American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street
- ISBN-10
- 1400865298
- ISBN-13
- 9781400865291
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 408
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2014-10-19
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Author
- Paula Rabinowitz
Description
A richly illustrated cultural history of the midcentury pulp paperback "There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."—a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951) American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped readers fashion new identities. Drawing on extensive original research, Paula Rabinowitz unearths the far-reaching political, social, and aesthetic impact of the pulps between the late 1930s and early 1960s. Published in vast numbers of titles, available everywhere, and sometimes selling in the millions, pulps were throwaway objects accessible to anyone with a quarter. Conventionally associated with romance, crime, and science fiction, the pulps in fact came in every genre and subject. American Pulp tells how these books ingeniously repackaged highbrow fiction and nonfiction for a mass audience, drawing in readers of every kind with promises of entertainment, enlightenment, and titillation. Focusing on important episodes in pulp history, Rabinowitz looks at the wide-ranging effects of free paperbacks distributed to World War II servicemen and women; how pulps prompted important censorship and First Amendment cases; how some gay women read pulp lesbian novels as how-to-dress manuals; the unlikely appearance in pulp science fiction of early representations of the Holocaust; how writers and artists appropriated pulp as a literary and visual style; and much more. Examining their often-lurid packaging as well as their content, American Pulp is richly illustrated with reproductions of dozens of pulp paperback covers, many in color. A fascinating cultural history, American Pulp will change the way we look at these ephemeral yet enduringly intriguing books.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2016-09-06
- 408 pages
- Paperback
- Princeton University Press
Similar books
-
The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines
By Peter HainingThe period between the World Wars—the era of sexual liberation, Prohibition, the rise of organized crime, and the Great Depression—was also the classic era of American pulp magazines, the subject...
-
Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines
By Roger Reed, Robert LesserThe American pulp magazines of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s had some of the most colorful, exciting, and memorable covers ever to appear in print. Chock-full of action-packed, gorgeous--even shocking--color...
-
American Pulp (eGalley): How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street
By Paula RabinowitzAmerican Pulp (eGalley): How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street
-
The Classic Era of the American Pulp Magazine
By Peter HainingThe era between the wars in America was on of dramatic change and uncertainty, a time of sexual liberation, Prohibition, organized crime and the Great Depression.
-
Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street
By Paul S. PowersPulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines. Portland: Collector's Press, 1998. Server, Lee. Danger Is My Business. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993. ———. Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. New York: Checkmark Books, 2002.
-
Anti-Foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books, 1920–1960
By Nathan Vernon MadisonIn this thorough history, the author demonstrates, via the popular literature (primarily pulp magazines and comic books) of the 1920s to about 1960, that the stories therein drew their definitions of heroism and villainy from an overarching ...
-
The Pulps: Fifty Years of American Pop Culture
By Tony GoodstoneThis book is the first survey and anthology of art and literature from the period 1896 to 1953. It contains 100 full color reproductions of rare origional cover art and...
-
Weird Heros #1, A New American Pulp!
By Byron Preiss... America's Nick Carter and England's Sherlock Holmes, had proved to be an effective figure to the public and publishers were eager to perpetuate him. In an effort to find something new, pulp ... pulps' most exciting hours. The era of pulp ...
-
Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism
By Paula RabinowitzThis book offers an unparalleled historical and theoretical overview of the noir shadows cast when the media's glare is focused on the unseen and the unseemly in our culture.
-
The Western Pulp Hero: An Investigation Into the Psyche of an American Legend
One woman told him: "I heard you were the fastest gunman who ever came north of Wyoming. ... He drew with a hitch, a swing of his body, a pull of the trigger, all as careless as striking a match on the side of his pants.