in maintaining the public's well being during the harsh reality of the period. Reading genres such as escapist fiction during this period allowed people to escape from the uncertainties, anxieties and loss of self-esteem resulting from the Great Depression period. Popular culture, in particular escapist fiction as a genre, thrived and evolved during the 1930s unlike other industries. Owing to the unemployment during the depression, people had more free time and sought-after ways to fill their time and escape the bleak reality they faced. Most popular culture and fiction created during the period of 1929 to 1941 did not deal with or contain any explicit references to the harsh realities of the Great Depression as a topic. This further supports this idea that in this context popular culture and fiction were largely utilised as a vehicle to escape the deprived and alienated living conditions characteristic of the period. In the 1950s and 1960s people tended to view the topic of escapism through a socio-political perspective, analysing how the dysfunctions of society trigger peoples need for escape. Reading fiction during the Great Depression was popular, readers searching for escapist literature had a vast array of materials to choose from, such as "pulps", comic strips, comic books, fiction novels, etc. The designation of escape in literature, known as escapist fiction, dates back to the 1930s. The word "escapism" was born in the 1930s and grew rapidly in usage. In the 1940s and the 1950s the term escapism in terms of literature was largely criticised. In the 1960s and 1970s the concept of "escape" in literature emerged as a mode of dealing with imperfect existence where the reader could temporarily escape reality. The conceptual idea and intention of escapist literature is to erase difference and to free readers of the intricacies and responsibilities of historical specificity. Ideology Fantasy literature is escapist in nature, creating another world where the reader and protagonist escape their familiar surroundings and enter into a different and new environment. Escapist fiction creates these alternate, fantasy worlds to escape the immediate socio-political and economic settings of the real world. The secondary world created in works of escapist fiction is something that closely mirrors the primary one. The secondary world is also a way of understanding and coping with the things we want to escape from in our primary world. This secondary world would not be successful if readers did not