• 1. Modernist writers and the ethos of professionalism; 2. Fiction from a newspaperised world: Henry James's The Reverberator; 3. The newspaperman kicked out: The Sacred Fount and literary authority; 4. The plots of murder: un/original stories in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy; 5. Reading John Dos Passos: reading mass culture in the USA; 6. Miss Lonelyhearts: Nathanael West's comic-strip novel; 7. Making the usual kind of sense: Hollywood, West and the critics in The Day of the Locust; Notes; Reference List; Index.

"...a penetrating analysis of the strategies of professionalism adopted by the modernists to legitimate their works and the symbolc role played by the academy in that legitimation....Strychacz's readings of these canonical modernist works constitute a powerful refutation of the vision of modernist writing as an elite literature that sets itself apart from mass culture in all its forms." Paula Geyh, Contemporary Literature

• 1. Modernist writers and the ethos of professionalism; 2. Fiction from a newspaperised world: Henry James's The Reverberator; 3. The newspaperman kicked out: The Sacred Fount and literary authority; 4. The plots of murder: un/original stories in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy; 5. Reading John Dos Passos: reading mass culture in the USA; 6. Miss Lonelyhearts: Nathanael West's comic-strip novel; 7. Making the usual kind of sense: Hollywood, West and the critics in The Day of the Locust; Notes; Reference List; Index.

"...a penetrating analysis of the strategies of professionalism adopted by the modernists to legitimate their works and the symbolc role played by the academy in that legitimation....Strychacz's readings of these canonical modernist works constitute a powerful refutation of the vision of modernist writing as an elite literature that sets itself apart from mass culture in all its forms." Paula Geyh, Contemporary Literature

• 1. Modernist writers and the ethos of professionalism; 2. Fiction from a newspaperised world: Henry James's The Reverberator; 3. The newspaperman kicked out: The Sacred Fount and literary authority; 4. The plots of murder: un/original stories in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy; 5. Reading John Dos Passos: reading mass culture in the USA; 6. Miss Lonelyhearts: Nathanael West's comic-strip novel; 7. Making the usual kind of sense: Hollywood, West and the critics in The Day of the Locust; Notes; Reference List; Index.

"...a penetrating analysis of the strategies of professionalism adopted by the modernists to legitimate their works and the symbolc role played by the academy in that legitimation....Strychacz's readings of these canonical modernist works constitute a powerful refutation of the vision of modernist writing as an elite literature that sets itself apart from mass culture in all its forms." Paula Geyh, Contemporary Literature