Voss and America's middlebrow library: Book-of-the-Month Club chooses Voss

Osborne, Roger

Abstract

In Australia, Patrick White is considered the least middlebrow of writers and yet, during the 1950s, White and his fiction found a prominent place in the most middlebrow of institutions worldwide. In August 1957, White's fifth novel, Voss (1957), was the main selection of the American Book-of-the-Month Club, which meant guaranteed sales of more than 100,000 copies and hence the largest sales of any of White's novels anywhere prior to his 1973 Nobel Prize. White's success was not unprecedented. Over several decades Australian books had been noticed in the influential Book-of-the-Month Club News and a few had been chosen as the Club's main selection. Despite the difficulties of publishing Australian books in the United States of America, many found a prominent place within American print culture, and the most prominent was the Book-of-the-Month Club, America's "middlebrow library."

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Telling Stories: Australian life and literature 1935-2012

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978-1-921867-46-0

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Monash University Publishing

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Melbourne, VIC, Australia

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