A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 503

find a signature: which is to say, establish a sense of wholeness and presence. They

were coextensive but not, however, to be confused with each other, not least because

those staples of literature, “image and emotion possess a logic of their own.” “Every

first rate novel, poem, or play,” Wright concluded “Blueprint for Negro Writing,”

“lifts the level of consciousness higher.” It was in this sense, as he saw it, that

imaginative writing got its social work done: as a vital agent of awareness and

luminous revelation of change – in short, an enabler of life.

Mass Culture and the Writer

Western, detective, and hardboiled fiction

In many of his stories, Wright revealed a lifelong fascination with the conventions of

such popular genres as dime novels and detective stories. He would probably not

have agreed with the claim made by the poet Kenneth Rexroth that “the only

significant fiction in America is popular fiction,” nor with the curt declaration of the

detective story writer Raymond Chandler that “there is no such thing as serious

literature.” Nevertheless, in this, he was taking the measure of his times. The first half

of the twentieth century witnessed an exponential increase in the production and

consumption of fiction. Compulsory education in most American states had created

a growing number of readers interested in escapist entertainment. Erasmus Beadle

revolutionized mass market publishing. The first of Beadle’s slender, cheaply printed

booklets appeared in 1860. Many could not afford the 25 cents for which paper-

covered novels were then sold. But they could manage the two cents needed for each

volume in Beadle’s Dime Novel series, as it was known. The dime novel became an

instant success, and Beadle’s venture soon had scores of competitors from other

publishers. And, after just four years in the publishing business, Beadle found himself

at the head of a company with five million of its little books, dime novels and nickel

novels, in circulation. Dime novels thrived on melodramatic adventure. Some had

historical or sea settings. But of all the genres the new mass readership and mass

methods of production generated none was more popular, to begin with, than the

cowboy tale. Very early on, too, the dime-novel Western became formulaic. There

was a hero who presented a synthesis of civilization and the wilderness; there was an

emphasis on action, progress, and the blessings of Manifest Destiny; and the settings

were appropriately epic, with vast, wild, open spaces. The dime novel operated at the

level of fantasy, where conflicts that could not be resolved in the real world could

find appropriate resolution. It celebrated the self-reliance, natural nobility, and

individuality of a modern American whose daring actions confirmed the inevitable

onward march of his nation. When the writer Edward Judson (1823–1886), known

by his pseudonym Ned Buntline, discovered William F. Cody in Nebraska in 1869

and later that year dramatized him as “Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men,” a

story published serially in the New York Weekly, the Western dime novel had found

its most influential icon. Prentiss Ingraham (1843–1904) followed Buntline with

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