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"Let me being with a bit of autobiography. I grew up in the Depression, before radio had advanced very far, before television had appeared at all. People were much more bookish then, and there was a quite highly educated literary public. There were lots of magazines—I mean literary magazines, whose editors themselves were writers. And libraries were full of people trying to keep warm, and they were reading all kinds of books. There were discussing them, too. You’d go out on the library steps in a city like Chicago—or New York for that matter—and you’d see groups of people actually arguing about ideas . . . . It’s much less common now, notwithstanding the growth of the universities. It was a really democratic phenomenon. That is to say, people of all classes participated in this. There would be working stiffs—of course tough guys wouldn’t do this sort of thing—and it was all right for lower middle class citizens and even proletarians and members of “minorities” to talk about public questions and literary questions. And you could sit around in cafeterias and over your nickel cup of coffee and could have a conversation lasting far into the night.
When I was in high school it seemed to me that this was an ongoing and very important concern of Americans all over the country, that they were reading and writing and that it was a permanent condition. As a child of immigrants I had no reason to think otherwise. This was America. America had an ongoing and permanent literary life.
Well, I turned out to be wrong, but it was an accident that I proved to be wrong because it was there, and it was there in all modern countries, not just in the United States . . . . We were reading the French and Japanese and Germans and Spaniards—as well as Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and Wallace Stevens. All of that was going on at that time. There was a certain familiarity with important political figures. It was all a great stimulus, a huge lark. Everybody took part in it and nobody dreamed that it was so close to what we now take for granted—it’s all but extinct. Well, in a way it is and in a way it isn’t. You still have a minority everywhere in the country interested in poems and novels."
- Saul Bellow, http://www.bu.edu/agni/interviews-e.../46-Bellow.html
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