THE CULTURE AND COMMERCE OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY :: essays papers

THE CULTURE AND COMMERCE OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY "The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age."Boris Pasternak "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."Samuel Johnson Andrew Levy's book is an immensely enjoyable read, one which presents the reader with an exhaustive historical treatment of that particularly American literary invention, the mass-marketed short story magazine.However, your final reaction to this book is likely to depend on who you agree with, Pasternak or Johnson, and thus whether you see writers as alienated individualists or clubby entrepreneurs. Levy begins at the same place everything about the American short story begins, with Edgar Allan Poe.While it is generally accepted that Poe's review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) established both a definition of and an attitude toward the American short story, Levy believes that Poe might better be considered the inventor of the American short story magazine.Levy quotes Poe's letters and journals at length, demonstrating that Poe's ultimate aim was to "found a magazine of my own."Poe dreamed of creating a magazine which would offer "high" culture to an expanding middle class, a population drawn to the magazine precisely because it represented their social aspirations rather than their social realities.Levy points out that the truly lasting American magazines have in fact followed Poe's plan, The New Yorker being perhaps the most obvious example. Levy describes his book as primarily a study of the commerce of the short story, of "...what Poe thought about his checkbook, and how his checkbook became the short story."Yet his most interesting assertion has less to do with sales than national character.He argues (in "The Land of Definition") that the American magazine stands in a metonymic relationship to the American story, in that the paradoxical assertion to both disposability and lasting value of the magazine represents perfectly the most persistent criticism and praise made of the short story.One would like to see an entire book devoted to a study of this relationship. Furthermore, if the economic foundations for the short story's development is the heart of his book, then we cannot dismiss what Levy thinks of the modern writing workshop, which has in effect created today's Writing Industry: The most striking aspect of the modern workshop system, for instance, is the extent to which its ensures the continued health of the short story ... The workshop system .