Against the American Grain [antikvár]

ill'''' Preface w T Thi hen i came to assemble these essays, written over the last ten years, I was hardly surprised to find they have a common theme: the influence of mass culture on high culture. As an earlier settler in the wilderness of massciilt who cleared his first tract thirty years ago (with an article for The Symposium on Hollywood directors), I have come to feel like the aging Daniel Boone when the plowed fields began to surround him in Kentucky. The plowing of this particular field has been intense but, except for H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson, most writers on the subject have treated it in a sociological rather than a literary way. My interest in mass culture, however, puts the emphasis on "culture" rather than on "mass." My subject is not the dead sea of masscult but rather the life of the tide line where higher and lower organisms compete for survival. In the last two centuries, our traditional culture has been under increasing pressure from mass culture, a conflict which has reached its greatest intensity in this country. The market for cultural products has steadily broadened until by now practically everybody is a customer. This is something new in history and it has had novel effects. As the masses have become more and more educated, prosperous and politically influential, the cultural question has moved into the foreground. Up to about 1750, art and thought were pretty much the exclusive province of an educated minority. Now that the masses—that is, everybody —^are getting into the act and making the scene, the prob-