Since the first soap opera aired on Chicago's WGN radio in the early 1930s, serial dramas have attracted hundreds of millions of fans, eager to escape the everyday problems of real life by immersing themselves in the far more dramatic ups and downs of their soap-opera heroes. Although soaps were originally designed to appeal to housewives (the name "soap opera" comes from the household products that were often the main advertisers), modern soap audiences include everyone from business executives to college football players.

In the 1800s, well before the invention of radio (see entry under 1920s—TV and Radio in volume 2) and television (see entry under 1940s—TV and Radio in volume 3), writers like Charles Dickens (1812–1870) created a kind of soap opera, stories full of twists and turns and plenty of melodrama that were published in magazines and newspapers in serial form, that is, divided into...