The Yellowbacks

THE HOUSE OF BEADLE AND ADAMS AND ITS DIME AND NICKEL NOVELS (2 vols., 919 pp.)--Albert Johannsen--Universify of Oklahoma ($20).

"Noiseless as spectres, Delano and the two maidens slid into the [ruffians' den]; and the young lieutenant . . . instantly singled out the chief from among his sleeping comrades, and with one fierce thrust, sent his cutlass directly through his body, and with such force, that the keen weapon was deeply sunk in the floor." The climax of The Signal; or, The King of the Blue Isle, by E. Curtiss Hine, was at hand. When Delano had finished his bloody work, "three hundred corpses lay strewn about the room."

"'Huzza! Huzza!' cried he. 'We're free!'

"Words are inadequate to describe the rapture which swelled the bosoms of the two maidens . . ."

Words were not only inadequate; they were superfluous. The reader of such gory classics a century ago knew exactly how well-bred young heroines felt in the presence of general mayhem--so long as it was perpetrated by the hero. The reader felt the same way himself and he loved it. He loved it so much that a new literary form, the dime novel, was created in his mental image, and a great publishing industry was built to produce it. At the head of the industry during the early years stood the house of Beadle and Adams. The history of that house and its publications is the year's choicest chunk of offbeat Americana, a huge, cheerful corpse from the literary morgue.

Trademark of Infamy. The first dime novel that really cost a dime was published by Beadle in 1860. Malaeska; The Indian Wife of the White Hunter came out in the yellowback that was to become the trademark of infamy to U.S. parents. A few months later came Edward S. Ellis' Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier which sold like dollar bills, 40,000 copies in the first few weeks.

The flood was on. In the next few decades, Beadle's authors hacked out thousands of dime novels (priced anywhere from 5-c- to 50-c-), countless short stories, and even some poems of a sort.

The Strenuous Life. Despite the low rates, dime novels were written by some prominent pens. Buffalo Bill Cody was a contributor; Louisa May Alcott sold some dime novels to Beadle rivals. All sorts and kinds helped to fill the yellowbacks: an Iowa farmer, a temperance lecturer, an actress, a Philadelphia physician, a second cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a parson's daughter.

The most fabulous of them all was Ned Buntline (Colonel E. Z. C. Judson), who led a life as strenuous as his fiction. He killed his man in a pistol duel in Nashville, Tenn., was mobbed by his victim's friends and saved from lynching when a friend of his cut the rope. He lived to a sinful old age (65), a hulking, white-mustached figure of some 200 lbs., immensely vain (at times sporting 20 medals) and prodigiously philandering (he had six wives in all, two at once in 1871). Ned wrote more words than most men speak, 10,000 a day in one six-day stretch, once blurting out an entire three-act play in four hours.

Vice & Virtue. Like Ned Buntline, most of the bestselling dime novelists could write as easily as they could breathe, and few of them had any compunctions about cribbing from each other, or even repeating their own works time after time. Some were so lost to literary shame that they wrote their stories to fit old illustrations, thereby saving publishers the price of new ones.

Their prose showed the effects of their hell-for-leather pace; so did their supreme disregard for facts. Edward L. Wheeler, the creator of the legendary Deadwood Dick, had never been west of Pennsylvania, and he rejuggled western geography and topography with wild abandon.

Yet in one sense the crudities of the dime novel were not vices but byproducts of their one great virtue. It was the first time any sizable body of U.S. writers had stopped laboring European themes, and started working native material. Because the dime novelists got plenty of slag out of the way, later writers could dig into the true metal of the American novel.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.