Strange bedfellows: How the confluence of art and big business in the 1930s and 1940s created new opportunities for authors (Djuna Barnes, Lloyd C. Douglas, William Faulkner, Pearl S. Buck)

This dissertation examines the way that the modernization and incorporation of the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century both helped to foment the emerging late industrial cultural hierarchy and capitalized on that same hierarchy to increase readership and profits. More importantly, however, it attempts to trace the ways in which recently-introduced marketing techniques, reconceived ideas of audience, and new paradigms in author-publisher relations affected American writers of the 1930s and the literature they produced. Using case studies of authors chosen from various points on the spectrum of so-called high-, middle-, and lowbrow literature, I will demonstrate that, contrary to popular critical opinion, this new publishing landscape---dominated by big-business practices and strict categorizations of audiences, writers, and works---did not ruin or corrupt literature but in fact enriched our literary heritage by providing authors with inspiration and opportunity that they may not otherwise have had.; I begin with an author who clearly intended to exist solely in the world of highbrow literature, Djuna Barnes, an artist whose very career owes its existence to the world of the avant-garde and its desire to challenge the middlebrow mainstream. From Barnes, I move to the other extreme, examining the career of Lloyd Douglas, who enjoyed his position as a strictly lowbrow author precisely because maintaining a best-selling but critically insignificant status allowed him to spread his spiritual messages to as wide an audience as possible and with no interference from the intelligentsia who might have muddled the message with their critical debate had his works merited their attention. Pearl Buck provides me with a perfect model of the solidly middlebrow writer, a status which provided her with the means to further her considerable social agenda. Finally, I've chosen to conclude with an author, William Faulkner, whose work and public persona gradually moved across categories and whose career illustrates that the most adept authors possessed the power to influence, if not to control, their literary destinies.