Prestige Fiction Is Dead

Evan Brier’s recent book conducts a depressing literary autopsy, complete with case studies.

By Dennis Wilson WiseMarch 12, 2026

• Literary Criticism

• SF

• Economics and Finance

IN THE 2023 FILM American Fiction, an adaption of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001), a hilarious but unexpectedly revealing exchange occurs between its protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, and a university colleague. Both men are creative writing professors, but Monk writes more slowly. After receiving some unwelcome news about an enforced break from teaching, Monk snaps at his more prolific colleague, “If you spent less time spying on me, you could probably write a dozen more novels that people buy at airports with their neck pillows and Cheez-Its!”

Although this retort doesn’t quite rise to the level of Papa Hemingway ripping open his shirt and baring his chest hair for writer Max Eastman to see (and presumably quail at), it still ranks, say, alongside Oscar Wilde’s quip that reading Alexander Pope counted as one of only two ways to dislike poetry. In fact, we might go further. What Monk’s riposte actually captures are several facets of modern book publishing and literary reputation that normally slide beneath readers’ notice. Monk isn’t outwardly challenging his colleague’s skills or craft, although that’s implied. Rather, he reserves his disdain for channels of book distribution. The people who read Monk’s colleague are businessmen—travelers, vacationers. The sorts of people, in other words, who want to kill a few hours and who, allegedly, don’t mind “Cheez-Its” for the mind.

As I read Evan Brier’s recent book Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965–1999 (2024), I couldn’t help but recall that scene. For anyone like Monk Ellison, a novelist whose artistic self-worth is based on critical acclaim, who rejects praise from the hoi polloi in favor of prestige reviewers and awards committees, it’s a natural question to ask, perhaps, just how much of that symbolic capital cherished by Monk actually exists.

Or still exists, rather. That’s the argument informing Brier’s book—that in the latter few decades of the 20th century, literary fiction endured a long, slow, deep recession in the “prestige economy.” During that time, although book sales, advances, and author royalties steadily rose, the symbolic capital once enjoyed by America’s literary lions—the Saul Bellows and John Updikes—also steadily declined.

Yet Novel Competition is no “death of the novel” diatribe. In fact, Brier gives short shrift to the doom-and-gloomers; American authors, in his view, remain as talented as ever. What has happened, though, is that, from 1965 through 1999, there has been a marked increase in art forms competing for elite cultural esteem—forms such as rock music criticism, journalism, film, television, and nonfiction memoir. Although the literary novel remains the touchstone for what “elite” cultural status might mean, its former midcentury monopoly on prestige, Brier claims, has been shattered.

For example, let’s take Brier’s first chapter. Today, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) is best remembered for its association with the New Journalism, but Capote himself actually held journalism in low regard. For him, it was mere “hackwork,” and Brier shows that Capote wanted his artistic reputation to rest upon technique alone—that is, pure literary skill. This perspective explains Capote’s brutal dismissal of Jack Kerouac as a practitioner of “typing” rather than writing—an insult sure to make Monk Ellison proud. The Beats, Capote believed, relied on performativity and improvisation rather than technical expertise, and he considered their writerly skills inferior to the craft displayed by such authors as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or James Joyce. Nonetheless, by the 1970s, the literary zeitgeist was trending in a new direction. Older notions about the primacy of unadulterated craft no longer translated quite so cleanly into literary reputation. Just as “Capote published his greatest success,” Brier writes damningly, “he was never further from the vanguard.”

This “novel competition” (and yes, Brier’s pun is deliberate) is one prong of his argument. His second prong involves what we might now call literary sociology: the material processes by which books are acquired, edited, published, distributed, sold, and reviewed. In Capote’s case, he benefited immensely from his connection to New York City, including his long relationship with The New Yorker, an upscale magazine that catered to an intellectual urban elite. According to Brier, In Cold Blood capitalized on the “profitable idea that middle America is earnestly, unironically, proudly bland.” Towns like Holcomb, Kansas, had nothing remarkable about them beyond their ordinariness, and for New York’s literary tastemakers, the people whose opinions could make or break careers, Capote’s nonfiction novel functioned almost like a fascinating piece of anthropology.

Or take Brier’s chapter on Toni Morrison. Here, the literary novel isn’t contending with another art form—instead, Morrison challenged the traditional book industry’s implicit equation between literariness and “whiteness.” As an editor for Random House, she deliberately undercut that assumption by assembling The Black Book (1974), an “unliterary” anthology that explored Black experiences. At the same time, Morrison wasn’t averse to gaming the system. She worked hard to promote another book she edited, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), through traditional literary institutions. Yet those efforts came to naught. By the early 1980s, a turning point had been reached. No matter how much acclaim a long, difficult novel such as The Salt Eaters might earn, at least in the eyes of reviewers, literary institutions had by then firmly lost their power to transform “symbolic, reputational capital” into increased book sales or even a second printing.

This two-pronged approach helps distinguish Novel Competition from other important books tackling the notion of literary reputation, such as James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005) or Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now (2016). Moreover, Brier performs his task with remarkable neutrality. Describing how the novel has been edged from its former lonely prominence, Brier’s eyes burn with neither anguish nor anger. However much market forces may have contributed to the “novel’s decline in the mattering economy,” he writes, they also aided the “novel’s earlier ascent, its midcentury rise vis-à-vis poetry.” That comment essentially mirrors his earlier argument in A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, The Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction (2010). In the period immediately following the Second World War, literary fiction had ironically found for itself a comfortable commercial niche by attacking commercialism and mass culture alike. Just think of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953).

In this regard, Novel Competition should be considered Brier’s direct sequel. After demonstrating the prestige economy’s diminishment, he spends his final three chapters on case studies, examining how various authors and editors chose to address the crisis of “mattering.” For example, when Philip Roth edited Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series (1975–89), which would eventually publish 17 novels by Eastern European writers, he hoped that literary celebrity in the West would help protect these dissident authors from political persecution the way such celebrity had helped Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But as these books entered the American marketplace, they inevitably became commodities—and an implicit cultural argument that novels could still “matter.”

Whatever dangers these Iron Curtain novelists may have faced, however, was nothing compared to what Salman Rushdie endured for The Satanic Verses (1988). The Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa sent shock waves throughout the world, but Rushdie, notably, resisted the free speech defense. He wanted The Satanic Verses defended on the same grounds that Ulysses by James Joyce had been defended—that is, on pure literary merit. When Penguin refused that quality defense, Rushdie considered it a “betrayal of literary values.” By the 1990s, though, there was little public appetite left for such elitism. Although the novel’s fiercest highbrow backers refused to “relinquish their claim to a specialness […] transcending the market and world affairs,” an era had passed.

Brier’s final chapter tackles the “editor’s critique.” In the 1970s and 1980s, large media empires began diversifying their portfolios by purchasing once-independent publishing houses, a phenomenon high-minded literary folk naturally viewed with dismay. One response by editors was to establish prestigious personal imprints that could provide literary fiction a space to survive, if not exactly flourish. Nevertheless, even these “heroic” literary editors couldn’t stem the tide. Although the novel’s diminishment coincided with conglomeration, its true decline, Brier notes, stemmed from its “competition from vital nonliterary cultures” such as rock criticism, journalism, and other emergent art forms.

In the final analysis, anyone still committed to the novel’s specialness—probably most folks reading this article—is bound to consider Novel Competition thoroughly depressing. But Brier is a historian, not a prophet. He has no answers, no grand solutions, for the novel’s lost pride of place. The prestige competition is over, he says; there’s just “less to be gained by denying it now.” And that rings true. Although winning a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award can still make one’s literary career, we no longer expect our literary lions to become public intellectuals. Once upon a time, authors like Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and Susan Sontag were recognizable faces on the television circuit. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine any novelist finding that same prominence.

So I probably wouldn’t recommend Novel Competition as happy bedtime reading for any aspiring MFA with dreams of becoming the next Norman Mailer. Nonetheless, Brier’s thesis is immensely useful, mainly because it helps explain so many things beyond the literary mainstream.

I’ll take two examples from speculative fiction, a genre long inured to problems of prestige. For editors and literary novelists during Brier’s decades, corporations and chain bookstores made for easy targets. Even Toni Morrison blamed the bookstores for the commercial failure of The Salt Eaters. A more telling example, though, is the career of Samuel R. Delany. From 1979 through 1987, he wrote the four volumes of Return to Nevèrÿon, a Marxist-inflected deconstruction of the sword and sorcery subgenre. When Barnes & Noble slashed their purchase order for the third volume in 1985, a rumor arose in SF fandom—one even taken at face value by an influential academic article—that it was because someone within their megacorporate oligopoly had suddenly discovered “gay content” in Delany’s books.

As it happens, I’ve had it confirmed that Flight from Nevèrÿon was dropped simply—and solely—due to poor sales. Still, this anecdote shows how easily wider anxieties about literary fiction’s diminishment can lead to conspiracy theories. An evil corporation censoring an ambitious novelist for ideological reasons? Nothing could be simpler or more soul-satisfying. Yet it was the big chains, following the lead of such independent stores as Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York and Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, who by the 1990s had helped establish official sections devoted to gay and lesbian books.

But just as I can’t forget Monk Ellison scorning his colleague’s novels for appearing in airports, I can’t forget the paradigm case of Timescape Books. After inflation had disrupted the US economy in the late 1970s, genre fiction developed a reputation as relatively recession-proof. By 1978, Pocket Books wanted in on the action. Hoping to establish a commercially competitive line of SF and fantasy titles, they hired David G. Hartwell as their editor, and he eventually launched his own personal imprint, Timescape/Pocket, in 1981.

Hartwell, though, had literary ambitions. He yearned to raise SF into mainstream respectability, and to this end, he published several genre titles of high literary quality: Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (1980–83, 1987), Michael Bishop’s No Enemy but Time (1982), John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting (1983). But despite several novels winning major awards, including a National Book Award in 1983 for Lisa Golden’s The Red Magician, Hartwell’s imprint failed disastrously on the commercial level. In June 1983, he was fired, and Pocket replaced Timescape with Baen Books, a much more adventure-oriented SF line.

The full story of Timescape Books has yet to be told, but to my mind, this episode in publishing history represents an ambitious editor’s power play to catapult SF into the prestige economy. By the mid-1980s, however, that economy was in shambles. Hartwell’s project was almost doomed from the start. Nor did the literary mainstream have much interest in allowing new members into their clubhouse; they had enough competition already. Notably, for the rest of Hartwell’s career, he would reiterate a genre version of the “editor’s critique”—the problem of sustaining literary values within a neoliberal marketplace.

Yet perhaps Novel Competition provides some measure of well-hidden hope too. As Sarah Brouillette reports, ever since the Great Recession, sales for literary fiction within the United States and United Kingdom have declined precipitously. The prestige competition really is over, and so, perhaps, it’s time to relinquish our old, hidebound allegiances to a certain kind of symbolic capital.

When I talk to students today, the reading that inspires them to study literature often isn’t what older critics would call “literary.” Instead, they’re inspired by categories such as young adult and children’s literature, speculative fiction and horror, thrillers and romance. They want to study transmedia storyworlds where they can experience a favorite franchise across multiple media, novels included. So, if a technology as ancient as the book is going to survive late into the 21st century, perhaps it’s time to reconsider—as rapidly and as radically as possible—how we collectively measure “prestige” among our authors of fiction. The old binaries, whether literary versus popular or highbrow versus lowbrow, now belong to an obsolete historical moment. But history, fortunately, always begins anew.