The Vanishing Freelancer: A Literary History of the Postwar Culture Industries

Abstract

Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, a wide range of U.S. fiction writers took jobs--sometimes briefly, but often for several years or more--in the film, broadcasting, publishing, and advertising industries. As a result of their experiences in these industries at a time when corporate employment was on the rise and freelance work was becoming less viable, writers like Raymond Chandler, Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, and Ishmael Reed crafted new narrative forms to examine the problems of bureaucratized creativity. While drawing on literary modernism's techniques and strategies, they traded its aesthetics of difficulty and self-sufficiency--its serene disdain for the uninitiated--for a more broadly communicative disposition.