What the Shadows Know: The Crime-Fighting Hero the Shadow and His Haunting of Late-1950s Literature

During the Depression era of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, millions of Americans sought escape from the tumultuous times in pulp magazines, comic books, and radio programs. In the face of mob violence, joblessness, war, and social upheaval, masked crusaders provided a much needed source of security where good triumphed over evil and wrongs were made right. Heroes such as Doc Savage, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Captain America, and Superman were always there to save the day, making the world seem fair and in order. This imaginative world not only was an escape from less cheery realities but also ended up providing nostalgic memories of childhood for many writers of the early Cold War years.

But not all crime fighters presented such an optimistic outlook. The Shadow, who began life in a 1931 pulp magazine but eventually crossed over into radio, was an ambiguous sort of crime fighter. Called “the Shadow” because he moved undetected in these dark spaces, his name provided a hint to his divided character. Although he clearly defended the interests of the average citizen, the Shadow also satisfied the demand for a vigilante justice. His diabolical laughter is perhaps the best sign of his ambiguity. One assumes that it is directed at his adversaries, but its vengeful and spiteful nature strikes fear into victims, as well as victimizers. He was a tour guide to the underworld, providing his fans with a taste of the shady, clandestine lives of the criminals he pursued. Relishing his role, the Shadow went beyond the simple exploits of a superhero like Superman, and even those he saved were not sure whether they would like to come across him on a dark night in a strange alley.

This paper explores the role that the Shadow plays in the work of Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the reasons these writers were attracted to him. At first glance, this seems an odd assortment of writers to bring together. Though these writers shared an interest in the confessional writing that gained momentum in the 1950s, their differences are more striking than their similarities. Plath, who married the British poet Ted Hughes and had two children, spent a good deal of time in England writing highly controlled verse. Kerouac, a peripatetic loner who celebrated America, insisted on spontaneous, free-flowing production. Baraka, an African American writer struggling with a racist America, eventually took the uptown train from the village to Harlem in order to produce more politicized work meant to directly affect his community. What unites these different writers is their mutual interest in the undercurrent of ambiguity that permeates the Shadow. All three writers penned tributes to this crime fighter, using him to examine the loss of childhood innocence and entry into the adult world. But the ambiguity the Shadow represented also provided a means of critiquing the binary dichotomies that helped define the postwar world. Plath, Kerouac, and Baraka used the Shadow to explore the obverse side of American optimism, simultaneously questioning the innocence of childhood and the conformism of America along the way.¹

The Shadow Knows

Although the pulps and the radio both shared the Shadow, the character manifested differently in each. In the pulps, the Shadow is part hardboiled detective and part mysterious avenger in equal turns. Lamont Cranston, his alter ego, is the same man about town as in the radio programs and resorts to the same type of deduction to solve his cases. But the pulp Shadow draws heavily on the detective novels of the period. He is tough, streetwise, and lives by his own code of vigilante justice outside the law. The pulp Shadow also has a stable of helpers (along with several alter egos) to do his bidding. He and his gang battle villains in streets and alleyways until the Shadow ends victorious, with the evildoers either dead or behind bars. The illustrations for the pulps likewise point to the influence of the hardboiled genre on Walter Gibson’s writing [Figure 1]. The...