The TenCent Plague, David Hajdu
The TenCent Plague, David Hajdu
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The Ten-Cent Plague
The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

Author: David Hajdu

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki

Unabridged: 11 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/02/2008

Synopsis

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the bold, pulpy pages of comic books. The Ten-Cent Plague explores this cultural emergence and its fierce backlash while challenging common notions of the divide between “high” and “low” art.David Hajdu reveals how comics, years before the rock-and-roll revolution, brought on a clash between postwar children and their prewar parents. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics became the targets of a raging generational culture divide. They were burned in public bonfires, outlawed in certain cities, and nearly destroyed by a series of televised Congressional hearings. Yet their creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority would have a lasting influence.

About David Hajdu

David Hajdu is the author of Lush Life and Positively 4th Street. He lives in Manhattan and writes for the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, New Republic, and New York Review of Books.

About Stefan Rudnicki

Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards and been named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices. A longtime fan of Weird fiction, and of Robert W. Chambers in particular, Stefan’s dramatic adaptation of The King in Yellow received the Madolin Cervantes Award from the Society of Stage Directors & Choreographers and was staged by him at the Donnell Library Center in New York City.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kemper on April 12, 2011

America 1954 “Howdy there stranger. I’m Chester.” “Hey, Chester. I’m Kemper.” “If you don’t mind me saying so, Kemper, your clothes look kind of odd.” “Well, you’re certainly styling in your overalls. I’ll tell you a secret, Chester. I’m from the future. The year 2011.” “Son, have you been drinking?” “Wel......more

Goodreads review by Paul on March 22, 2024

HOW TO SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FOOT Senate hearings on Comic Books held on 21 April 1954 : Counsel Beaser : Let me get the limits as far as what you put into your magazine. Is the sole test whether it sells? Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a c......more

Goodreads review by Jim on February 05, 2018

I'm not a real comic book fan, but I found this fascinating. The history & players of comics themselves were interesting with names of publishers, writers, & artists running together into the maelstrom of an emerging product. I recognized some, although not many. In a lot of ways, the early days of......more

Quotes

“Rudnicki’s steely narration of the Great Comic Book Scare of 1953–54 will raise the hackles of any freethinking American…The book is outstanding, even for those who don’t love comic books. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.” AudioFile

“Incisive and entertaining…This book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book’s imagination.” New York Times

“To those who think rock ’n’ roll created the postwar generation gap, David Hajdu says: Think again. Every page of The Ten-Cent Plague evinces [Hajdu’s] zest for the ‘aesthetic lawlessness’ of comic books and his sympathetic respect for the people who made them.” Chicago Tribune

“David Hajdu, who perfectly detailed the Dylan-era Greenwhich Village scene in Positively 4th Street, does the same for the birth and near death (McCarthyism!) of comic books in The Ten-Cent Plague.” GQ

“Sharp…lively…entertaining and erudite…David Hajdu offers captivating insights into America’s early bluestocking-versus-blue-collar culture wars, and the later tensions between wary parents and the first generation of kids with buying power to mold mass entertainment.” Village Voice

“A compelling story of the pride, prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in the first half of the century.” Times Literary Supplement (London) 

“A vivid and engaging book.” New Yorker

“Hajdu creates a colorful, character-driven story of our first real—and lasting—counterculture and shows why we embrace it still.” Amazon.com

“Marvelous…A staggeringly well-reported account of the men and women who created the comic book, and the backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it…Hajdu’s important book dramatizes an early, long-forgotten skirmish in the culture wars that, half a century later, continues to roil.” Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A-) 

“The Ten-Cent Plague is about the best account yet of comics in America, an instant classic of cultural history.” Geoffrey O’Brien, editor, Library of America

Awards

  • AudioFile Earphones Award
  • San Francisco Chronicle Best Book
  • New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books
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