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 brief coda examines the curious case of Marilynne Robinson, one of the most decorated living American novelists who seems like she would easily be aligned with American conservatism, but is not, for reasons that are intertwined with the perceived anti-intellectualism of the political Right. In short, Robinson epitomizes the prevailing, though flawed, assumption within the literary field that the cultural capital associated with highbrow literature is inevitably aligned with progressive liberalism.

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.

This chapter interrogates the conservative conceptualization of great literature during the culture wars, arguing that it was an over-determined symptom revealing how two different discourses of literary prestige clashed in a futile attempt to reconcile the radical tension between capitalism and traditionalism. This debate turned the category of “highbrow fiction” into a condensation point of perplexing opposites, combining disparate conservative explanations for social decline. For Reagan era conservatives, highbrow fiction was somehow both an elitist liberal discourse that betrayed traditional American values and a great civilizational barricade against the untutored, racialized masses. Ultimately, conservatives mourned the deterioration of meaningful connection and community produced by capitalism, but they reconfigured this neoliberal nihilism into a left-wing specter that haunted contemporary American fiction and the institutions of higher education that produced and legitimized it. The conservative movement’s simultaneous suspicion of contemporary literary prestige and their embrace of popular realist fiction were rooted in a commitment to market-based individualism, nominal colorblindness, and the aestheticization of populist white grievance. This chapter probes these ostensible contradictions to illuminate how Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe emerged as major, diametrically opposed figures in the cultural politics of American fiction toward the end of the twentieth century.

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.

Focusing on the major writings of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, this chapter argues that the interpretative horizon of their works is inextricable from the emergence of modern conservatism as a cultural and electoral force. Whereas movement conservatives in the 1950s tended to stress tradition-based hierarchies and organic social order over abstract theories of individual liberty, conservatives began to shift their emphasis in the mid-sixties toward the language of unadulterated patriotism, property rights, and colorblind individualism. In this next stage of their movement, conservatives embraced an ideologically rigid fusion of laissez-faire capitalism and cultural populism that would redirect perceptions of literary value and prestige within American conservatism toward certain conservative strands of New Journalism and, in later years, toward the one-dimensionality of mass-market genre fiction. Finally, conservatives emphasized the “liberal cultural elite” trope with renewed vigor, constructing a monolithic stereotype of white liberal intellectuals whose racial guilt fueled their appetite for difficult, morally complex literature, a form of moral masochism that conveniently helped those same white liberals accrue “hip” cultural capital.

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.