http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/802300256

What america read : taste, class, and the novel, 1920-1960

Hutner explains that realist novels of the mid-20th-century were frequently lauded when they first appeared. They are almost completely unread now, he contends, largely because they record the middle-class encounter with modern life. This middle-class realism, he shows, reveals a surprising engagement with the social issues that most fully challenged readers in the United States, including race relations, politics, immigration, and sexuality. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly d.

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