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US Literature and the Modern Right at Midcentury: Conservative Modernism, Race, and the Cold War, 1945-1960 -- The Conservative Movement's Foundational Fictions: Flannery O'Connor, Ayn Rand, and the Evolving Literary Forms of Conservatism, 1950-1964 -- The Strongbox of Custom: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and the Shifting Racial Logic of Postwar Conservatism, 1955-1972 -- Movement Conservatism, Neoconservatism, and the New Right: Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon in the Age of Reagan, 1970-1990 -- The American Novel and the Reagan Revolution: The Ascent of Toni Morrison in the Age of Conservative Pop Fiction, 1987-2000 -- Epilogue: The Curious (Conservative) Case of Marilynne Robinson. "By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the robust linkage between highbrow literary fiction and progressive liberalism was virtually axiomatic. In a 2014 cover story for National Review, 'Let Your Right Brain Run Free,' Adam Bellow, son of Saul Bellow, exemplified the typical conservative lament when faced with this fact. Unusually, though, Bellow transformed his complaint that a liberal ethos dominates the major institutions of the U.S. literary establishment into an argument for why 'conservative fiction' should be 'the next front in the culture war'. Using the left-brain/right-brain metaphor, Bellow claimed that for too long 'conservatives have favored the rational left brain at the expense of the right,' making the proverbial conservative mind 'hyperdeveloped in one respect, completely undeveloped in another'. By the left side of the conservative mind, Bellow meant the postwar creation of 'a network of think tanks, foundations, magazines, and publishing houses' that were the institutional and intellectual underpinnings of the modern conservative movement. To grow the right side, Bellow believed, conservatives essentially ought to recreate that massive organizational effort to produce American literature instead of political power: 'We need our own writing programs, fellowships, prizes, and so forth'"--
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