Brief History of Street & Smith
In 1855, when Francis Scott Street and Francis Shubael Smith bought The
New York Weekly Dispatch, Street & Smith embarked on a publishing
mission that remained remarkably prolific and profitable for over one
hundred years. Street & Smith rapidly became a "fiction factory,"
producing a wide variety of popular literature, including dime novels,
pulp magazines, books in series for juveniles, fashion and homemaking
magazines, comics, and adventure stories. The company viewed fiction as
a commodity, with Street & Smith editors dictating plots, character
types, and other conventions to the firm's stable of writers. As a result,
Street & Smith authors, including such literary figures as Horatio
Alger, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London were often disguised
by house pseudonyms and wrote to carefully calculated formulae, with their
respective products subject to extensive rewriting by Street & Smith
editors.
Street & Smith illustrators worked under the same editorial constraints
as did the writers. If an editor received unacceptable illustrations,
the illustrator was told to "get busy and change them then and there."
Nevertheless, Street & Smith eventually became "an incubator
where the greatest illustrators in the country were professionally born."
These included Harvey Dunn, Joseph Leyendecker, Dean Cornwell, Winfield
Scott, Tom Lovell, Anton Otto Fisher, Amos Sewell, and N.C. Wyeth.
Scanned images of all dime novel, and a selection of serial, covers
which were microfilmed as part of the original NEH project. The collection of images can be accessed via the Library's CONTENTdm server and can be browsed as well as being fully searchable by keyword, title, series title, and author.
In this gallery of cover images we have selected what we feel is a
representative sampling of the great variety of art to be found in the
Street & Smith Collection. For a more complete collection of images,
please see the dime novel holding list.
Images of the "one and only" Yellow Kid, original standard
bearer of Street & Smith.
See the inner workings of the Street & Smith company.
Inventory to the editorial records of the Street & Smith company.
Lists of Radio Scripts
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