Lists hundreds of books that have made the famous list, and offers facts about the publishing industry, authors, and the list itself

Product Description: During the Cold War, many popular American novels were labelled "middlebrow," leading to a general belief that these texts held less intellectual merit. Perrin debunks these unfair assumptions through works by James Michener, Harper Lee, and Leon Uris, arguing that such writers made a major contribution to the tradition of American literature...read more

B-movies, crime novels, science fiction- all of these forms of mass media came into their own in the 1950s. Dismissed by critics as dehumanizing to both author and audience, these genres unflinchingly exposed the depths of American life at a time when it was not politically correct to do so. David Cochran details how, at the height of the Cold War, ten writers and filmmakers challenged such social pieties as the superiority of American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone related stories of victims of vast, faceless bureaucratic powers. Jim Thompson's The Grifters portrayed the ravages of capitalism on those at the bottom of the social ladder. Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley featured an amoral con man who infiltrated the privileged class and wreaked havoc once there. All of these artists helped to set the stage for the 1960s counterculture's challenge to the established order. In doing so, they blurred the lines between "high" and "low" art.

Analyzes the best-sellers published between 1945 and 1975 to determine how American dreams of success have changed, and discusses the issues these novels raise about modern life

 When Edgar Allan Poe set down the tale of the accursed House of Usher in 1839, he also laid the foundation for a literary tradition that has assumed a lasting role in American culture. “The House of Usher” and its literary progeny have not lacked for tenants in the century and a half since: writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King have taken rooms in the haunted houses of American fiction. Dale Bailey traces the haunted house tale from its origins in English gothic fiction to the paperback potboilers of the present, highlighting the unique significance of the house in the domestic, economic, and social ideologies of our nation. The author concludes that the haunted house has become a powerful and profoundly subversive symbol of everything that has gone nightmarishly awry in the American Dream. (view table of contents)

This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture. Streeby's analysis of this fascinating body of popular literature and mass culture broadens into a sweeping demonstration of the importance of the concept of empire for understanding U.S. history and literature. This accessible, interdisciplinary book brilliantly analyzes the sensational literature of George Lippard, A.J.H Duganne, Ned Buntline, Metta Victor, Mary Denison, John Rollin Ridge, Louisa May Alcott, and many other writers. Streeby also discusses antiwar articles in the labor and land reform press; ideas about Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in popular culture; and much more. Although the Civil War has traditionally been a major period marker in U.S. history and literature, Streeby proposes a major paradigm shift by using mass culture to show that the U.S.-Mexican War and other conflicts with Mexicans and Native Americans in the borderlands were fundamental in forming the complex nexus of race, gender, and class in the United States. (view table of contents)

Product Description: America’s Sketchbook recaptures the drama of nineteenth-century American cultural life, placing at its center a genre—the literary sketch—more available than the novel, less governable by the critical establishment, and shot through with the tensions and types of local and national culture-making...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Beacham, Walton

Product Description: Newhouse (English, Buffalo State U.) assesses the literary legacy of the Beat writers. He locates the concerns of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs in a deep satisfaction with America as a spiritual wasteland filled with intolerable repression and conformity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance...read more

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Product Description: In the decades before the Civil War, American society witnessed the emergence of a new form of print culture, as penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, fashion magazines, and other ephemeral printed materials brought exuberance and theatricality to public culture and made the practice of reading more controversial...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This volume celebrates yesterday’s pulp magazines and their heroes and heroines. Readers will acquaint themselves with such famous magazine titles as The Shadow, The Black Mask, Weird Tales, and others as obscure as Scientific Detective Monthly and the sensuous Scarlet Adventuress of dim reputation...read more

Product Description: This book proposes a new view of the democratization of America by recasting democracy as a symbolic theater, historically realized in an untheorized and irrational public utterance that began with the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 and extended through the Great Awakening and the antebellum era...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Frequently identified as sensational literature filled with violent characters, intricately woven plots, changing identities and confusion between issues of right and wrong, many considered the Dime Novel guilty of sending serious and improper messages to the day's impressionable youth...read more

Product Description: This text explores the sources and meanings of tales and figures that have dominated the American imagination: the Horatio Alger story, the western and the figure of the private eye. They emerged in the late 19th century as a response to immigration, expansion of industry and urbanisation...read more

Product Description: Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture—from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere...read more

Product Description: The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance examines the response of American leftist writers of the 1930s to the rise of mass culture, and to the continued propagation of the values of consumerism during the Depression. Rita Barnard traces in the work of Kenneth Fearing and Nathanael West theoretical positions associated with the Frankfurt School (especially Walter Benjamin) and with contemporary theorists of postmodernism...read more

Product Description: Here is an affectionate look back at the outsized heroes who once occupied the imagination of millions of loyal readers. The Shadow. Tarzan. Doc Savage. Captain Future. The Spider. Zorro. They were the original super guys-godfathers and inspiration to the likes of Supewrman, Batman and James Bond...read more

Product Description: In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The hard-boiled stories published in Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly and Clues featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)