The article deals with the origins of specific features of the US mass fiction - increased didacticism and broad reliance on the traditions of national literature. In the usage of Russian American studies new facts are introduced (popular novel by JR Ridge "The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the famous Californian bandit" (1854), etc.). Fiction of North America, initially oriented to the widest and most democratic audience, since the XVII century. worked out original techniques and principles of the most effective impact on the reader. European borrowings of the XVIII century. They also adapted it both in the national spirit and in terms of the purely understandable moral lesson. Known traditions of American literature were developed in the work of romantic writers of the XIX century. (Cooper, Po, Beecher Stow, and others), in which the parameters of the popular US literature of the turn of the XIX-XX and XX centuries are clearly seen.