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- Title
"I Used to Be a Highbrow but Look at Me Now": Phrenology, Detection, and Cultural Hierarchy in S. S. Van Dine.
- Authors
Hefner, Brooks E.
- Abstract
This article reads Willard Huntington Wright's work against his anxieties about cultural hierarchy and value, utilizing archival work in Wright's papers at the University of Virginia and unearthing a previously unknown series of crime stories that he published under another pseudonym a decade before his success as bestselling detective novelist S. S. Van Dine. The author argues that Wright's work in popular fiction provides a special opportunity for interrogating the highbrow/lowbrow divide and its phrenological roots.
- Subjects
PHRENOLOGY in literature; VAN Dine, S. S., 1888-1939; WRIGHT, Willard Huntington, 1888-1939; CRIME in literature; AMERICAN detective &; mystery stories
- Publication
Clues: A Journal of Detection (McFarland & Company), 2012, Vol 30, Issue 1, p30
- ISSN
0742-4248
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.3172/CLU.30.1.30