“As Popular as Pin-Up Girls”: The Armed Services Editions, Masculinity, and Middlebrow Print Culture in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States

What is it about?

Produced between 1943 and 1947, the Armed Services Editions comprised 1,322 titles and 122,951,031 books. A central part of middlebrow culture’s institutionalization, they democratized reading for servicemen, setting the stage for a massive consumption of middlebrow print culture postwar. Further, the Editions illuminate the ways in which this culture dovetailed with anxieties about masculinity. While the Editions shored up GIs’ morale, they helped revitalize longstanding concerns about men’s reputed softening and even effeminacy. In consuming middlebrow print culture, critics argued, men opted for the weak and spurious instead of the virile and vigorous—a dereliction of duty in Cold War America.

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