This chapter examines how cheap, handy, and accessible print formats facilitated the growth and development of American genre writing throughout the twentieth century. From horror stories to science fiction, popular genres took root in pulpwood magazines targeting working-class male readers who lived in industrialized areas. Paperback books became the primary format by which genre writing was marketed to a mass readership. Whether in magazine or book form, the appeal of pulp fiction may be attributed to the serial plots and sensationalized storytelling that came along with ephemeral print media. But it also may be attributed to their masculinist perspectives and racial and ethnic stereotyping narrative strategies that reinforced the prejudices of its presumed readership of white men. The chapter tracks the representation of anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiment in pulp fiction from the early twentieth century to the Black Power era. It explains how such sentiment reflected nativist and imperialist ideologies of difference, and it ends with a consideration of how writers of color have sought to diversify popular genres by writing against the pulp traditions they have inherited.

This chapter examines the role of surrealism in a network of underground publications produced in the United States, England, and France during the 1960s, including: The Rebel Worker (Chicago, 1964–66), Resurgence (New York City, 1964–7), Black Mask (New York City, 1966–8), and Surrealist Insurrection (Chicago, 1968–72). By moving beyond aesthetic, literary, commercial, and institutional legacies of surrealism in the postwar period, and investigating the reclamation of surrealism by radical factions of the American and British ultraleft during the 1960s, it becomes apparent that surrealism was not entirely absorbed by the process of academic musealization that assailed most of the early twentieth century avant-gardes. The broad assortment of subcultural mimeographed and printed journals, broadsides, and leaflets that emerged during the era of the student movement and the counterculture reveal that surrealism influenced and was actively incorporated into leftist and activist struggles for civil rights, free speech, anti-war, anti-statist and anti-capitalist efforts.