Unbalanced Books

Literary art has been unkind to capitalists, according to the Weekly Standard‘s Stephen Miller, who senses a partisan divide:

There are sympathetic portraits of businessmen in novels by Abraham Cahan, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis; yet after World War II, most American literary writers painted the business world in dark colors. In 1978, John Gardner complained that most contemporary American writers preached “a whining hatred of American business.” …

Puzzled by the literary world’s dark view of commerce, the business world occasionally fights back. In May 2011, the chairman of a major bank holding company said he would give grants of as much as $2 million to colleges if they agreed to make Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged required reading in a course on capitalism. This idea has undoubtedly been resisted by most academics, who rightly object to donors’ prescribing what should be taught. Moreover, Ayn Rand’s second-rate novels are tedious and humorless paeans to selfishness.

Wallace Stevens, the poet who was an executive for an insurance company, wished “we could … get rid of … the caricatures of the businessman.” But it is unlikely that Stevens’s wish will ever be fulfilled, for most American literary writers will continue to dislike commerce, especially corporate commerce, and most will continue to regard profit-making with suspicion, which is why most American writers are liberals. Three years ago, the essayist Daniel Menaker put it nicely: “Republican literary writers are in my experience as rare as ski bums in the Sahel.”