In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

The work and lives of modernist writers were extensively chronicled by the mass media, enabling Americans to develop an active interest in even the most radical literary developments in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter examines the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway and the cultural developments that enabled their success in specific decades. All were American celebrities. The lives of each were profiled in periodicals, their style was parodied, their faces graced the covers of popular magazines, and all had relationships with Hollywood and filmmaking. Other modernists were subject to this public interest as well, including Faulkner, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce. None were immune to the broad changes in the marketing and promotion of books and authors that facilitated a lively, robust mainstream knowledge of writers as popular as Hemingway or as difficult as Gertrude Stein, blurring distinctions between low-, middle-, and highbrow writers.

A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881) represented major reorientations of Ibsen’s dramatic authorship, initiating a turn to middle-class life treated with tragic seriousness and radicalism. These plays made Ibsen the spearhead of the Scandinavian ‘Modern Breakthrough’, reaffirming his literary superiority, while at the same time bringing new levels of commercial success. The reorientation was made possible by the literary dynamics unfolding in Scandinavia at the time. By the early 1880s, Ibsen gave up on his ambition to get a foothold in Germany, moved back to Italy (1880–5) and once more prioritized his home markets. His association with the Literary Left was not a lasting one, however. With An Enemy of the People (1882) and The Wild Duck (1884), he distanced himself from social criticism and gradually established a position all his own. Moving back again to Munich (1885–91), he eventually experienced a breakthrough also in German literature and theatre from 1887, followed by Britain from 1889. After Ibsen again settled in Norway in 1891, he wrote for a European market, concluded his production with a series of self-reflective plays, and tried to frame his oeuvre as a continuously unfolding and self-sufficient whole.