The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction examines the critically acclaimed, popular novels that were labeled "middlebrow" in the US during the Cold War. This period saw a vogue for the term 'middlebrow,' with articles on the topic in magazines like Harper's and Life; there was even a song about "Middle Brow" taste in Touch and Go, a 1949 Broadway revue. The project treats the middlebrow novel not as marginal but as central to the tradition of American literature. Tom Perrin argues that bestselling novelists such as James Michener, Harper Lee, and Leon Uris were not, as critics often asserted, writing work outmoded by comparison with their modernist peers, but rather adapted the traditional conventions of the novel to represent the modern world.