The American Writer by Lawrence R. Samuel

Author:Lawrence R. Samuel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

Love Story

The showy kind of fiction being published was perhaps an attempt by writers to become darlings in the media as the literary world increasingly crossed paths with show business. In the past, more fortunate writers had a choice in terms of retaining their creative freedom or making money, but those two goals often did not intersect. Fitzgerald and Faulkner, for example, were able to do each by writing the books they wanted to and using the movies as a means of generating large amounts of cash. (The playwright Clifford Odets, on the other hand, was acknowledged as having completely “sold out,” using his considerable talent to write or direct any Hollywood screenplay if it would pay for things like a giant pool in his backyard.) Arthur Miller’s 1956 marriage to Marilyn Monroe served to bridge the distance between “high” and “low” culture, however, bringing the rarified air of literature closer to that of entertainment and paving the way for a new kind of celebrity author.43

Writers’ higher profile in show business in the 1960s and 1970s could be seen across American popular culture. The literary elite could be legitimately considered superstars of their day, with their personal lives often covered by the media. A-list authors were even invited on The Tonight Show in order to provide witty banter for a mass audience. Hip magazines like Playboy and Esquire began featuring short stories and literary interviews, and even Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar included the occasional poem and book review. These were clear indications that writers in America had crossed over a kind of tipping point; they still might be rather odd ducks, but now they were seen as valuable members of society plagued with problems to be solved. Intelligence had become cool, one might say, a turn of events that authors were more than happy to exploit.44

Erich Segal was perhaps the best example of this cross-pollination between intellectualism and mass culture. An associate professor of classics at Yale, Segal began drifting into the popular realm in the 1960s, writing pop songs, screenplays, and books for musicals. On Valentine’s Day 1970, Segal’s weepy Love Story was published; the novel was a monster hit (it was the bestselling work of fiction that year), and was immediately green lit for a movie that was released in December. (The film became the highest grossing film of 1970.) Amazingly, Segal did not quit his day job at Yale, claiming that pursuing serious work by teaching the classics remained important to him. While he became somewhat of a laughing stock among intellectuals after innumerable interviews to shamelessly promote Love Story and the movie version (“the first printing of Love Story in paperback was the largest single printing of any book since the invention of movable type,” he claimed in one of them),45 his success was evident of the more blurry lines between the high and low. Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer had also crossed over in their own respective ways (“Mailer the celebrity has tended to overshadow

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