"There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."-a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951) American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized[...]

In nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, fashion--once the province of the well-to-do--began to make its way across class lines. At once a democratizing influence and a means of maintaining distinctions, gaps in time remained between what the upper classes wore and what the lower clas[...]