With their rakish characters, sensationalist plots, improbable adventures and objectionable language (like swell and golly), dime novels in their heyday were widely considered a threat to the morals of impressionable youth. Roundly criticized by church leaders and educators of the time, these short, quick-moving, pocket-sized publications were also, inevitably, wildly popular with readers of all ages. This work looks at the evolution of the dime novel and at the authors, publishers, illustrators, and subject matter of the genre. Also discussed are related types of children's literature, such as story papers, chapbooks, broadsides, serial books, pulp magazines, comic books and today's paperback books. The author shows how these works reveal much about early American life and thought and how they reflect cultural nationalism through their ideological teachings in personal morality and ethics, humanitarian reform and political thought. Overall, this book is a thoughtful consideration of the dime novel's contribution to the genre of children's literature. Eight appendices provide a wealth of information, offering an annotated bibliography of dime novels and listing series books, story paper periodicals, characters, authors and their pseudonyms, and more. A reference section, index and illustrations are all included.

A thrilling true crime narrative and groundbreaking historical account, Dime Novel Desperadoes recovers the long-forgotten story of Ed and Lon Maxwell, the outlaw brothers from Illinois who once rivaled Jesse and Frank James in national notoriety. Growing up hard as the sons of a struggling tenant farmer, the Maxwell brothers started their lawbreaking as robbers and horse thieves in the 1870s, embarking on a life of crime that quickly captured the public eye. Already made famous locally by newspapers that wanted to dramatize crimes and danger for an eager reading audience, the brothers achieved national prominence in 1881 when they shot and killed Charles and Milton Coleman, Wisconsin lawmen who were trying to apprehend them. Public outrage sparked the largest manhunt for outlaws in American history, involving some twenty posses who pursued the desperadoes in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Nebraska. Some of the pursuers were intent on a lynching, but the outlaws escaped against incredible odds. When a mob finally succeeded in killing Ed, in broad daylight on a courthouse lawn, that event generated widespread commentary on law and order. Nevertheless, the daring desperadoes were eventually portrayed as heroes in sensationalistic dime novels. A stunning saga of robbery and horse stealing, gunfights and manhunts, murder and mob violence, Dime Novel Desperadoes also delves into the cultural and psychological factors that produced lawbreakers and created a crime wave in the post-Civil War era. By pointing to social inequities, media distortions, and justice system failures, John E. Hallwas reveals the complicity of nineteenth-century culture in the creation of violent criminals. Further, by featuring astute, thought-provoking analysis of the lawbreaker's mindset, this book explores the issue at the heart of humanity's quest for justice: the perpetrator's responsibility for his criminal acts. Every overview and encyclopedia of American outlaws will need to be revised, and the fabled "Wild West" will have to be extended east of the Mississippi River, in response to this riveting chronicle of major American desperadoes who once thrilled the nation but have since escaped historical attention for well over a century. With more than forty illustrations and several maps that bring to life the exciting world of the Maxwell brothers, Dime Novel Desperadoes is a new classic in the annals of American outlawry.

Despite efforts of contemporary reformers to curb the availability of dime novels, series books, and paperbacks, Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes reveals how many readers used them as means of resistance and how fictional characters became models for self-empowerment. These literary genres, whose value has long been underestimated, provide fascinating insight into the formation of American popular culture and identity. Through these mass-produced, widely read books, Deadwood Dick, Old Sleuth, and Jessie James became popular heroes that fed the public’s imagination for the last western frontier, detective tales, and the myth of the outlaw. Women, particularly those who were poor and endured hard lives, used the literature as means of escape from the social, economic, and cultural suppression they experienced in the nineteenth century. In addition to the insight this book provides into texts such as “The Bride of the Tomb,” the Nick Carter Series, and Edward Stratemeyer’s rendition of the Lizzie Borden case, readers will find interesting information about: the roles of illustrations and covers in consumer culture Bowling Green’s endeavor to digitize paperback and pulp magazine covers bibliographical problems in collecting and controlling series books the effects of mass market fiction on young girls Louisa May Alcott’s pseudonym and authorship of three dime novels special collections competition among publishers A collection of work presented at a symposium held by the Library of Congress, Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes makes an outstanding contribution to redefining the role of popular fiction in American life.

Factory Firls and Upperclass Seducers; the Molly Maguires and the Knights of Labor; Pinkertons and Tramps; Deadwood Dick and the James Gang: the 'dime novel' was the most widely read literature of the nineteenth century. It was also the contested tarrain of ideological class struggle, between middle-class moralism and the 'mechanic accents' of popular sensationalism. This is the first detailed study of the American dime novel phenomenom in an international context. Theorhetically informed by Marx, Gramsci, Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson among others. Dennings brings to bear and unrivalled knowledge of the primary material. The book explores both the social conditions which led to their popularity and the thematic conventions of the dime novels themselves. He concludes that their central function - representing the utopian longings of their working-class readerships - has been missed by critics of these cheap fictions. Mechanic Accents adds a new dimension to our understanding of the 'artisan republican' ideology of the nineteenth-century working class as well as the origins of the 'culture industry'. [Summary from back cover]

THROUGH the generosity of Dr. Frank P. O'Brien of New York, who has given this collection to the Library, it is possible to place on exhibition about fourteen hundred of those rare little books and magazines which, beginning about the year 1859, were issued in America under the broad and general title of "Dime Novels." These are separate publications from the house of Beadle and Adams, of which Erastus Beadle, the Otsego printer, was the originator and guiding spirit. The remaining 171 items in Dr. O'Brien's gift are examples of those other novels which sprang into existence as a result of the popularity with which the Beadle books were greeted from their first appearance. For lack of space, they are not in the exhibition. The collection, as shown in the Main Exhibition Room, constitutes an absorbingly interesting assemblage of a pioneer literature which has now wholly vanished, but which, for a generation, exercised a profound influence on the country's thought, character, and habits of mind.

"Dime novels probably did more than any other kind of book to turn lower- and middle-class Americans into both book owners and book readers. It's hard to tell just how many of these dime novels featured Mormons, but the dime-novel sterotypes of Mormons worked their way into much of the more-respectable literature of the day and influenced the way American culture has interacted with Mormonism ever since. For this volume, four full-length dime novels have been chosen to represent different aspects of the Mormon image in dime novels... The often lurid and scandalous portrayals of Mormons in these dime novels haed consequences for the relationship between Mormons and the rest of the United States. They would represent reality for millions of people, and the basic portrayals found their way into more serious literature. Understanding how these stereotypes were created and first employed can help us understand many things about the way Mormonism has always functioned in American culture."--Back cover.