The editors of the Book of the Month Club were, like the editors of the New Yorker, very suspicious of modernism. They acknowledged its importance, but thought it was nihilistic and sterile and definitely not suitable for their members.

I sympathize with this perspective. Even now, having read and enjoyed many works of modernist literature, I am somewhat suspicious of the movement, so I am dead certain that if I was an editor in the 1940s or 1950s I’d be like…this Faulkner guy writes some interesting stuff, but he’s no Steinbeck or Salinger.

(Honestly, that might still be how I feel)