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Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

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Boys Club Literature<br />

Chapter 19 -- The Stratemeyer Boys Club Serials<br />

CHAPTER 19<br />

THE STRATEMEYER BOYS CLUB SERIALS<br />

We've bracketed the spectrum <strong>of</strong> underground river fiction. Chapters 16 and 17 recognized<br />

works well-respected in modern literature. Chapter 18 sampled picture books for young children.<br />

We'd be remiss to ignore the larger portion <strong>of</strong> underground river<br />

literature, that from the ranks <strong>of</strong> authors who aimed at an<br />

intermediate demographic, juvenile readers -- juvenile males, for<br />

most part, more likely than girls to pick up a swashbuckling<br />

subterranean adventure.<br />

We move to what we'll call "Boys Club" literature, as illustrated by<br />

the underground river illustration <strong>of</strong> Howard De Vere's piece<br />

about Mammoth Cave, "A Trip to the Center <strong>of</strong> the Earth" in the<br />

<strong>New</strong> York Boys Weekly (1894).<br />

Boys Club plots and characterizations tend toward the formulaic --<br />

fast-paced adventures in exotic environments. Casual racism<br />

and sexism can be jarring. But, by golly, the boys do have nifty<br />

adventures.<br />

The distribution <strong>of</strong> new releases over time reveals the Boys Club heyday. As such literature<br />

tended to be inexpensively bound, shoddily treated and dismissed by archivists, who knows how<br />

many like works have been completely forgotten?<br />

Count<br />

50<br />

45<br />

40<br />

35<br />

30<br />

25<br />

20<br />

15<br />

10<br />

5<br />

0<br />

1830<br />

1840<br />

1850<br />

1860<br />

1870<br />

1880<br />

1890<br />

1900<br />

DRAFT 1122//66//22001122<br />

Uppddaatteess aatt hhttttpp::////www. .uunnm. .eedduu//~rrhheeggggeenn//UnnddeerrggrroouunnddRi ivveerrss. .hhttml l<br />

1910<br />

Decade<br />

1920<br />

1930<br />

1940<br />

Lost World Books in English, 1800-2000<br />

1950<br />

1960<br />

1970<br />

1980<br />

1990<br />

206

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