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.

Often focused on the rapid development of technologies (both scientific and social) and their dangers, American science fiction (SF) novels have highlighted how the twentieth century is characterized by truly global crises and possibilities, from the mass migrations and their various exploitations in the early twentieth century, to the Cold War and the direct threat of global nuclear destruction, to giving voice to those denied rights and silenced both in the earlier SF canon and in the larger body politic, and to the climate emergency. Distancing these political issues from the real, twentieth-century SF novels may risk making specific political moments seem fantastic, but they can simultaneously enable new forms of global and communal visions that are (increasingly) necessary to political action. To discuss these visions, the chapter discusses a range of different traditions running through SF and parallel forms of work throughout the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the role of Black and Afrofuturist writers in the period.

Alan Yates was a mid-century Australian crime-writing sensation, writing more than 300 books over a career that spanned the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Writing under the pseudonym of ‘Carter Brown’, he was published in thirty-five countries, including the United States, where his books were released by the Signet imprint of the prestigious New American Library, and his work was translated into twenty-seven languages. Yet he is now largely forgotten and, despite his impressive sales, received little recognition in Australia even at the height of his success. The lack of critical recognition afforded to Yates’s efforts largely flows from the fact that he wrote faux American mysteries and private detective fiction for Horwitz Publications, one of the largest and most dynamic of a group of Sydney pulp publishers that emerged in Australia after 1945. Yates’s career is an excellent lens through which to examine Australian pulp publishing’s operations in the context of other successful pulp authors, including its interactions with international publishing markets, as well as the author’s complex relationship with mainstream publishing, literary fashions and notions of authorial reputation in mid-century Australia.

This chapter traces the influence of paperback books on American literary subcultures after World War II. Cheap, handy, and accessible for most readers, the mass-market paperback format at once democratized the culture of letters and exploited stereotypes for profit. When it came to race relations, paperbacks’ capacity for disrepute collided with African Americans’ struggle for civil rights in a subgenre called “black sleaze.” In the 1940s and 1950s, books that tackled racial violence were repackaged with prurient covers that emphasized the taboo of interracial sex. This set the stage for the 1960s, when direct-to-paperback books bracketed social upheaval in the real world for sexual hedonism in fantasy. White readers’ problematic consumption of black sleaze was epitomized by the release of Iceberg Slim’s autobiographical novel Pimp in 1967 by the white-owned, tabloid-oriented Holloway House. However, after seeing the racial composition of its readership change in the 1970s, Holloway House sidelined sleaze for black pulp fiction formula stories by black authors for black readers. The switch may have appeared to vanquish sleaze, but elements of it remained embedded in this masculinist subgenre of books, which went on to inspire key figures in rap and hip-hop culture.