Largely ignored in American literary history, the magazine novelwas extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century, with editors describing theform as a virtual "necessity" for magazines. Unlike many previous studies ofperiodicals that focus often exclusively on elite literary magazines, Social Storiestreats a variety of magazines and authors, ranging from Ann Stephens's novels infashionable magazines for women to William Dean Howells's anxious investigation ofmodern mass culture in A Modern Instance. William Gilmore Simms's pro-Southernantebellum novels, the publication of Martin Delany's Blake in an African Americanmagazine, Jeremy Belknap's investigation of the racial and national politics of theearly national period, and Rebecca Harding Davis's efforts to make sense of raceduring Reconstruction all receive Patricia Okker's carefulattention. Byexploring how magazine novelists addressed audiences that differed from one anotherin terms of race, region, class, and gender, Social Stories offers a narrative ofthe American magazine novel that emphasizes its direct engagement with social, political, and cultural issues of its day. Rejecting the association of novelreading with notions of the private, Okker convincingly argues thatnineteenth-century magazine novels were indeed fiercely social. Createdcollaboratively with readers, editors, and authors, and read among a community ofreaders and other texts, the serial novel of the 1800s proved to be an ideal formfor exploring the strategies Americans used and the obstacles they faced in formingand sustaining a collective sense of themselves. They are, in short, novels thattell stories about how -- and whether -- individuals can come together to form asociety.