The Death of Literary Culture

One of my editors at the New York Times Book Review once put it to me this way: when motion pictures came along, literary culture had real competition, and by the time televisions were in most American homes, anything we might want to call literary culture was all but finished. We simply do not have a literary culture anymore--what we have instead is a widely shared pop culture provided by movies and television.

Charles Johnson, The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling, 2016