selecting "fifth-rate throwaway tracts" such novelists as John Irving and E. L. Doctorow.
Teachout thinks the BOMC has done its best to survive a period of American literary decline. "In its well-meaning, idealistic way," he main- tains, the club brings "pretty good books to the prairies year after year."
Emerson the "The Making of an American Prophet: Emer- son, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture
Showman Industry in Nineteenth-Century America"...