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COPYRIGHT 2004 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
JOHN P. MARQUAND'S CREDENTIALS AS A MEMBER OF AMERICA'S BLUE-blood upper class are considerable. He was born to an elite lineage that included Joseph Dudley, Margaret Fuller, and Edward Everett Hale. At Harvard, he made Lampoon, if not the Harvard Club, and later returned to receive an honorary degree. He served honorably in Army Intelligence in both World Wars. His face adorned the cover of Time. He won a Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley, which was, an anonymous reviewer in the "Notes and Comment" section of the New Yorker wrote in Marquand's obituary tribute, "the best-wrought fictional monument to the nation's Protestant elite that we know of" (Birmingham 88). Indeed, Marquand's novels that grapple with the complexities of contemporary American life are peopled by upper-class types, often Bostonians of the sort found on Beacon Hill, although their lives are far from uncomplicated or easy.
Likewise, Marquand's credentials as a producer of popular culture are impressive. By 1944, he was very likely "the highest paid novelist in the world" (Birmingham 181). He was to become an editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Marquand was at least as prolific as any author of his day; his training in the writing of advertising for the J. Walter Thompson Agency served him well in this regard. He published stories, articles, and serials in most of the popular magazines of his time: the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Scribner's Magazine, Collier's, American Magazine, Liberty, McCall's, Life, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Bazaar, Atlantic Monthly, Holiday, and Sports Illustrated. He produced a string of best-selling formular detective novels: the Mr. Moto series. His book, The Late George Apley, was a smash on Broadway. He sold movie rights to many of his books and collaborated on the making of the films; he traveled in the company of actors and producers, and enjoyed celebrity status himself. He had a racehorse named after him (Birmingham 214).
Odd it is, then, that John P. Marquand is noted in neither the "serious" nor the "popular" canon. His name appears but once in Russel B. Nye's comprehensive The Unembarrassed Muse, and only in passing. In Ray and Pat Browne's big directory of popular culture, Marquand gets mentioned only twice, but has no entry devoted entirely to him. Unlike Mark Twain, whose popular books have endured in the "serious" canon. Marquand's books have vanished from sight. He wrote at least as well as his contemporary Sinclair Lewis, whose books received considerable critical attention--and Marquand's characters are at least as interesting as Babbitt or Arrowsmith--yet Lewis's works stayed longer in the public eye. In the new century, Marquand is a virtual unknown.
The problem of Marquand's obscurity is not unique in the study of popular culture. Unless we are willing to reduce our consideration of popular culture to what Russel Nye used to call "trivialization," we must look for some meaning to be discovered in the fact that popular artists often vanish from the cultural landscape. Marquand, then, serves as an example; although his own case is interesting, it is also indicative of some larger principles. The work of an artist, popular or otherwise, is to make the invisible visible, to make the abstract concrete, to make a nuance or an impression appear in specific form. As we will see, the case of John Marquand suggests a useful generalization for the study of popular...
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