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PARTISAN REVIEW
flowed into service industries, into leisure, entertainment, and
what is very loosely called culture. By the end of the twenties,
radio was one of the biggest industries in the country. The movies
went to the five-reel picture and the talking picture came in.
It
was after 1919 that we had the building of motion-picture houses
that looked like palaces . Dance halls imitating palaces like the
Trianon were built, and both movie houses and dance halls were
furnished with Louis Quatorze and Louis Quinze furniture.
There were new types of magazines-
Time,
for instance-and
new types of cultural organs of distribution-the Book-of-the–
Month Club, which was followed by the Literary Guild and then
by the Theater Guild. There were new publishing houses such as
the Viking Press, but the most notable was Simon and Schuster,
which developed a kind of advertising from the "Inner Sanctum"
that seemed to guarantee a bestseller. The
Saturday Evening Post
and
Collier's
were among the leading popular magazines–
financed by advertising, naturally.
In
most cases, the stories
printed in these magazines were at least consistent, and in no way
caused disharmony, with the advertisements . Today, of course,
the relationship between advertising and our culture doesn't need
to be documented. We see it in television and even in the book
market. Publishers are now bringing out books with advertise–
ments in them. That is an extension, a continuation, a develop–
ment out of those tendencies that began in the 1920s.
Interviewer:
How did these developments affect the writers of the
time?
Farrell:
Around 1920 or 1921 Mencken called Chicago the literary
capital of America. A few years later he retracted this. Most of
Chicago's writers went to the East, which became the publishing
center as well as the entertainment center in the 1920s.
Significant changes and differences in the writing itself came
about. For instance, in earlier writing, in the image of women
there is the idea that women can grow. Theodore Dreiser, in
Jennie Gerhardt,
describes his heroine , based on one of his sisters,
when she gets her first job as a domestic. He says that at her work
she gained a theory of existence and she learned. Now, the idea of
women learning should be very commonplace, but like all ideas it
had to be introduced into literature.
In
1914 a very remarkable
novel was published that anticipated Dreiser and the mainstream
of Sinclair Lewis's work.
It
was
A JIl.0man
oj
Genius
by Mary
