Ann Sohpia Stephens
Like yellowbacks, the American dime novel's popularity is correlated with increased literacy rates and improved transportation in the nineteenth century United States. Also similar to yellowbacks, dime novels were often sensational stories of serial fiction.
Ann Sophia Stephens
Ann Sophia Stephens's novel, Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, was the first book published by Beadle and Company in their dime novel series.
Stephens and her husband, Edward Stephens, were involved in magazine publishing in New York in the mid-nineteenth century. For a period she edited The Ladies Companion, in which a version of Malaeska appeared in 1839. It was reprinted in 1860 as the first in American publisher Beadle and Adam's Beadle's Dime Novels and later in Britain as a yellowback.
Stephens also wrote under the pseudonym Jonathan Slick.
