For more than fifty years Maturin Murray Ballou wrote sensational novels for a growing American middle class that craved popular literature, and he prospered. A century later his prodigious literary efforts are forgotten, and posterity remembers him only for innovations early in his career. With a partner he established the first successful pictorial weekly in America; he appears to have been the first to market dime novels to the American public, preceding Beadle and Adams by three years; and he prescribed contributors' story lines in a way that anticipated Edward Stratemeyer by fifty years. But having opened new territory, Ballou proved unprepared to share it with others; he moved on to other things, leaving it to aggressive competitors to exploit his gains.

Ballou was born in Boston on 14 April 1820, the youngest of nine children of the Reverend Hosea Ballou and Ruth Washburn Ballou. He was a sixth-generation namesake...