Literature and Lucre  

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"The struggle of High Art and Low is, moreover, a battle of the sexes."

Full fragment:

"The struggle of High Art and Low is, moreover, a battle of the sexes. Referring to the writers who had preempted the paying audience before he ever entered the scene, Nathaniel Hawthorne called them a "damn'd mob of scribbling women." And, indeed, from Mrs. Rowson to Jacqueline Susann, the authors of monumental, long-lasting popular successes have continued to come from the sex which thinks of itself as otherwise exploited, oppressed, dominated in a patriarchal society. Unlike other oppressive minorities, however (white slave owners, for example), it is possible for both males and the cultural elite to contend, with a certain superficial plausibility, that they are victims rather than victimizers. And, indeed, both primary and secondary literature in the United States, the novels and poems of which we are most proud and the critical autobiographical works written on them, reflect the myth of the serious writer as an alienated male, condemned to neglect and poverty by a culture simultaneously commercialized and feminized."

--"Literature and Lucre" (1981) by Leslie Fiedler

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"Literature and Lucre" (The New York Times, May 31, 1981) is an essay by Leslie Fiedler.

Incipit:

"IN America - perhaps precisely because among us commerce is officially more honored than art - our eminent writers have not typically spoken with equal candor on the subject of literature and lucre. Certainly, the great novelists of the mid 19th century, celebrated in F.O. Matthiessen's The American Renaissance and D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, have chosen self-pity over irony or frankness in talking about their relationship to the marketplace. The classic statement is Melville's, Dollars damn me ... all my books are botches. ... And implicit in this melancholy cry from the heart is a belief, as strong and pertinacious as any myth by which we live, that the authentic writer is neither drawn to nor confirmed in his vocation by the hope of marketplace success, the dream of becoming rich and famous; but can only be seduced by lucre, led to betray or prostitute his talent."





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