Birth, copulation, and death. Central to life, and also to the publishing industry. Every age has its birth books, its sex books, and its death books. (Though, because birth is an event more or less wasted on its central character, birth books tend to be mere directives for the supporting cast: clinical works for doctors and midwives, advice to expectant mothers.) Sex and death dominate. Tragedy for death, comedy for sex. Murder mysteries, war novels, and westerns for death; hip literature, pornography, and the new novel of violence for sex. Poetry for both.
In our culture, though not in all, this trinity has been closely followed by another: class, money, and power. Silver-spoon novels in the eighteenth century. Rags-to-riches stories and true lives of millionaires in the nineteenth. The making of presidents and studies of global politics now. Jane Austen wrote about money; John O’Hara specialized in class. Herman Kahn and Theodore White deal in power.
Comments