Arguing that researchers have primarily focussed on radical literature of the Depression era (the prime example is Michael Denning's notable 1996 book The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century), David Welky turns our attention to “mainstream print culture” and its stabilizing influence during this unsettled period. In so doing he hopes to restore “the middle to the center of the American experience” (9). David Welky is on the history faculty at the University of Central Arkansas, and this book is based on his doctoral dissertation (Purdue, 2001).

Welky defines mainstream print culture as “written material that has a national reach,” produced by “profit-driven corporations that wanted to appeal to the largest possible audience within a target demographic” (4). Although he shies away from the claim that in the 1930s mainstream print culture was monolithic or unified, he identifies a common intent among its publishers, that of reassuring readers that “American society had no faults while downplaying the threat of radical reform” (4). The book's three parts (each divided into four chapters) address newspapers, magazines, and books. Under newspapers, Welky analyzes press responses to the New Deal, the sensational Lindbergh kidnapping, the Olympics, and the comic strip as instantiated by The Gumps. Chapters on magazines cover the Saturday Evening Post, Life, the Ladies Home Journal, and Superman. Examples of mainstream books are The Good Earth, Anthony Adverse, Gone with the Wind, and the Ellery Queen mysteries. Blending literary analysis with historical contextualization, Welky contends that popular texts such as these carried a common conservative message about gender, race, class, and the superiority of American capitalism.

Each chapter makes a unique contribution to the development of the overall theme, and all are engagingly and persuasively written. Still, the book falls somewhat short of achieving Welky's ambitious goal. The principles of “individualism, the rags–riches philosophy, xenophobia, and American distinctiveness” (9) were as familiar to readers in the 1890s as they were during the Depression. Lacking a comparison with previous periods, it is hard to say what was special about their appearance in the 1930s. “Print culture” is also lopsided in this account: the commercially successful products themselves are well chosen and perceptively discussed, but what about the readers? Welky asserts that he made “every effort to uncover the voices of Depression-era readers” (9), but in fact these are largely silent in the pages that follow. Without evidence of readers' responses, can one argue that 1930s mainstream print culture actually provided “a steadying influence” (3)? Recovering reading practices of the past poses a challenge, but print culture historians are developing helpful techniques. For example, Welky might have cited Erin A. Smith's analysis of Black Mask during the same period (Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines, Temple, 2000).

Despite these reservations, Everything Was Better in America is a welcome addition to the history of twentieth-century print culture, one that teachers and students of American studies will find useful and thought-provoking. The cultural mainstream is clearly an important topic, and Welky ably prods us into interrogating this too often taken-for-granted concept.