What the Shadows Know: The Crime-Fighting Hero The Shadow and his Haunting of Late 1950s Literature

Abstract

This paper examines thereemergence of the popular crime fighter The Shadow in the work of SylviaPlath, Jack Kerouac, and Amiri Baraka. The Shadow was an immensely successful pulp magazine and radiophenomenon known to millions during the 1930s and 1940s. In the pulps he wasdrawn in the hardboiled style of the era, and in radio’s “golden age,” he wasknown by his eerie, disembodied laugh.  Thisdark mysteriousness, along with his willingness to use vigilante justice inorder to punish his adversaries, marks The Shadow as a strange sort of crimefighter.  While he is clearly on the sideof justice, there remains a hint of darkness in his character.  It isprecisely this uncertainty that compels Plath, Kerouac, and Baraka to put TheShadow to new uses in their works.  Allthree draw on the figure of The Shadow to comment on the loss of childhoodinnocence. For these artists, meaning is found in the shadows because life isnever simply black and white.  But it isimportant that this nostalgic looking back takes place within a postwarpresent.  The ambiguities that The Shadowraises allow these authors to simultaneously comment on the Cold War conditionsof their texts' production and reception.  In an era that positedtruth as a binary choice between light and darkness, The Shadow was a usefulsite for deconstructing the Manichean rhetoric of the Cold War.