Potboiler or pot-boiler is a term used to describe a poor quality novel, play, opera, or film, or other creative work that was created quickly to make money to pay for the creator's daily expenses (thus the imagery of "boil the pot",[1] which means "to provide one's livelihood"[2]). Authors who create potboiler novels or screenplays are sometimes called hack writers. Novels deemed to be potboilers may also be called pulp fiction, and potboiler films may be called "popcorn movies."
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"In the more elevated arenas of artistry such a motive...was considered deeply demeaning."[3] If a serious playwright or novelist's creation is called a potboiler, this has a negative connotation that suggests that it is a mediocre or inferior-quality work. An early usage of the term that has this sense is in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of New York, dated 1854: “He has not carelessly dashed off his picture, with the remark that ‘it will do for a pot-boiler’”.[3] Similarly, Jane Scovell's 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. [4] 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." [5] 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."[6]
A definition of potboiler fiction from the 2000s captures the sense that it is an inferior grade of writing; in a Publishers Weekly article, author David Schow called potboilers fiction that "... stacks bricks of plot into a nice, neat line."[7]