During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, "A good
citizen is a good reader."? As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of
Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing
world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading
make you a good citizen?
In Reading America, Kristin L. Matthews puts into conversation a range
of political, educational, popular, and touchstone literary texts to
demonstrate how Americans from across the political spectrum-including
"great works"? proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodern
theorists, neoconservatives, and multiculturalists-celebrated particular
texts and advocated particular interpretive methods as they worked to
make their vision of "America"? a reality. She situates the fiction of
J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine
Hong Kingston within these debates, illustrating how Cold War literature
was not just an object of but also a vested participant in postwar
efforts to define good reading and citizenship.