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We all saw the recent news stories about the big decline in the percentage of Americans who read fiction or poetry or drama. Back in 1982, a large majority of people said they read a work of literature that year. And now, just two decades later, it's less than half that.
Reading fiction – any kind of fiction, from Jackie Collins to Stephen King to Philip Roth – has officially become a minority taste in America .
What's more, this decline appears to be accelerating – nearly the entire drop occurred in just the last decade.
The new study was undertaken by the National Endowment for the Arts. And Dana Gioia, the clear-eyed poet and former businessman who runs the NEA, says what we are witnessing is “a general collapse in advanced literacy.” He calls it a “national crisis.”
I don't disagree: this really, literally is the decline of western civilization. Not the end , necessarily… but without question a decline . I believe there are essential perceptions and ideas and knowledge – wisdom, truths – that can only be transmitted by means of fiction or poetry.
Much of the data confirm what one expects: educated people read more literature than the uneducated, women more than men, whites more than blacks and Hispanics. But after picking through the NEA data, I unearthed some details and nuances that weren't in all the news accounts.
For instance, TV is apparently not the driver of the decline. The literary people watch slightly fewer than 3 hours of TV each day, but the people who never read fiction watch only slightly more than 3 hours.
A main headline was that the biggest decline was among young people. But the study compares the reading rates of young people in 1982 with those of young people in 2002. It's important to realize that those are entirely different groups of young people.
In other words, when I was young in the early 80s, 60% of people my age read novels. Today only 43% of 18-to-24 year-olds do. That is a huge and troubling 17% difference , a real generation gap – but it's not entirely correct to call it a 17% “drop.”
The fact is, more baby boomers than any other age group read fiction when they were young, and more of them still do today.
But there's a nugget of semi-hopeful news about one of today's younger generations: the decline in literary reading since 1992 among the Gen-Xers is actually much less than that for older people.
And poetry: according to the NEA, 12 percent of American adults say they read poetry… 25 million people. Can that really be true? If so, it's absolutely amazing, and heartening.
The historian and author Kevin Starr was quoted in the New York Times as saying that this glass looked half full to him – nearly 100 million American adults still reading poetry and fiction and drama.
“In age where we're returning to medieval-like oral culture based on television,” Professor Starr said, “I think that's pretty impressive.”
And I agree. But I have to say that when I read his phrase about “returning to a medieval oral culture based on TV” I got the chills imagining the culture that my grandchildren and great- grandchildren may inherit.
