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  • Chapter 9 - The Short Story and the Popular Imagination

  • from Part II - Histories
  • Edited by Michael J. Collins, King's College London, Gavin Jones, Stanford University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story
    Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023, pp 146-159

  • Summary

    This chapter examines US pulp crime fiction published between the 1920s and the 1960s, focusing on its formal distinctiveness and its development. It shows how the forms of organization taken by pulp labor related to the literary forms found in the stories, exploring how the principles of fungibility and economy, recognizable from the industrial factory system of mass-production, were accommodated or challenged by two key crime writers: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It examines how the rhythms of pulp labor intersected with the stories’ formal composition. Finally, it discusses the interpellation of a white, male, working-class readership by interwar pulp crime fiction, and the way its ideological valences were reconfigured in the postwar period by writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes.