Gordon Hutner

This selection of 24 excerpts from immigrant memoirs contains selections from the 18th to 20th centuries, and features a wide range of ethnicities and religious backgrounds. I found some to be much more interesting than others. A book like this is so hard to rate! I added the originals by Rebecca Burlend and Mary Paik Lee to my tbr. I have read selections from Jacob Riis before.

The only interesting bit is the number of these authors who converted to Protestant denominations after some time in this country. Were they chosen for that reason, or is that a function of the sort of immigrant who does anything to be successful, and then writes a book about and gets it published?

Worth reading, and my first finish in my new attempt to read a bit of nonfiction daily--to work through my shelf of bought-used books!… (plus d'informations)

What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 is a fascinating literary history. Hutner examines the vast universe of books that made up most of what was published and read in America from 1920-60. Most of it was soon forgotten in favor of a small handful of "classics" that are studied over and over like Hemingway, Faulkner and a few others. He has found that most novels published then (and now) can be categorized into a genre that he says, like pornography, is hard to define but "you know it when you see it." This genre can perhaps best be defined as "middle class literature". Hutner understands the term "middle class" is a loaded one, but he uses it in a neutral way. It is the people who have the time and money to read books and search for answers in the ever evolving and often confusing cultural landscape of America. The middle class novel is typically instructing, realistic in style, and perhaps mirrors in some way the readers own life, or sets out to show a slice of life in America - to pick a modern example, the "post-9/11 novel". These novels represent the vast majority of literature published, and by their existence, define the "Great" novel. Every "Great novel", Hutner says, has been an anti middle class novel (although to be sure not every anti middle class novel is great).

Hutner's book is long and detailed and full of novels and authors that were once the critical and popular darlings - thought to be among the immortals - and now today forgotten. This is not the exception, but the norm, as Hutner shows in great detail year by year, decade by decade. Each chapter examines each decade, starting with the 1920s, going through the major works of the period. It's a veritable gold mine of novels and authors to read more about for those so interested. However Hutner says none of the works are really lost classics, they are all just "very good" - one should not approach them as individuals, but as a class or type, representative of the realistic middle class concerned literature that is in constant evolution published year after year in America. He also examines an individual year from each decade in depth, going month by month with the major books published. He may name 20 or 30 major books published that year, of which maybe 3 or 4 titles are still familiar today.

It's difficult for this review to do Hutner's nuanced argument for the "middle class novel" of the 1920s-1960s justice, but his theory has changed how I look at present day novels. I can now scan a "Top 100 Novels of the 2000s" list and quickly ask myself, is this a middle class novel? The concept is helpful in determining not only what to read, but why I read - to find a mirror of my own life, to find answers to life problems, to find out what America is like today? Sort of like TV shows are an ever changing mirror of American culture in the moment, these novels are ephemeral as individuals, yet enduring as a class over time. I would recommend this book to anyone trying to make sense of the ocean of literature published each year. How to navigate the present is made easier by looking at the past. It's also useful for the historian interested in reconstructing a vision of the past through realist fiction, not unlike how historians have used Balzac and Zola for learning more about 19th century France. In addition this is a great book for (re) discovering very good fiction that has probably unfairly fallen by, Hutner has read 100s of these books and knows his topic well.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd… (plus d'informations)