Subject
Re: Oprah's book club
From
Date
Body
From: Mary Bellino <iambe@javanet.com>
Before this thread peters out or is snipped by our editor, let me add
that there is a fairly good book called "The Making of Middlebrow
Culture" by Joan Shelley Rubin (an Americanist) which traces the
evolution of book clubs, reading programs etc in American culture from
the early days of Alexander Woollcott's radio broadcasts, the founding
of the Book-of-the-Month Club etc. It's not exactly a page-turner but
it's very informative. As the E.B. White poem I posted earlier suggests,
Nabokov was not alone in finding book clubs risible; most of the icons
of midcult were ventilated by the big guns of American humor -- Thurber,
Lardner, Sinclair Lewis etc -- with no appreciable effect on their
popularity or profits.
Mary Bellino
Before this thread peters out or is snipped by our editor, let me add
that there is a fairly good book called "The Making of Middlebrow
Culture" by Joan Shelley Rubin (an Americanist) which traces the
evolution of book clubs, reading programs etc in American culture from
the early days of Alexander Woollcott's radio broadcasts, the founding
of the Book-of-the-Month Club etc. It's not exactly a page-turner but
it's very informative. As the E.B. White poem I posted earlier suggests,
Nabokov was not alone in finding book clubs risible; most of the icons
of midcult were ventilated by the big guns of American humor -- Thurber,
Lardner, Sinclair Lewis etc -- with no appreciable effect on their
popularity or profits.
Mary Bellino