The other day I was sitting in a bar waiting on a friend.  As an unashamed bibliophile, I always have a book with me and, while I waited, I began to read a Jodi Picoult novel.  When my friend arrived she looked at what I was reading, rolled her eyes and asked if I ever bothered reading anything other than Pop Fiction.  Popular fiction is usually something people don't admit to reading.  In public, most people either want to be seen reading something other will perceive as cool or edgy.  The best many popular fiction books can hope for is to make it into a televised Book Club which offers instant approval from the masses.  But the fact of the matter is, fiction not only feeds the mind, it sparks the imagination and provides inspiration for countless struggling writers.

Steam-powered printing presses and an increase in literacy were the key to bringing fiction to the general American public.  The first American novel, “The Power of Sympathy”, was published by William Hill Brown in 1789 and once people got a taste of reading for entertainment, there was no stopping the publishing industry.  Fiction became an easy way for writers to discuss controversial topics of the time and address various social ills.  Harriet Beecher Stowe was able to make scathing remarks and paint a horrific, but accurate, portrait of slave life with her infamous novel “Uncle Tom's Cabin”.  Other novelists followed suit and through the years. Writers have tackled social problems such as racism, unsafe working conditions, child labor, drug abuse, police brutality and corrupt political systems.  With each wave, the public had their eyes opened to what was possible, what could be, and usually what WAS happening right under their collective nose.  Descriptions of the working conditions in Upton Sinclair's novel 'The Jungle', for example, caused such a public outcry that it eventually led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

While the popular fiction of the day was opening the eyes of the American public, it was also inspiring new generations of writers.  Nearly any author you name has credited his or her passion to the love of great books. Charles Dickens, for example, grew up as a happy but somewhat isolated child and spent most of his time reading his favorite authors - Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding.    Margaret Frances Culkin Banning (1891 - 1982) penned over 30 novels, was an early prominent figure of the Women's Rights movement and was quoted as saying “Fiction is not a dream. Nor is it guesswork. It is imagining based on facts, and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not stand up.”  And the best fiction is always based somewhere in fact.  It's that foundation in fact that makes the novel so easy for people to relate to and, as a result, so popular.

The stories behind the writers themselves are often just as inspirational as the novels they craft.  Again, the esteemed Charles Dickens provides us with real life example.  As a child, his father was a chronic debtor and eventually wound up in debtor's prison along with most of his family.  Charles was sent off to live with relatives and attend school.  At the same time, any free time was spent working in order to pay for his room and board as well as to help pay his family's debts.  Dickens spent years as a child working under cruel conditions pasting labels on shoe polish for six shillings a week.  After his father's debts had been paid, the family had moved on and Dickens began work in a legal office before finally getting a small article printed in a London Magazine.  From there he began a short career in political journalism before publishing his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, as a serialized novel, designed to increase subscriptions for the magazine he was working for, The Morning Chronicle.  It's strange to think of it now, but the infamous Charles Dickens was, at the start of his writing career, a craftsman of Pop Fiction designed to keep the audience coming back for more. 

More recent examples of writers who began at the bottom, in ways that many people would scoff at, include the likes of John Grisham and J K Rowling.  Rowling wrote her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, while sitting in cafes and working through chronic depression.  The book was rejected by 12 publishing houses before being picked up by the British publishing firm Bloomsbury.  John Grisham had his first novel, 'A Time to Kill' rejected by no less than 35 publishers before he found a small press willing to take a gamble and print 5,000 copies.  A true first edition of the book Grisham almost couldn't get published would run a collector around $1500 now.

Popular fiction has been the driving force in culture from addressing social ills to inspiring people to tell their own stories.  It has not only reflected the cultural norm of the time, but has been an agent of change.  Many people sniff derisively at those of us who choose fiction over non-fiction but I say we're making the right choice.  The child who reads Harry Potter today may grow up with an interest in magic which could, given the right encouragement, lead to an interest in the advanced sciences.  After all, it was none other than the famous inventor and write Arthur C. Clarke who said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  So keep the magic, and the fiction that popularizes it, alive and it can lead to almost anything. 

So, while I'll always have time for nonfiction accounts of true crimes, popular science and history, my heart belongs to fiction.  For all its critics, fiction is where ideas are born, where inspiration flows and where the future happens first.