Serious readers in the 1970s had good reason to be confused. Critics surveyed a publishing world that seemed no longer to be producing great works of literature, and they proclaimed that the novel was dead. What they might have said, however, was that the novel was changing and changing fast. No longer were the great novels being produced by white American male writers; in the 1970s, some of the best serious fiction was being produced by minorities, women like Alice Walker (1944–) and Toni Morrison (1931–), and people living outside the United States, such as Gabriel García Marquez (1928–) and Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).

The market for popular fiction boomed in the 1970s, as Americans lapped up exciting, fast-paced books by skilled popular novelists. Harold Robbins (1916–1997) and Judith Krantz (1937–) specialized in "trash fiction," with its sensational doses of sex, money, and power. Novels about spying and global...