The Birth of the Dime Novel

The genre helped define the myth of the Old West.

In 1860, the publishers Erastus and Irwin Beadle released a new series of cheap paperbacks, Beadle’s Dime Novels. “Dime novel” became a general term for similar paperbacks produced by various publishers in the early 20th century. The first book in the Beadle series was Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens. The term was used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp magazine Western Dime Novels. In the modern age, the term dime novel has been used to refer to quickly written, lurid potboilers.