Triumph of the middlebrow …

… How The Second World War Made America Literate. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

At the heart of middlebrow culture was the belief that high art was accessible to anyone who was willing to put in the effort to understand it, and that reading “serious” bestsellers such as Lust for Life or Marquand’s The Late George Apley could serve as preparation for more ambitious ventures into great literature. For those servicemen who were already in the habit of reading for pleasure, the stateside counterpart of the ASEs was the Book-of-the-Month Club (which is mentioned only in passing in When Books Went to War). Both enterprises were essentially aspirational in their goals, both drew on the same wide-ranging pool of books, and both were broadly successful in elevating the literary tastes of those readers who made good use of them.

Reading this, I was reminded that I am myself a product of middlebrow culture. I grew up thinking that even a working-class kid like me could aspire to enjoy Bach and Shakespeare and Rembrandt. All I had to was open myself to them.