American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (review)

When one thinks of the classics of American modernism, one does not generally think of the cheap paperbacks that were so prevalent in American readership (and, of course, in American commerce) in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. For decades, the American literary canon esteemed the early pioneers of modernism to be worthy of study, while the pulps were thought of as purely vehicles for entertainment. But, with the 21th-century push for a more inclusive canon, scholars are now revisiting the importance of pulp fiction in literary study. One of the foremost pulp scholars is the University of Minnesota's Paula Rabinowitz, who bridged the subject in 2002 with Black and White and Noir: America's Pulp Modernism, and expands her case in the recent (2014) volume American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press).

In American Pulp, Rabinowitz argues not only the importance of paperback books to middle America at midcentury, but she also specifically ties the art form to modernism. She coins the term "demotic reading" to explain the way in which paperbacks expanded the boundaries of American readership, enabled by the fact that it "lured readers with provocative covers at an affordable price into a new relationship with the private lives of books and so with themselves" (3). And thus, by expanding access to readership, these same paperbacks, with their "provocative" covers, were also able to expose readers in middle America to the more esoteric ideals of high modernism. Modernist perceptions of sexuality were particularly important in the consumption of paperbacks; while the America of the 1940s and 1950s was hardly in an overt sexual revolution, readers could still access more open depictions of sexuality between the covers of the paperback. Because of this, Rabinowitz notes that even the format of the paperback itself is fashioned in the image of modernism: "A lowly yet somehow revered object, the paperback book exemplifies a modernist form of multimedia in which text, image, and material come together as spectacle to attract and enthrall a recipient, its audience, its reader. This medium was designed for maximum portability and could move seamlessly from private to public spaces" (4). While the initial spark of modernism began long before the First World War, paperbacks, according to Rabinowitz, provided the means for the movement to continue, and to reach a larger and more diverse audience than ever before. She refers to this new, expansive brand of modernism as "secondhand modernism."

An important portion of this audience is what she terms "Main Street," a broad term referring to the United States beyond coastal urban centers. The extent of this geographic diversity is evident from the first chapter, entitled "Pulp: Biography of an American Object." Here, through bits of personal narrative and many brief anecdotes about the history of pulp and its connection to modernism, Rabinowitz forms the basis for her argument. In the second chapter, "Pulp as Interface," she delves further into the format of pulp as an intermediary between modernism and middle America, and explores how the styling of paperbacks helped not only to sensationalize reading but to further blur the lines between the experimental and the mainstream, between high art and pop culture, between the written word and the burgeoning culture of motion pictures.

She then goes into more depth as she analyzes the work of Chicago's own Richard Wright—specifically, his 1941 book 12 Million Black Voices. Rabinowitz makes the case that Wright used the pulpy true-crime format—one that was particularly popular at this time in American history—to explain the larger problem of systemic racism, telling us that the book "supplements the crime narrative, or, better, inverts it, to make clear that the crime, that which the American people … had been lied to and been lying to themselves about, was the crime of slavery and its attendant Jim Crow laws and culture of racism" (86). Through luring readers in with...