Television has revived interest in many a once popular but then forgotten author. Perhaps the most striking example of this occurred from 1967 to 1974, when a multipart black-and-white dramatization of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga (1922) enthralled millions of viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Having been dismissed by critics for several decades as a middlebrow writer who failed to participate in the significant innovations of modern drama and fiction, Galsworthy was at least granted an audience not only vastly larger than that of his highbrow rivals but actually larger than that which had eagerly awaited his books during his lifetime. This audience was described demographically as cutting across age groups and social classes, but the popularity of the series was greatest, both in Britain and in the United States, among the very people the novelist of manners was satirizing, the upper middle class. "The Forsytes," as the television...