This chapter tracks the changes to the American conservative movement that have unfolded since the heyday of William F. Buckley, who founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955. Centered on Buckley’s defiance of all things left wing and on his provocative writings on welfare, critiques of the New Deal, and Cold War anxieties, this chapter shows the conflicted relationship many contemporary American conservatives have with his legacy. "Serious conservatives" who place themselves in Buckley’s lineage find themselves alienated in the contemporary media landscape, which, although displaying the same incendiary spirit as Buckley’s essays and his television show Firing Line, lacks the intellectual seriousness that many found in his writings. More generally, this chapter identifies the recurrent themes in conservative writing and dwells on the agitational poetics of conservative essayism.

This chapter sketches the history of movement conservatism’s impact on American literature from the 1950s to the present. Midcentury conservatives, in their war against an intelligentsia that they perceived as dominated by liberal voices, evolved a model of counter-expertise that continues to inform right-wing intellectual practice today. This model was influenced by midcentury disciplinary conflicts between literature and the social sciences, with conservatives affirming a literary model of truth against the rationalism of social scientific discourse. Focusing on writers who published in the book review section of National Review, this chapter shows how the idea of conservative counter-expertise attracted critics and fiction writers such as Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Garry Wills. However, the conservative critique of the liberal intelligentsia was in the process of turning into a critique of expertise as such; this critique pushed many of these writers away from the magazine and helped fashion the version of the left/eight divide that defines American politics today.

This chapter investigates how and why the cultural capital of literary fiction increasingly became aligned with liberalism and the Left in the 1970s and 1980s. It introduces a unique historical perspective that moves away from well-trodden narratives about how modern progressive liberalism, the sixties counterculture, or the New Left altered the landscape of literary fiction, and toward a broader political narrative that interrogates the impact of conservatism as an ideological force on American fiction after the 1960s. This shift in conservative literary taste was a historical contingency, a largely unintended byproduct of arguments between three strains of the post-sixties American Right: the triptych of William F. Buckley’s movement conservatism, Irving Kristol’s neoconservatism, and the reactionary populist New Right. To advance its argument, this chapter concentrates primarily on the writings of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, two major postwar novelists who wrote several of the most critically acclaimed works of the era, but who were eventually seen as occupying very different positions in the political literary fields: Bellow’s literary prestige declining as he was aligned with neoconservativism and the American Right, and Pynchon’s literary prestige increasing as he was aligned with various strands of the New Left and the broader counterculture.

This chapter examines how the traditionalist wing of the conservative movement identified Flannery O’Connor as an important young writer who epitomized traditionalist conservatism’s faith in the sophisticated fiction of high culture. However, the chapter also shows how shifting conservative literary tastes could be discerned in movement conservatism’s contemporaneous reception of Ayn Rand. Unlike O’Connor and traditionalist conservatives who valued aesthetic form over abstract ideas, Rand and the libertarian conservatives at National Review who championed her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) were concerned above all with advancing a firm set of ideological principles through the medium of fiction. While Buckley eventually ousted Rand from the conservative movement, her immense popularity with conservatives of the era foreshadowed the movement’s growing distrust of literary fiction and its eventual embrace of ideological purity and cultural populism. By close reading selected works by O’Connor and Rand, two fundamentally different fiction writers with material and symbolic linkages to the conservative movement, this chapter reveals not only the importance of fiction as a crucial nodal point in these debates, but also how racially fraught literary representations of totalitarian collectivism proved to be foundational for conceptualizing modern American conservatism.