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Middlebrow Culture in the Cold War: Books USA Advertisements, 1967

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Trysh Travis
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Extract

IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II, AMERICANS WHO BELIEVED IN THE BOOK'S TRANSFORMATIVE POWER ENJOYED SHARING THEIR literary wealth with readers in the developing world. Through the Darien Book Aid Project (founded in 1949), The Freedom House Bookshelf (founded in 1958), Books USA (BUSA; founded in 1962), and other programs, they sent bundles of American paperbacks to would-be readers in countries where books were scarce and expensive. Such experiments in what international-relations scholars call people-to-people diplomacy aimed to harness the energies of America's growing middlebrow reading public to the nation's Cold War aims.

Book-donation programs shared the realist aesthetic and humanist sensibility that hallmarked the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). Disdaining avant-garde “difficulty,” their selections foregrounded transparent language, traditional mimesis, and strong themes. Fiction, biography, and popular history were the backbone of such programs, and even selections from sociology and political thought centered on unambiguous, three-dimensional characters—individuals who embodied the Enlightenment virtues of rational thought, hard work, and tolerance.

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 2 , March 2013 , pp. 468 - 473
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Works Cited

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