The creators of West Side Story were liberal artists who updated Romeo and Juliet amidst youth gangs and racism, and each felt the sting of discrimination because they were Jewish and gay, but neither good intentions nor their own status as ‘Others’ in American society allowed them to realize fully the class advantages they had over the Puerto Rican minorities depicted in their show. Through consideration of Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘Culture Industry,’ what one learns about Bernstein from his 1970 meeting with the Black Panthers immortalized as ‘Radical Chic’ by Tom Wolfe, Teju Cole’s concept of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ how the show has been cast, and other lenses, the author demonstrates how West Side Story can be described as insensitive in areas of class, the politics of colour, and race. The chapter also considers Bernstein’s cultural appropriation of African American and Latinx tropes in his music.

No one so inspired the generation of American musicians born in the 1940s and 1950s as did Bernstein, an ‘inescapable’ and ‘incontroverible’ icon of the 1960s and beyond. His celebrity was particularly linked to the explosive growth of television, beginning with appearances on Omnibus (from 1954) and the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts (from 1958). Two texts complicate his reputation as Wunderkind of American music: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ (1970) and Leon Botstein’s ‘The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein’ (1983). But by the time of his 100th birthday celebrations in 2018, Bernstein’s stature as cultural icon seemed intact and secure, resting largely on West Side Story.

This chapter begins with the little magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ends with contemporary online literary magazines, highlighting the radical changes that have taken place as print yielded to digital culture. Motivated by the contrarian personalities of their founding editors against commercial tastes, small-circulation periodicals prioritized aesthetic experimentation and established themselves as an avant-garde force in the arts. During the twentieth century, literary magazines would become institutionalized and relinquish their financial and intellectual independence. Their avant-garde status, once represented by a collectively upheld editorial persona, would become overshadowed by individual cults of personality around popular writers. Magazines’ social programs would become watered down, and instead writers would make themselves into social actors. The arrival of New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s radically changed long-form journalism, rendering it more literary. The chapter ends with the contemporary literary magazine ecosystem, showing that what magazines have lost in materiality, they have gained in generic hybridity and global access.

This chapter offers a schematic overview of the many different ways in which scholars and theorists have thought about what exactly makes literature neoliberal. After introducing several representational and heuristic models, the chapter summarizes the economic and theoretical history of neoliberalism in the United States and then introduces a four-phase approach to conceptualizing the relationship between neoliberalism and literature. Identifying economic, political, sociocultural, and ontological features of neoliberalism, it offers brief readings of three US novels that foreground these distinct features. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which explores the intersection of finance capital and racial politics in 1980s New York City, helps us see neoliberalism as an economic and political phenomenon. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which worries about the aesthetic representation of revolutionary politics, reveals neoliberalism’s intrusion into the cultural domain. And Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad asks where meaning and value might be found in a world where art, language, and being have been captured by neoliberalism’s for-profit technologies. These three texts are exemplary neoliberal novels, but the differences among them also provide a fuller picture of the neoliberal novel as a literary phenomenon of the past four decades.

This chapter discusses Mailer’s work in the context of the New Journalism movement, including his own unique contributions in terms of style and perspective. It explores the ways Mailer blends characteristics of autobiography, participatory journalism, and literary fiction, and also addresses Mailer’s use of illeism, a style which allowed him to write about himself in the third person, and which became one of his signatures as a New Journalist in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter interrogates the conservative conceptualization of great literature during the culture wars, arguing that it was an over-determined symptom revealing how two different discourses of literary prestige clashed in a futile attempt to reconcile the radical tension between capitalism and traditionalism. This debate turned the category of “highbrow fiction” into a condensation point of perplexing opposites, combining disparate conservative explanations for social decline. For Reagan era conservatives, highbrow fiction was somehow both an elitist liberal discourse that betrayed traditional American values and a great civilizational barricade against the untutored, racialized masses. Ultimately, conservatives mourned the deterioration of meaningful connection and community produced by capitalism, but they reconfigured this neoliberal nihilism into a left-wing specter that haunted contemporary American fiction and the institutions of higher education that produced and legitimized it. The conservative movement’s simultaneous suspicion of contemporary literary prestige and their embrace of popular realist fiction were rooted in a commitment to market-based individualism, nominal colorblindness, and the aestheticization of populist white grievance. This chapter probes these ostensible contradictions to illuminate how Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe emerged as major, diametrically opposed figures in the cultural politics of American fiction toward the end of the twentieth century.