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In the afterword of its novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury states that

I didn't know it, but I was literally writing a dime novel.

However dime novel seems to have a negative connotation, according to the following definitions:

a cheap melodramatic or sensational novel, usually in paperback and selling for ten cents, especially such an adventure novel popular c1850 to c1920.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dime-novel

Dime novel, a type of inexpensive, usually paperback, melodramatic novel of adventure popular in the United States roughly between 1860 and 1915

http://global.britannica.com/art/dime-novel

On this site, dime novel is used as an answer for the opposite of a gripping book.

The question is, if dime novel has such a bad connotation, why does Bradbury use that term to refer to one of its most acclaimed work?

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Thomas Francois
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The following extract may help undestand what he meant by "dime" novel:

  • In Los Angeles in the early 1950s, Ray Bradbury went in search of a peaceful place to work. "I had a large family at home," he said five decades later. They must have been a particularly lively bunch, because at the time it was just Ray, his wife Marguerite and two young children.

  • The writing refuge Bradbury found was in the basement of the Lawrence Clark Powell Library at UCLA -- and in fact, it wasn't all that quiet. "I heard this typing," he explained. "I went down in the basement of the UCLA library and by God there was a room with 12 typewriters in it that you could rent for 10 cents a half-hour. And there were eight or nine students in there working away like crazy."

  • So he went to the bank and returned with a bag of dimes. He plugged a dime into the machine, typed fast for 30 minutes, and then dropped another. When he took breaks, he went upstairs to the library, soaking in a book-loving ambience he was making forbidden in the fiction he was writing below. He took books off the shelves, finding quotes, then ran downstairs to write some more. Nine days -- and $9.80 in dimes later -- he'd written "Fahrenheit 451." Almost.

  • What he'd finished there was "The Fireman," a short story published in Galaxy magazine in 1951. Later, he expanded the story into "Fahrenheit 451," which was published in paperback by Ballantine.

  • When "Fahrenheit 451" was selected as one of the books for the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read project, Bradbury said, "My God, what a place to write that book!"

(Los Angeles Times)

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