Potboiler

Usage

High culture

Historical usages

• In 1854 Putnam’s Magazine used the term in the following sentence: “He has not carelessly dashed off his picture, with the remark that ‘it will do for a pot-boiler’”.
• Jane Scovell's Oona: Living in the Shadows states that "...the play was a mixed blessing. Through it O'Neill latched on to a perennial source of income, but the promise of his youth was essentially squandered on a potboiler."
• Lewis Carroll, in a letter to illustrator A. B. Frost in 1880, remarks that Frost should spend his advance pay from his work on Rhyme? & Reason? lest he be forced to "do a 'pot-boiler' for some magazine" to make ends meet.
• In an early-1980s Time review of a book by Andrew Greeley, the author called his novel Thy Brother's Wife a "...putrid, puerile, prurient, pulpy potboiler".
• In the late 1990s, American author and newspaper reporter Stephen Kinzer referred to potboilers in this derogatory sense: "If reading and travel are two of life's most rewarding experiences, to combine them is heavenly. I don't mean sitting on a beach reading the latest potboiler, a fine form of relaxation but not exactly mind-expanding."
• In an interview with Publishers Weekly, writer David Schow described potboilers as fiction that "...stacks bricks of plot into a nice, neat line".