,000 each. And all were erected and in
operation within a few months from the day of the first work upon
them.
Eighteen months of war saw the construction of nearly five
hundred important projects of these various kinds at a cost of over
$750,000,000, all of them rushed to completion at the greatest
possible speed.
CHAPTER III
FEEDING AND EQUIPPING THE ARMY
The Quartermasters Corps, which formerly totaled 500 officers

and 5,000 enlisted men, with its facilities and routine adapted to the
feeding and equipping of an army of 127,000 men, had at once not
only to meet the needs of the vastly expanding forces and to keep
abreast of the actual growth and immediate demands of the army as
it came into being, but it had also to anticipate and prepare to meet
what would be the much greater needs of a much larger army six or
eight months in advance.
While a million and a half of men were being examined, classified
and called to service and more than thirty cantonments and camps
were being built in which to house and train them and other
construction projects were being rushed forward, the Quartermasters
Corps had to provide their uniforms and clothing and accumulate in
storage the food for their subsistence. At the same time, it had to
make sure that it could meet the constantly enlarging needs of the
coming months when the army would grow like a Jonah’s gourd with
every passing week. Production had to be stimulated and turned
aside from its usual channels and enormous quantities of material
used for new purposes. It was an emergency that required the
practical making over of the methods and purposes of American
industry and in the process the Quartermasters Corps had to be both
the directing and supervising agency and the channel of
communication between industry and the army.
A soldier’s outfit of clothing for a year cost $65.51 and numbered
twenty-three different items of a dozen different branches of
manufacturing industry. The initial equipment for one man’s shoes
alone cost $14.25. During the sixteen months from April 1st, 1917, to
the end of July, 1918, the army was supplied, among other things,
with 27,000,000 pairs of shoes, field and marching; 29,800,000 pairs
of breeches, light and heavy; 19,800,000 coats, both wool and
cotton; 192,200,000 shirts, undershirts and drawers, for both
summer and winter wear; 156,600,000 pairs of stockings of cotton
and light and heavy weight wool; and 21,000,000 blankets. And by
the end of July the Corps already was taking measures to provide
the clothing necessary during the coming year for the army of
5,000,000 men for which the War Department was preparing. That
meant it must have on hand whenever and wherever they should be
required, among many other things, all of which at the signing of the
armistice it had either ready or in sight, 17,000,000 blankets,
28,000,000 woolen breeches, 34,000,000 woolen drawers,
8,000,000 overcoats, 33,000,000 pairs of shoes, 110,000,000 pairs
of stockings, 9,000,000 overseas caps, 25,000,000 flannel shirts.
Ten great storage depots were maintained in as many different
regions of the country where huge quantities of equipment were kept
and from which the camps in that district were supplied. Other
storage plants had to be kept full at the ports of embarkation from
which the troops bound for overseas service were outfitted. On the
other side of the Atlantic stock depots were maintained with
complete equipment for ninety days’ supply for all the troops,
numbering finally over 2,000,000, that were sent overseas. As an
indication of the enormous quantities of clothing which had to be
sent across the Atlantic, on the first of July, 1918, there were, along
with similar large quantities of other supplies, on docks in the United
States ready for shipment, 2,700,000 blankets, 840,000 pairs of
spiral puttees, 7,500,000 pairs of stockings, 1,400,000 pairs of field
shoes, 203,000 pairs of hip rubber boots, 713,000 overseas caps,
697,000 woolen breeches, 709,000 overcoats.
A force of inspectors kept the output of the manufacturing
contractors constantly under rigorous watch and whenever supplies
were not up to the specified standard they were rejected. Because it
is of the first importance that a soldier’s feet be always in the best
condition, great care was taken in properly fitting each individual. A
scientific means was devised of measuring the soldier’s foot when
he received his first pair of shoes and of testing the fit so that he
could be sure of entire comfort in his foot-gear, no matter what the
length of the hikes he should take. And after being perfectly fitted the
first time, with each successive pair—each year in the service in the
United States he received three pairs and four pairs for each year
abroad—he had only to ask for another exactly similar.
The American army has always been a well fed army. In the pre-
war days, when it was the smallest army maintained by any large
state, experts from other nations, versed in the quantity and quality
of army rations, said that the American was the best fed of all
armies. And this was still true during the great war, though its
numbers leaped on by magic strides. Whether in training at home, in
camp on the other side, or on the battle front, the American soldier
had better food and more of it than the soldier of any other nation.
For instance, extra rations from American supplies were issued to
American soldiers when brigaded with those of any other army, in
addition to those supplied by the commissariat of the army with
which they were working. No experiments were made upon the
doughboy in the matter of food and experts saw to it that his ration
was agreeable to the taste, well-balanced and nutritious. That it was
good was proved by the fact that the average soldier gained from ten
to twelve pounds in weight after entering the service.
Food experts were constantly busy devising the best means of
preserving the food until it reached the army kitchens, whether in the
home camps or behind the lines at the front. A part of their mission
was also to eliminate waste. Coffee roasting plants were installed in
all the large camps at home and overseas, for the double purpose of
giving the soldier better coffee—coffee made within twenty-four
hours after the bean had been roasted—and to prevent the waste,
about two cents on each pound, which results when the roasted
coffee is kept for long periods and so deteriorates in strength and
quality. A school was established to which men were sent to learn
the art of roasting coffee properly and after they became expert they
were detailed to the different camps at home and abroad to take
charge of the coffee roasting plants. Lemon drops were found to be
a desirable part of the army ration, as they supply needed factors of
food, help to quench thirst and are much enjoyed by the soldiers. To
make sure that the drops supplied should be of the best quality a
formula was prepared calling for pure granulated sugar and the best
quality of fruit and the candy makers taking the contract were held
strictly to that standard. The same care was taken to see that
manufacturers of chocolate candies should use the best cocoa
beans in making them. The candy ration for troops on overseas
service was a half pound every ten days for each soldier, and a great
deal of this was made, toward the end of the war, in factories which
the Quartermasters Corps established in France.
The American soldier’s daily ration consisted of twenty-seven
articles of food, weighing altogether about four and a half pounds
and costing about 50 cents per man, and it had to be ready for him
regularly and promptly every day, wherever he might be. No second
grade material of any kind was bought and constant inspection of
raw materials, of processes and places, of preparation and of army
kitchens kept the food up to the standard demanded. It was bought
in enormous quantities and, in order to stabilize prices in all sections
of the country, part of the supplies was secured through the Food
Administration and the remainder by means of a system of zone
buying. During the ten months from September 1st, 1917, to the end
of June, 1918, 225,000,000 pounds of sugar were required and from
the 1917 crop of vegetables and fruits the army bought and used
75,000,000 cans of tomatoes and 20,000,000 pounds of prunes.
From the listed amounts of thirty articles of food demanded for the
subsistence for one year of an army of 3,000,000 men, the
approximate size of the American army before the September draft,
the following items are taken. They will give an idea of the size of the
task which the Quartermasters Corps undertook in the feeding of our
soldiers at home and abroad: Fresh beef, 478,515,000 pounds;
bacon, 48,000,000 pounds; potatoes, 782,925,000 pounds; jam,
7,665,000 cans; flour, 915,000,000 pounds; coffee, 61,320,000
pounds; tea, 7,665,000 pounds; canned pork and beans, 4,000,000
cases; canned tomatoes, 6,000,000 cases; evaporated milk,
2,992,500 cases; butter, 15,330,000 pounds. More than six thousand
different packers supplied the canned vegetables bought for the
army in the summer of 1918, approximately 300,000,000 cans,
enough to girdle the earth if the cans were laid in line, end to end.
The necessity of conserving shipping space led to the use of
dehydrated vegetables, of which the Quartermasters Corps in the

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