"Most of the material contained in this volume previously appeared in a special supplement to the October, 1959, issue of Harper's Magazine."

The wider and wiser use of books / Mason Gross -- The alone generation : a comment on the fiction of the fifties / Alfred Kazin -- Poetry's silver age : an improbable dialogue / Stanley Kunitz -- Why American plays are not literature / Robert Brustein -- The decline of book reviewing / Elizabeth Hardwick -- Who needs no introduction / Kingsley Amis -- Which side of the Atlantic? / P. Snow -- On the teaching of writing / Archibald Macleish -- The writer and Hollywood / Budd Schulberg -- The lost art of writing for television / Vance Bourjaily -- How and why I write the costume novel / Frank Yerby -- Writers and their editors : notes on an uneasy marriage / John Fischer -- Letter to a young man about to enter publishing / Anonymous -- Two view of the reviews.

"In the fall of 1959, Harper's Magazine published a special supplement on the state of writing and the American literary scene. The supplement was greeted with a broadside of commendation and a fusillade of cavil, and has since become recognized as the most useful brief survey of the contemporary state of the American writing arts and of their fellow travelers, the spoken word, the typescript word, the filmed and televised word, and the publishing memorandum. In this newly reissued volume in the Rutgers University Press Classics Imprint, Writing in America proves to be as stimulating as it was in 1960. Here, writers including Robert Brustein, Stanley Kunitz, and C.P. Snow examine the state of writing in American novels, films, and television candidly and critically. The result is a collection of essays that showcase a first-rate and highly entertaining piece of reporting on the American literary scene that resonate in 2017"-- Provided by publisher.