The introduction posits a crucial hypothetical question: If the basic trajectory of the postwar literary field saw highbrow fiction become increasingly associated with progressive liberal politics, even though the simultaneous trajectory of postwar American politics saw the fall of New Deal liberalism and the rise of a historically unique form of modern conservativism, then what insights about literary taste and perceptions of aesthetic value could a book-length reconstruction of these dual literary-historiographic narratives produce? After reviewing the germane existing scholarship, this chapter explains that the aim of Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism is not just to unravel the perception that highbrow literature is a natural, virtually inexorable, ally of post-sixties progressive liberalism, but also to show how that connection is a historically contingent development shaped in part by deeper arguments within movement conservatism about the purpose and acquisition of literary cultural capital.

Focusing on the birth of the postwar era to the early 1960s, this chapter reconstructs the widely held critical view that even though New Deal liberalism was the dominant political order in the United States, the most celebrated literature of the period was derived from Anglophone modernism, an aesthetic movement embodied by writers including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound, whom prominent critics such as Lionel Trilling perceived as anti-liberal at best and reactionary at worst. The chapter also reveals how the correlation between highbrow literature and conservative politics accorded not only with the early conservative movement’s neo-Burkean conception of empirical complexity over abstraction, but also the carefully cultivated self-image conservatives had of themselves as guardians of high literary culture.

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.