Life — May 5, 1898 — page 5: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "The Literary Movement in America" This satirical cartoon depicts two women in an interior setting, with the caption quoting one encouraging the other to join a book club. The speaker boasts of reading over a hundred books annually by devoting just five minutes daily to works by Zane Grey, Hall Caine, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The satire targets the "literary movement" of early 20th-century America—specifically mocking dilettante book clubs and the claim that rapid, superficial reading constitutes genuine literary engagement. The cartoon suggests that spending mere minutes on disparate classic and popular authors produces no real understanding, satirizing both the pretension of such clubs and the cultural phenomenon of quantity-over-quality reading habits among American women of leisure.