Kristin Matthews

(University of Massachusetts Press, 2016)

During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, “A good citizen is a good reader.” As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading make you a good citizen? In Reading America, Kristin L. Matthews puts into conversation a range of political, educational, popular, and touchstone literary texts to demonstrate how Americans from across the political spectrum—including “great works” proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodern theorists, neoconservatives, and multiculturalists—celebrated particular texts and advocated particular interpretive methods as they worked to make their vision of “America” a reality. She situates the fiction of J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston within these debates, illustrating how Cold War literature was not just an object of but also a vested participant in postwar efforts to define good reading and citizenship.

Review by Ed Cutler presented at Faculty Book Lunch

Kristin L. Matthews’ new book takes a cultural commonplace–the importance of reading and reading well in a democratic society—and recasts it as a discourse whose deeper sociology is fraught with contradiction. Cultural discourses are nothing if not durable and alarmist. And the United States’ purported literacy crisis has persisted, unexamined, across the American Century. Matthews asks what is at stake when the Department of Agriculture hosts a conference on the national reading crisis in 1951? What when dozens of other such initiatives follow? Do good readers really make better citizens, or might “reading well” serve to acculturate an acquiesce toward established authority, to a greatness already distilled in the Great Books and, by extension, the triumphalist self-image of American liberalism itself? What happens when writers and readers shake off the passive inwardness of middlebrow reading and turn the tables on the question of what is to be read and why? Matthews’ book sheds a revealing light on these questions, demonstrating how the emergence of the New Left, campus activism, even the birth of metafiction can be read as blowback from the quietist, narcotizing, Book-of-the-Month-Club agendas for American readers. Deeply researched, persuasive, and wholly original, Reading America is a vital new contribution toward our understanding of a tumultuous era that in turn helps us better perceive our own.