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Vice & Virtue. Like Ned Buntline, most of the bestselling dime novelists could write as easily as they could breathe, and few of them had any compunctions about cribbing from each other, or even repeating their own works time after time. Some were so lost to literary shame that they wrote their stories to fit old illustrations, thereby saving publishers the price of new ones.
Their prose showed the effects of their hell-for-leather pace; so did their supreme disregard for facts. Edward L. Wheeler, the creator of the legendary Deadwood Dick, had never been west of Pennsylvania, and he rejuggled western geography and topography with wild abandon.
Yet in one sense the crudities of the dime novel were not vices but byproducts of their one great virtue. It was the first time any sizable body of U.S. writers had stopped laboring European themes, and started working native material. Because the dime novelists got plenty of slag out of the way, later writers could dig into the true metal of the American novel.