Pittsburgh's most famous book club (mine) read "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" by Richard Hofstadter this month, a 1964 book which most of us -- but not all -- found quite relevant in today's fractious political scene.

Equally interesting, to me at least, was Mr. Hofstadter's history of American literary life. The Columbia University historian divided those writers into three groups:

"The clerisy (a distinct class of learned or literary people), consisting of writers sufficiently close to the primary assumptions of their society to act in some degree as its spokesman" -- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, William Dean Howells, Ralph Waldo Emerson;

The "avant garde who are profoundly alienated from those assumptions. The better part of the creative brilliance and originative power has come from" this group -- Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound;

And "figures so mixed in their motives that they are impossible to classify. ... Here it is not the presence of a single pattern" -- Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot.

Little has changed in Mr. Hofstadter's broad classification of American literary culture in 2010, except in the shifting influence of the three groups. The "cleristy" contains such well-known historians as David McCullough, Douglas Brinkley and Joseph Ellis. Philip Roth is the best example as a novelist.

What passes for the avant-garde has shrunk in size and influence because it has been largely co-opted by a popular culture that embraces outsiders such as the Beats. Others are mostly poets.

The largest group by far is Mr. Hofstadter's great undefinables -- from so-called outsiders like Dave Eggers to the best-seller champions Stephen King and John Grisham, with hundreds in between, including Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler and Richard Russo.

The pessimistic Mr. Hofstadter offered this upbeat observation:

"Our society is sick in many ways; but such health as it has lies in the plurality of the elements composing it and their freedom to interact with each other."

I'm not sure the interaction and the plurality are as prevalent today in literature as it seemed to Mr. Hofstadter in the early '60s, but certainly the market for books about the great literary figures of the past appears robust as this list of biographies indicates.

"The Letters of Sylvia Beach" edited by Keri Walsh (Columbia University Press, $29.95). A must stop for readers in Paris is Shakespeare and Company, the hole-in-the-wall bookstore near Notre Dame started by Baltimore's Sylvia Beach just as the "Lost Generation" was making its way to the city. She proved to be a kind of den mother to the writers and published "Ulysses." The original location is now a dress shop.

"A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster" by Wendy Moffat. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $32.50). Author of major English works such as "A Passage to India" and "Howards End," Mr. Forster's private life centered around his homosexuality, writes Ms. Moffat, who teaches at Dickinson College.

"Wolf: The Lives of Jack London" by James L. Haley (Basic Books, $29.95). The self-made fiction writer died at 40 after a life of struggle and excess. Somewhat forgotten today, Mr. London's works are shown in a new light.

"The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham" by Selina Hastings (Random House, $35). Mr. Maugham, whose books made him quite wealthy and funded a luxurious lifestyle, had a complicated private life as well. His biographer's earlier work was on Evelyn Waugh.

"Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl" by Donald Sturrock will be published in September by Simon & Schuster.

"Louisa May Alcott" by Susan Cheever is another S&S bio and will be published in November.

There is still an intellectual pulse beating, 46 years after Mr. Hofstadter documented its decline.

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