Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

Dan Sinykin

In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature—and literature itself—transformed.

Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry's daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published by examining four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton.

Written in gripping and lively prose, and featuring vivid portraits of key industry figures, this deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.