Excitable Fictions: Peyton Place and the Possibility of "Dirty" Talk

The fan mail of Peyton Place's readers suggests two things: one, the ways in which the novel operated as a form of gossip and scandal, suggesting that historians need to explore popular novels like Peyton Place as both text and talk; two, that readers found in Peyton Place a narrative template and language to discuss and conceptualize their own discomfort and alienation from normative ideals and identities.