Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon examines the evolution of cultural categories in early-to mid-twentieth-century America through the study of the Modern Library, a cheap reprint series created in New York in 1917. While the Modern Library has been described as a series of ‘highbrow’ works that gradually became more commercial, I show that it had always published a wide range of texts – modernist texts by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, but also detective fiction, scientific essays, and novels that we now see as ‘middlebrow’. My central argument is that the diversity of the Modern Library exemplifies the flexibility of cultural categories in the interwar period – a flexibility that was lost in the 1940s and 1950s when critics called for the separation between ‘high’ and –low’ cultural forms. I see the Modern Library as an influential tastemaker that participated in the definition of the literary canon, and contributed to the popularization of ‘difficult’ writers such as Joyce, Woolf and Stein.

When Albert Boni and Horace Liveright created the Modern Library series during the First World War, ‘classics’ generally meant out-of-copyright works reprinted in cheap collections. Recent literary works were often too expensive for most working-class and lower-middle-class readers. For instance, when E. P. Dutton published Samuel Butler' The Way of All Flesh in 1910, it was priced at $1.50.