Conceptualizing the History of Reading in Postwar America

Joan Shelley Rubin

My paper tackles the question of how to create a narrative integrating the disparate histories of readers in the United States since 1945. (The desirability - the necessity, even - of such a narrative may well be an assumption that reflects anxieties of disciplinarity.) I will propose two related themes as organizing principles: first, the well-worn but still serviceable construct of an ongoing tension between individualism and community in American culture; and second, the competing visions of the reading public as both autonomous and deferential toward the authority of critics and experts.

The starting point for my account will be a publication that appeared sporadically and in different formats between 1947 and 1985, a paperback book entitled Good Reading. I will establish as one pole of my discussion the ideal of the solicitous, community-oriented reader from which the editors of Good Reading proceeded. The other pole - the model of the individualistic, private reader - comes from what some may view as an unlikely source: the writings of the “consensus” historian Daniel Boorstin when he was Librarian of Congress.

I will then trace the American reading public’s ambivalent attitude toward literary authority as Americans debated how to read, argued over reading instruction, mustered print in the service of politics, and re-imagined their identities as readers in the era that encompassed the Cold War, the rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the therapeutic preoccupations of the century’s last decades, and the digital revolution. I will consider the controversy surrounding the award of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949, as well as the response to John Ciardi’s attack on the poetry of Anne Morrow Lindbergh as episodes that triggered readers’ resistence to critical opinion. I will also look at debates from the mid-1950s on about literacy education for children, noting how the proponents of phonics positioned themselves as opponents of both the educational “Establishment” and the individualism they attribute to permissive “whole language” instruction. In addition, I will pursue the connection between reading, politics, and community by describing the role of collective reading within the New Left and the women’s movement. Finally, I will discuss the persistent association of reading with both self-discovery and connection to others in recent accounts by book club members, participants in Robert Pinsky’s “Favorite Poem Project,” and other respondents to surveys of reading habits.

Two spectres of decline hover over my inquiry. One is the set of late-twentieth studies by the NEA and other agencies that document a steady drop in “literary reading” among American citizens. The other is the apparent diminution in the critic’s power vis á vis readers during the last few decades. As Rachel Donadio observed in the New York Times Book Review for May 11, 2008, in today’s blog-filled world, everyone’s a critic. I will confirm those changes by discussing Amazon and Oprah, but I will also ask whether declension is the best mode in which to tell the story of American readers in the late twentieth century.