Publication details
“Beatnik Wanton”: The Beat Generation, Paperbacks, and Pulp Fiction
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Mass-market paperbacks became extremely common by the 1950s and heralded a new trend in the book market. Thanks to large circulation and availability at kiosks, paperbacks offered numerous titles to the masses for a substantially reduced price compared to the hardcover edition, thus frequently reaching much larger audience than the original printing. Nevertheless, paperback versions of books such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye had to share the same space with low-grade and often exploitative pulp fiction as a result. What is more, the paperback industry frequently employed the same artists illustrating covers to innumerable romance and crime pulp fiction to design the covers for the paperback reprints of hardcover novels, and this process also affected several of Jack Kerouac’s novels. However, unlike other novelists with mass-market paperback editions, Kerouac was also generally recognized as belonging to “the Beat Generation,” and this all-encompassing characterization – and the derogatory term “beatnik” derived from it – soon adorned the book blurbs of several exploitative pulp fiction novels appearing in the same places as Kerouac’s paperbacks. As a result, the “beatsploitation” pulp fiction thus became nearly indistinguishable from genuine Beat works, thus the dynamics of paperback publishing helped codify and further disseminate the negative stereotype of the Beats. |