The Age of Dimes and Pulps: A History of Sensationalist Literature, 1830-1960

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Sensationalistic literature is reading material that is intended to shock, startle, excite, or arouse intense interest in a reader through the use of subject matter, style, language, or artistic expression. Readers throughout the ages have been fascinated by lurid fiction about crime, assault, killings, thievery, kidnapping, murder, and the associated villains of the worst type. This type of reading material has provided escapism that has thrilled and shocked readers from the appearance of dime novels around the time of the American Civil War to the decline of the pulp magazines after World War II and the transition into what have become today’s paperback novels. This popular history of dime novels and pulp magazines during the time period from approximately 1850 to 1960 describes how sensational pulp literature filled a need among readers and flowered during the evolving social conditions of the Industrial Revolution. It provides a comprehensive story of why pulp books and magazines appeared, what this type of literature was, how it became popular, how it was the basis for the later pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, and then continued on into today’s thrillers.