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This chapter focuses on the early Stuart English literary underground that helped circulate copies of Eglisham's The Forerunner of Revenge. This literary underground had links to the Continent, but its dynamism was homegrown, and it involved a broad cast of characters. Although some of its activities were thoroughly commercialized, the literary underground was far more reliant on older forms of exchange, in which sociability and ideological commitment, rather than commodification and profit, facilitated the circulation of dangerous books. These underground systems of exchange disseminated The Forerunner and many variations upon it, thus prolonging Eglisham's political impact far beyond the 1626 Parliament, and allowing his allegations to acquire a settled place in contemporary political consciousness where they could ferment and mutate in a rapidly changing world.

This chapter provides an introduction to the Restoration literary underground. It outlines how the trade survived harsh conditions of censorship and government regulation by deploying a number of protective strategies like shared printing. By isolating a substantial body of the nation, especially Presbyterian and Independents, the passing of a narrow religious settlement increased public demand for satire and oppositional polemics. It is argued that this demand was met and intensified by the literary underground through coordinated publishing campaigns. The use of Habermas's public-sphere theory as an analytical methodology is justified with reference to recent revisions to the theory by Steve Pincus and Peter Lake, who incorporate religion as a driving factor behind what they term the ‘post-Revolutionary public sphere’.

This chapter explores the development of Russian modernism and avant-garde trends into the 1920s in relation to the new institutions of the Silver Age (1890s–1917), pausing on why the period has proven hard to define. It discusses key modernist journals and the social contexts, including groups and societies, that were formative for writers. How these cultural processes changed in Soviet Russia under a regime of political and aesthetic state control, and in Russia Abroad, is charted. While Socialist Realism became the dominant aesthetic from the 1930s, the chapter shows how innovations in language and theory (including Formalism and structuralism) as well as independent literary institutions bypassed official doctrines and led to important experimentation. The chapter tracks a number of phenomena bridged unofficial literary culture and the post-Soviet literary field.

The book concludes by revisiting Stuart Hall’s essay “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” and suggests that race, for Holloway House, was a sliding signifier of competing interests and tastes. The “blackness” of black pulp fiction was not inherent to the writer or his work. Rather, it was an effect of how Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock marketed pinups, paperbacks, and pornography to different audiences, white then black, over a long period of time. True alternatives to their control over the black literary underground only emerged when women writers and hip-hop artists began producing their own urban narratives. Once those gained traction in the 1990s, it was only a matter of time before the white men’s symbiotic enterprise would come to an end. Holloway House and its affiliate companies closed for good in 208. The structure of the literary underground lives on, however, in uncanny ways: Donald Goines’s books are now reprinted by a romance publisher that used to be a sleaze outfit, and Iceberg Slim’s books are now reprinted by an urban fiction imprint founded by hip-hop artists.

While Iceberg Slim stumbled into the Black Power era, an unknown quantity named Donald Goines began publishing books with Holloway House that were distinct from sleaze. This chapter shows how Goines, between 1971 and 1973, surpassed Slim’s output and set the terms for the market for black pulp fiction. Goines’s books were fast-paced and action-packed; they rarely exhibited the vernacular flair for which Slim was known. But as much as he relied on the sex-and-violence formulas of men’s pulps, Goines proved enormously popular among black readers while not conceding anything to white voyeurism. Harrowing, inner-city dramas that tackled drug addiction, criminal enterprises, and even the corruption of Black Power ideology: Goines’s novels forged a literary underground that was indifferent to white tastes. Bentley Morriss saw the potential in this market. In a reversal of Holloway House’s founding, he began a black pornographic magazine, Players, to complement the black pulp fiction Goines had pioneered. Local writer Wanda Coleman edited the magazine, which featured stories, reviews, pictorials, and centerfolds tailored to black men’s tastes. The founding of Players sealed Morriss’s commitment to producing books and magazines for a different kind of readership.

This chapter describes the streamlining of production that occurred in the early years of the black literary underground. In editing and writing for Players, Wanda Coleman wanted to steer the magazine toward quality fiction, stylish fashion, and celebrity coverage. But she was frequently stymied by Ralph Weinstock, who acted as Bentley Morriss’s editorial arm and streamlining enforcer. Eventually, Coleman was replaced as Players’s editor by Joseph Nazel. A veteran pressman, Nazel was willing to follow Weinstock’s directive to repeat tried-and-true formulas. He did this not only for Players but for Holloway House. While Donald Goines’s festering heroin addiction made his productivity erratic, Nazel proved capable of churning out scores of novels for the company. Under his real name and different pseudonyms, Nazel helped fill out Holloway House’s catalog in the same way Paul Gillette had done in the 1960s. Applying such practices of the pulp trade to race-oriented fare, Holloway House did not balk when Goines was murdered in his home in 1974. In addition to publishing a sensationalistic biography of Goines, the company had its author, a white man named Carlton Hollander, ghostwrite Goines’s final novels.