The argument of this essay is that the traditional bridges between the literary culture and the publishing culture have increasingly weakened, if not begun to collapse, in the past decade or so. On the one hand, the publishing culture has become more and more like that of big business generally, marked by the broad effort to standardize the product, the distribution, and the consumer. Hence the increasing dominance of "brand-name authors" or categories and indeed of "lines" (like Silhouette, Harlequin, Executioner, etc.). Similarly, the advent of the bookstore chains put into practice the mass-merchandising system, and books began to be promoted as if they were merchandise no different from a bar of soap. As the publishing culture moves away from its traditional commitments to standards of taste and to cultural responsibility, which the privately owned houses tended to exemplify, the literary culture appears to be becoming more and more elitist in its new home on the campuses. Most American writers today ...