Those of us of a certain age can remember the middle-class suburban home of the late 1950s and early 1960s. On the coffee table lay a large format book titled “The World’s Most Beautiful Paintings,” or something similar. The bookshelf groaned under the weight of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or perhaps Collier’s Encyclopedia. Alongside it were volumes of the various Book of the Month Club selections. The console where the hi-fi lived might have a Reader’s Digest boxed set of vinyl LPs called “Music of the World’s Greatest Composers” (pressed under contract by RCA), or a Time-Life classical music compilation.
Did everyone routinely use the encyclopedia, or read the Steinbeck novel, or listen attentively to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony? That is uncertain, but what it showed was the cultural aspiration of the post-World War II American middle class: People wanted to be seen as interested in those things, whatever their actual level of enthusiasm. The era is often thought of in retrospect as the waning days of the McCarthy era and a time of drab conformity — think William H. Whyte’s “The Organization Man” or David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” or even, retrospectively, “Mad Men” – but there was a flip side to the period: It was the high point of middlebrow culture.
