Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: ‘Good Taste in Reading’
- 1 H. G. Wells, Science and Sex in the Modern Library, 1917–31
- 2 ‘The Modern Library is Something Magnificent’: Sherwood Anderson and the Canon of American Literature
- 3 Blurring the Boundaries: Detective Fiction and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Modern Library
- 4 Woolf in the Modern Library: Bridging the Gap between Professional and Common Readers
- 5 Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series
- 6 ‘If it's Like Any Introduction You Ever Read, I'll Eat the Jacket’: Faulkner's Sanctuary, the Modern Library and the Literary Canon
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - ‘The Modern Library is Something Magnificent’: Sherwood Anderson and the Canon of American Literature
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: ‘Good Taste in Reading’
- 1 H. G. Wells, Science and Sex in the Modern Library, 1917–31
- 2 ‘The Modern Library is Something Magnificent’: Sherwood Anderson and the Canon of American Literature
- 3 Blurring the Boundaries: Detective Fiction and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Modern Library
- 4 Woolf in the Modern Library: Bridging the Gap between Professional and Common Readers
- 5 Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series
- 6 ‘If it's Like Any Introduction You Ever Read, I'll Eat the Jacket’: Faulkner's Sanctuary, the Modern Library and the Literary Canon
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Whereas H. G. Wells was already an internationally known author when the Modern Library was created, the series also helped younger writers to get established. Without new blood, the Modern Library risked turning into a traditional uniform series of reprints – safe, but unexciting. For Horace Liveright, literary modernism did not have to come from Europe. As the publisher of Theodore Dreiser, Liveright was particularly interested in the Chicago literary renaissance. Capitalizing on the recently acquired fame of Sherwood Anderson and others, the Modern Library transformed this short-term fame into long-term cultural capital.
The Modern Library was the first publisher's series to market Winesburg, Ohio as a classic. In the summer of 1918, the 42-year-old Sherwood Anderson was still a relative newcomer in the literary field: John Lane had published his first three books (Windy McPherson's Son, Marching Men, Mid-American Chants) but would not accept his latest collection of short stories. In autumn 1921, the same collection had become a ‘classic’ in the Modern Library. In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Winesburg, Ernest Boyd wrote:
Just as the growth and development of America are rapid, so literary history moves quickly in this country, and in the space of five years the writer who was an innovator, an isolated figure, is now counted as one of a school of what is called the new American fiction.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary CanonThe Modern Library Series, 1917–1955, pp. 41 - 62Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014