Table of Contents

Introduction: Cultivating Taste in a Mass-Market World

1  Mr. Mabie Tells What to Read

2  The Compromise of Silas Lapham

3  James for the General Reader

4  Misreading The House of Mirth

5  The Comforts of Romanticism

Epilogue: Reading Up into the Twenty-first Century

Appendix A: The Mabie Canon

Appendix B: “Novels Descriptive of American Life” (November 1908) 

Notes

Bibliography

Index