State-Funded Fictions: The NEA and the Making of American Literature After 1965

Abstract

This dissertation studies the effects of a patronage institution, the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program, on American literary production in the postwar era. Though American writers had long cultivated informal relationships with government patrons, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reflected a new investment in the aesthetic life of the nation. By awarding grants to citizens without independent resources for work yet to be produced, it changed both the demographics of authorship and the idea of the “professional” writer. The grants also generated new themes for fiction as well as new civic roles for writers themselves.

The central argument of “State-Funded Fictions” is literary-historical: state funding resulted in the development of what I call the compromise aesthetic: fiction that combines realism and experimentalism in order to appeal to readers across the educational (and political) spectrum. This is the resolution of a set of dynamic tensions inherent in welfare state liberalism and enacted by writers involved in the agency’s initiatives. Ralph Ellison, a public servant and an architect of the NEA Literature Program, championed the artist’s individual freedom as a way of advancing the collective good. Tillie Olsen advocated for a more democratic literary world with more accessible resources, but her rhetoric and writing preserved the ideas of meritocracy and literary excellence. Raymond Carver and the writers of minimalist short fiction—Bobbie Ann Mason among them—produced fiction that navigated between populism and elitism in an increasingly polarized political climate. Contemporary writers achieve a different kind of compromise, both aesthetically and politically, in realist fiction that acknowledges critiques of state power without suggesting revolutionary action. Taken together, the literary products of federal patronage attest to the intimate relationship between aesthetics and politics in the twentieth century and beyond.