Illustrated Fiction - Illustrated Fiction in The 1900s

Illustrated Fiction in The 1900s

The amount of illustrated fiction that was published declined from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1930s. By the 1930s, illustrations were rarely used in adult's novels. Illustrated serious fiction was not popular over the rest of the century. The decline in the publication of serials, rise in labour costs, and competition from film, television, and photojournalism contributed to its decline. There was also less demand from readers. Historians of Western illustrated fiction mostly agree that film replaced the illustrated book. A review of the 1915 film adaptation of Vanity Fair said that "the reels make a set of illustrations superior to the conventional pen-pictures of a deluxe edition."

Modern literary fiction was often not well-suited to illustration, for example the introspective novels of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Illustrations were used on book covers to attract buyers, but not used within the novel. Similar to the period before 1836, illustrations were not commissioned for new books, but were commissioned for established classics, usually for a limited luxury edition. Serious novels are not illustrated, and illustrated fiction is generally associated with serialized or short fiction that is published in popular but not intellectually prestigious magazines. Children and comics readers became the only fiction readers whose fiction was generally illustrated.

Some authors were concerned that illustrations would date or misinterpret their prose. Henry James disliked illustrations, claiming that illustrations were not needed because prose was sufficiently pictorial. He thought that illustrations and prose were in competition with one another. He permitted his travel books, but not his mature fiction, to be illustrated. Alvin Colburn's photographs were used in the New York edition of his works only as frontispieces, and only after James reassured himself that they did not compete or make a reference to his prose. Similar to James, Thomas Hardy increasingly excluded illustrations from the collected editions of his novels, with the exception of maps that he had drawn and photographic frontispieces.

None of the first or standard editions of James Joyce's novels were illustrated during his lifetime, except for an edition of Ulysses published by the Limited Editions Club in 1935, which included drawings and etchings by Henri Matisse. Pearl Buck's husband Richard Walsh, as editor of Asia, included illustrations with Buck's work that was published there in serial or complete form. However, as editor and later president of the John Day Company, he did not include illustrations in the subsequent hardcover editions of these novels. When Ernest Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea was first published in Life magazine in 1952, it was illustrated with blue-tinted drawings by Noel Sickles. These illustrations were not included in its first publication in volume form, published by Charles Scribner's Sons.

In the middle of the 20th century, the comic strip using visual images to convey action were a great influence on children and young people. Comic books had a unique storytelling potential.