Juvenile Tradition and the Fiction Factory, Part I

This first in a series of two essays considers the relation of the juvenile tradition to cheap, mass-produced dime fiction in America from the 1860s on. Part One provides a survey of fiction-factory writing by now-unrecognized young writers in the latter half of the nineteenth century; my interest lies in recovering what juvenile writers who worked in that industry thought about it. This essay focuses on how they embraced new opportunities for authorship that mass-market publication provided. Such an assembly-line mode of literary production carried a new understanding of its authors as workers in the fiction factory. Rather than regret the loss of inspiration or genius in their writing identity, however, young dime writers hailed their role as “hack” writers by asserting youth’s modern character as “wide-awake”—aware, practical, savvy, and successful.