In 1854 used the term in the following sentence: "He has not carelessly dashed off his picture, with the remark that 'it will do for a pot-boiler'".[3]
Putnam's Magazine
's Oona: 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."
Jane Scovell
in a letter to illustrator A. B. Frost in 1880, advises Frost not to spend his advance pay for his work on Rhyme? & Reason? lest he be forced to "do a 'pot-boiler' for some magazine" to make ends meet.[4]
Lewis Carroll
A 1980s reviewer for condemned the novel Thy Brother's Wife, by Andrew Greeley, as a "putrid, puerile, prurient, pulpy potboiler".[5]
Time
In the late 1990s, American author and newspaper reporter wrote that reading a "potboiler" is "a fine form of relaxation but not exactly mind-expanding."[6]
Stephen Kinzer
In an interview with , writer David Schow described potboilers as fiction that "stacks bricks of plot into a nice, neat line".[7]