What America Read

“An interesting analysis of how the literary academy decides which books will be remembered.” — The Wall Street Journal

“No one who studies or teaches U.S. fiction should overlook this sharp, luminous book. . . . Hutner’s brilliance as synthesizer, theorizer, and literary historian makes this study shine, as both a straight read and a reference tool.” — CHOICE

“Hutner covers a great deal of ground with a good deal of clarity, and his book deserves to be read with close attention by anyone interested in the reading habits of the American public.” — The National Review

“Hutner surveys four decades of American fiction from the viewpoint of the reading public and the mainstream critics of the time, and reveals just how shifts in the currents of critical tastes can leave many good works stranded and quickly forgotten.” — NeglectedBooks.com

“A legitimate corrective to the English department syllabus.” — Wilson Quarterly

“The originality of this project and the avenues it opens for further comparative work are undeniable. Hutner’s book promises to enliven work in modernist and American studies, recalibrating our sense not only of what America read but of why that reading matters.” — Clio

“Hutner exhibits skillful precision in advancing through this often misty and stony literary landscape. . . . [An] entertaining and comprehensive survey.” — Publishing Research Quarterly

“Hutner’s study should begin a useful discussion about how we judge literature and just where the value of a novel lies.” — The CEA Forum

“In restoring to view the middle-class novels that chronicled Americans' multifaceted responses to modernity, Hutner is a master chronicler himself. His reclamation project — astutely directed at both criticism and fiction — enables us to recover a more accurate and a more democratic literary history than we have previously possessed.” — Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester, author of Songs of Ourselves: American Readers and the Uses of Verse

“For more than twenty years, Gordon Hutner has been a leader in transforming the field of American literature studies. In What America Read, he makes a distinctive and original undertaking: to diagnose the soul of the American literate middle class over a crucial forty-year period by examining quality realist fiction and the critical conversations in which this fiction took part.” — Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh