A Book for a Dime.

During the 1880s and 1890s the American literati assumed the mantle of social reform and scientific inquiry. William Dean Howells defended the anarchists arrested in Chicago's Haymarket bombing. The normally aloof -Henry James wrote two expressly "political" novels, The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886). And the young writers known as naturalists began to spin progressively darker and grimmer tales of urban malaise, social inequity, and individual pathology. The reading public clamored for a little escapism and found it in the dime novel. Before the Civil War American readers' morbid curiosity and sensual cravings had been satisfied by sensational "story papers" and pamphlet novels (the latter selling in twenty-five-cent installments). In 1860 the publishing firm of Beadle and Adams offered readers a new option —"A DOLLAR BOOK FOR A DIME!!"—and made money by providing the soldiers of...