In the Valley of the Shadow

A full-page newspaper story illustration from The Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), part of its Banner Series of Selected Short Stories. The halftone vignette shows a man in a waistcoat leaning toward a seated woman in an interior domestic setting — the classic scene of genteel confrontation that drove popular fiction of the era. The bold slab-serif display headline and secondary deck type announce the story by Josephine Dodge Daskam. This is pre-pulp popular fiction in its Sunday supplement form: the direct ancestor of the wood-pulp magazines (1896–1950s) that would codify romance, mystery, and drama into genre formulas later absorbed wholesale by the comic book. Artist unconfirmed.