Pulp magazines also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction

Fiction

Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...

 magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long. Pulps were printed on cheap paper with ragged, untrimmed edges.

The name pulp comes from the cheap wood pulp

Wood pulp

Pulp is a lignocellulosic fibrous material prepared by chemically or mechanically separating cellulose fibres from wood, fibre crops or waste paper. Wood pulp is the most common raw material in papermaking.-History:...

 paper on which the magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper were called "glossies" or "slicks." In their first decades, they were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks were 25 cents apiece. Pulps were the successor to the penny dreadful

Penny Dreadful

A penny dreadful was a type of British fiction publication in the 19th century that usually featured lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks, each part costing an penny...

s, dime novel

Dime novel

Dime novel, though it has a specific meaning, has also become a catch-all term for several different forms of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S...

s, and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories

Exploitation fiction

Exploitation fiction is a type of literature that includes novels and magazines that exploit sex, violence, drugs, or other elements meant to attract readers primarily by arousing prurient interest without being labeled as obscene or pornographic. It is comparable to the Italian giallo...

 and sensational cover art. Modern superhero

Superhero

A superhero is a type of stock character, possessing "extraordinary or superhuman powers", dedicated to protecting the public. Since the debut of the prototypical superhero Superman in 1938, stories of superheroes — ranging from brief episodic adventures to continuing years-long sagas —...

 comic book

Comic book

A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

s are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as The Shadow

The Shadow

The Shadow is a collection of serialized dramas, originally in pulp magazines, then on 1930s radio and then in a wide variety of media, that follow the exploits of the title character, a crime-fighting vigilante in the pulps, which carried over to the airwaves as a "wealthy, young man about town"...

, Doc Savage

Doc Savage

Doc Savage is a fictional character originally published in American pulp magazines during the 1930s and 1940s. He was created by publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L...

, and The Phantom Detective

The Phantom Detective

The Phantom Detective was the second pulp hero character published, after The Shadow. The first issue was released in February of 1933, a month before Doc Savage, which was released in March of 1933. The title continued to be released until 1953, with a total 170 issues...

.

Origins

The first "pulp" was Frank Munsey

Frank Munsey

Frank Andrew Munsey was an American newspaper and magazine publisher and author. He was born in Mercer, Maine but spent most of his life in New York City...

's revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896, about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue on pulp paper with untrimmed edges and no illustrations, not even on the cover. While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people. In six years Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million.

Street & Smith

Street & Smith

Street & Smith or Street & Smith Publications, Inc. was a New York City publisher specializing in inexpensive paperbacks and magazines referred to as pulp fiction and dime novels. They also published comic books and sporting yearbooks...

 were next on the market. A dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, they saw Argosys success, and in 1903 launched The Popular Magazine

The Popular Magazine

The Popular Magazine was an early American literary magazine that ran for 612 issues from November 1903 to October 1931. It featured short fiction, novellas, serialized larger works, and even entire short novels...

, billed as the "biggest magazine in the world" by virtue of being two pages longer than Argosy. Due to differences in page layout

Page layout

Page layout is the part of graphic design that deals in the arrangement and style treatment of elements on a page.- History and development :...

, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy. The Popular Magazine introduced color covers to pulp publishing. The magazine began to take off when, in 1905, the publishers acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha

Ayesha (novel)

Ayesha, the Return of She is a gothic novel by the popular Victorian author H. Rider Haggard, published in 1905, as a sequel to his far more popular and well known novel, She...

, by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his popular novel She

She (novel)

She, subtitled A History of Adventure, is a novel by Henry Rider Haggard, first serialized in The Graphic magazine from October 1886 to January 1887. She is one of the classics of imaginative literature, and with over 83 million copies sold in 44 different languages, one of the best-selling books...

. Haggard's Lost World

Lost World (genre)

The Lost World literary genre is a fantasy or science fiction genre that involves the discovery of a new world out of time, place, or both. It began as a subgenre of the late-Victorian imperial romance and remains popular to this day....

 genre influenced several key pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...

, Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard

Robert Ervin Howard was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. Best known for his character Conan the Barbarian, he is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre....

, Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy was an English writer. He also wrote under the pseudonym Walter Galt.-Life and work:...

 and Abraham Merritt. In 1907, the cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue; along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine, this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of Argosy. Street and Smith's next innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, each magazine focusing on a genre such as detective stories, romance, etc.

At their peak of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, the most successful pulps could sell up to one million copies per issue. The
most successful pulp magazines were Argosy

Argosy (magazine)

Argosy was an American pulp magazine, published by Frank Munsey. It is generally considered to be the first American pulp magazine. The magazine began as a general information periodical entitled The Golden Argosy, targeted at the boys adventure market.-Launch of Argosy:In late September 1882,...

, Adventure

Adventure (magazine)

Adventure magazine was first published in November 1910 as a monthly pulp magazine. Adventure went on become one of the most profitable and critically acclaimed of all the American pulp magazines...

, Blue Book

Blue Book (magazine)

Blue Book was a popular 20th-century American magazine with a lengthy 70-year run under various titles from 1905 to 1975.Launched as The Monthly Story Magazine, it was published under that title from May 1905 to August 1906 with a change to The Monthly Story Blue Book Magazine for issues from...

and
Short Stories

Short Stories (magazine)

-Origin of Short Stories:Short Stories began its existence as a literary periodical, carrying work by Rudyard Kipling,Emile Zola, Bret Harte, Ivan Turgenev and Anna Katharine Green. The magazine advertised...

described by some pulp historians as "The Big Four". Among the best-known other
titles of this period were Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories was an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction...

, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces

Flying Aces (magazine)

Flying Aces was one of a number of so-called "flying pulp" magazines, popular during the 1920s and 1930s. Like other pulp magazines, it was originally printed on coarse, pulpy paper, but later moved to a "slick" format. The magazine was launched in October 1928 by Periodical House, Inc...

, Horror Stories

Horror Stories (magazine)

Horror Stories was an American pulp magazine that published tales of the supernatural, horror, and macabre. The first issue was published in January 1935, three years after the weird menace genre had begun with Dime Mystery Magazine. Horror Stories was a sister magazine to Terror Tales, whose first...

, Love Story Magazine,
Marvel Tales

Marvel Tales

Marvel Tales is the title of three American comic-book series published by Marvel Comics, the first of them from the company's 1950s predecessor, Atlas Comics...

, Oriental Stories

Oriental Stories

Oriental Stories, later retitled The Magic Carpet Magazine, was a pulp magazine of 1930-34, an offshoot of the famous Weird Tales....

, Planet Stories

Planet Stories

Planet Stories was an American pulp science fiction magazine, published by Fiction House between 1939 and 1955. It featured interplanetary adventures, both in space and on other planets, and was initially focused on a young readership. Malcolm Reiss was editor or editor-in-chief for all of its 71...

, Spicy Detective,
Startling Stories

Startling Stories

Startling Stories was an American pulp science fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1955 by Standard Magazines. It was initially edited by Mort Weisinger, who was also the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Standard's other science fiction title. Startling ran a lead novel in every issue;...

, Thrilling Wonder Stories

Wonder Stories

Wonder Stories was an early American science fiction magazine which was published under several titles from 1929 to 1955. It was founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1929 after he had lost control of his first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, when his media company Experimenter Publishing went...

,
Unknown

Unknown (magazine)

Unknown was an American pulp fantasy fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1943 by Street & Smith, and edited by John W. Campbell. Unknown was a companion to Street & Smith's science fiction pulp, Astounding Science Fiction, which was also edited by Campbell at the time; many authors and...

, Weird Tales

Weird Tales

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre....

and Western Story Magazine.

Although pulp magazines were primarily a US phenomenon, there were also a number of British pulp magazines published between
the Edwardian era and World War Two. Notable UK pulps included Pall Mall Magazine, The Novel Magazine,
Cassell's Magazine

Cassell's Magazine

Cassell's Magazine was the successor to Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper, which was published from 31 December 1853 to 9 March 1867, becoming Cassell's Family Magazine in 1874, Cassell's Magazine in 1897, and, after 1912, Cassell's Magazine of Fiction.The magazine was edited by H. G...

, The Sovereign Magazine, Hutchinson's Adventure-Story and Hutchinson's Mystery-Story.

WWII

The Second World War paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production, starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps. Beginning with Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, pulp magazines began to switch to digest size

Digest size

Digest size is a magazine size, smaller than a conventional or "journal size" magazine but larger than a standard paperback book, approximately 5½ x 8¼ inches, but can also be 5⅜ x 8⅜ inches and 5½ x 7½ inches. These sizes have evolved from the printing press operation end...

; smaller, thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks.

The pulp format declined from rising expenses, but even more due to the heavy competition from comic book

Comic book

A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

s, television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

, and the paperback

Paperback

Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...

 novel. In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s, Men's adventure

Men's adventure

Men's adventure is a genre of magazines that had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Catering to a male audience, these magazines featured glamour photography and lurid tales of adventure that typically featured wartime feats of daring, exotic travel or conflict with wild animals.These magazines are...

 magazines began to replace the pulp.

The 1957 liquidation of the American News Company, then the primary distributor of pulp magazines, has sometimes been taken as marking the end of the "pulp era"; by that date, many of the famous pulps of the previous generation, including Black Mask, The Shadow

The Shadow

The Shadow is a collection of serialized dramas, originally in pulp magazines, then on 1930s radio and then in a wide variety of media, that follow the exploits of the title character, a crime-fighting vigilante in the pulps, which carried over to the airwaves as a "wealthy, young man about town"...

, Doc Savage

Doc Savage

Doc Savage is a fictional character originally published in American pulp magazines during the 1930s and 1940s. He was created by publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L...

, and Weird Tales

Weird Tales

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre....

, were defunct. Almost all of the few remaining pulp magazines are science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 or mystery

Mystery fiction

Mystery fiction is a loosely-defined term.1.It is often used as a synonym for detective fiction or crime fiction— in other words a novel or short story in which a detective investigates and solves a crime mystery. Sometimes mystery books are nonfiction...

 magazines now in formats similar to "digest size

Digest size

Digest size is a magazine size, smaller than a conventional or "journal size" magazine but larger than a standard paperback book, approximately 5½ x 8¼ inches, but can also be 5⅜ x 8⅜ inches and 5½ x 7½ inches. These sizes have evolved from the printing press operation end...

", such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Analog Science Fiction and Fact is an American science fiction magazine. As of 2011, it is the longest running continuously published magazine of that genre...

and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is an American monthly digest size fiction magazine specializing in crime fiction, particularly detective fiction...

. The format is still in use for some lengthy serials, like the German science fiction weekly Perry Rhodan

Perry Rhodan

Perry Rhodan is the name of a science fiction series published since 1961 in Germany, as well as the name of the main character. It is a space opera, dealing with several themes of science fiction. Having sold over one billion copies worldwide, it is the most successful science fiction book series...

(over 2,450 issues as of 2009).

Over the course of their evolution, there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles; Harry Steeger

Harry Steeger

Henry "Harry" Steeger co-founded Popular Publications in 1930, one of the major publishers of pulp magazines, with Harold S. Goldsmith. Steeger handled editorial matters while Goldsmith took care of the business side. Both were veterans of the pulp magazine business. Steeger had edited war pulps at...

 of Popular Publications

Popular Publications

Popular Publications was one of the largest publishers of pulp magazines during its existence, at one point publishing 42 different titles per month. Company titles included detective, adventure, romance, and Western fiction. They were also known for the several 'weird menace' titles...

 claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month. Many titles of course survived only briefly. While the most popular titles were monthly, many were bimonthly and some were quarterly.

The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories. Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, writers attempting to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces.

Genres

Pulp magazines often contained a wide variety of genre fiction

Genre fiction

Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre....

, including, but not limited to,

• adventure
  Adventure novel
  The adventure novel is a genre of novels that has adventure, an exciting undertaking involving risk and physical danger, as its main theme.-History:...
  
  
• detective
  Detective
  A detective is an investigator, either a member of a police agency or a private person. The latter may be known as private investigators or "private eyes"...
  
  /mystery
  Mystery fiction
  Mystery fiction is a loosely-defined term.1.It is often used as a synonym for detective fiction or crime fiction— in other words a novel or short story in which a detective investigates and solves a crime mystery. Sometimes mystery books are nonfiction...
  
  
• fantasy
  Fantasy literature
  Fantasy literature is fantasy in written form. Historically speaking, literature has composed the majority of fantasy works. Since the 1950s however, a growing segment of the fantasy genre has taken the form of films, television programs, graphic novels, video games, music, painting, and other...
  
  /sword and sorcery
  Sword and sorcery
  Sword and sorcery is a sub-genre of fantasy and historical fantasy, generally characterized by sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent conflicts. An element of romance is often present, as is an element of magic and the supernatural...
  
  
• gangster
  Gangster
  A gangster is a criminal who is a member of a gang. Some gangs are considered to be part of organized crime. Gangsters are also called mobsters, a term derived from mob and the suffix -ster....
  
  
• horror/occult
  Occult
  The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...
  
   (including "weird menace
  Weird menace
  Weird menace is the name given to a sub-genre of horror fiction that was popular in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and early 1940s. The weird menace pulps, also known as "shudder pulps", generally featured stories in which the hero was pitted against sadistic villains, with graphic scenes of...
  
  ")
• railroad
• romance
  Romance novel
  The romance novel is a literary genre developed in Western culture, mainly in English-speaking countries. Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Through the late...
  
  
• science fiction
  Science fiction
  Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
  
  
• Série Noire (French crime mystery)
• "spicy/saucy" (soft porn)
• sports
• war
  War
  War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...
  
  
• westerns (also see Dime Western
  Dime Western
  A Dime Western is a modern term for Western themed dime novels, which spanned the era of the 1860s—1900s. Most would hardly be recognizable as a modern western, having more in common with James Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking saga, but many of the standard elements originated here: a cool...
  
  ); the Colorado
  Colorado
  Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...
  
   artist
  Artist
  An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
  
   Arthur Roy Mitchell
  Arthur Roy Mitchell
  Arthur Roy Mitchell was an American artist and historian who was born on his father's homestead west of Trinidad in Las Animas County in southern Colorado....
  
   is particularly known for his sketches of the covers of such western magazines.

The American Old West

American Old West

The American Old West, or the Wild West, comprises the history, geography, people, lore, and cultural expression of life in the Western United States, most often referring to the latter half of the 19th century, between the American Civil War and the end of the century...

 was a mainstay genre of early turn of the century

Turn of the century

Turn of the century, in its broadest sense, refers to the transition from one century to another. The term is most often used to indicate a non-specific time period either before or after the beginning of a century....

 novels as well as later pulp magazines, and lasted longest of all the traditional pulps. In many ways, the later men's adventure

Men's adventure

Men's adventure is a genre of magazines that had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Catering to a male audience, these magazines featured glamour photography and lurid tales of adventure that typically featured wartime feats of daring, exotic travel or conflict with wild animals.These magazines are...

 ("the sweats") was the replacement of pulps.

Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originally serialized

Serial (literature)

In literature, a serial is a publishing format by which a single large work, most often a work of narrative fiction, is presented in contiguous installments—also known as numbers, parts, or fascicles—either issued as separate publications or appearing in sequential issues of a single periodical...

 in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales

Weird Tales

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre....

, Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories was an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction...

, and Black Mask.

Notable original characters

While the majority of pulp magazines were anthology

Anthology

An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...

 titles featuring many different authors, characters and settings, some of the most enduringly popular magazines were those that featured a single recurring character. These were often referred to as "hero pulps" because the recurring character was almost always a larger-than-life hero in the mold of Doc Savage or The Shadow.

Popular pulp characters included:

• The Avenger
• Biggles
  Biggles
  "Biggles" , a pilot and adventurer, is the title character and main hero of the Biggles series of youth-oriented adventure books written by W. E. Johns....
  
  
• The Black Bat
  The Black Bat
  The Black Bat was the name of two unrelated pulp heroes featured in different pulp magazine series in the 1930s, most well known because of their similarity to DC Comics hero, Batman.-The first Black Bat:...
  
  
• Bran Mak Morn
  Bran Mak Morn
  Bran Mak Morn is a hero of several pulp fiction short stories by Robert E. Howard. In the stories, most of which were first published in Weird Tales, Bran is the last king of Howard's romanticized version of the tribal race of Picts....
  
  
• Buck Rogers
  Buck Rogers
  Anthony Rogers is a fictional character that first appeared in Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. A sequel, The Airlords of Han, was published in the March 1929 issue....
  
  
• Captain Future
  Captain Future
  Captain Future is a science fictional hero pulp character originally published in self-titled American pulp magazines during the 1940s and early 50s.-Origins:...
  
  
• Conan the Barbarian
  Conan the Barbarian
  Conan the Barbarian is a fictional sword and sorcery hero that originated in pulp fiction magazines and has since been adapted to books, comics, several films , television programs, video games, roleplaying games and other media...
  
  
• The Continental Op
  The Continental Op
  The Continental Op is a fictional character created by Dashiell Hammett. A private investigator employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office, he never gives his name and so is known only by his job description....
  
  
• Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective
  Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective
  Dan Turner, also known as the Hollywood Detective, was a fictional private detective created by Robert Leslie Bellem. His first appearance was in the second issue of the pulp magazine Spicy Detective, dated June 1934, and he continued to appear regularly in that magazine until its demise in...
  
  
• Doc Savage
  Doc Savage
  Doc Savage is a fictional character originally published in American pulp magazines during the 1930s and 1940s. He was created by publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L...
  
  
• Doctor Death
  Doctor Death (magazine)
  Doctor Death was the title of a short-lived pulp science fiction magazine published by Dell Magazines in 1935, as well as the name of the main character featured in that magazine...
  
  
• Dr. Yen Sin
  Dr. Yen Sin
  Dr. Yen Sin was a short-lived pulp science fiction magazine published by Popular Publications during 1936. It superseded a similar magazine from the same publishers entitled The Mysterious Wu Fang, which had ceased publication in February 1936. The title characters of both magazines, Wu Fang and...
  
  
• Domino Lady
  Domino Lady
  The Domino Lady was a masked pulp heroine who first appeared in the May 1936 issue of Saucy Romantic Adventures. All of her stories were published under the house name "Lars Anderson" owned by the publisher, Fiction House. The author's real identity is unknown.Saucy Romantic Adventures was a "spicy...
  
  
• The Eel
  The Eel (fictional character)
  The Eel is a pulp fiction character, a gentleman thief of "courageous action and questionable morals," created by Hugh B. Cave, writing under the pseudonym Justin Case...
  
  
• Flash Gordon
  Flash Gordon
  Flash Gordon is the hero of a science fiction adventure comic strip originally drawn by Alex Raymond. First published January 7, 1934, the strip was inspired by and created to compete with the already established Buck Rogers adventure strip. Also inspired by these series were comics such as Dash...
  
  
• Fu Manchu
  Fu Manchu
  Dr. Fu Manchu is a fictional character introduced in a series of novels by British author Sax Rohmer during the first half of the 20th century...
  
  
• G-8
  G-8 (character)
  G-8 was a heroic aviator and spy during World War I in pulp fiction. He starred in his own title G-8 and His Battle Aces, published by Popular Publications. All stories were written by Robert J. Hogan, under his own name. The title lasted 110 issues, from October 1933 to June 1944...
  
  
• Green Lama
  Green Lama
  The Green Lama was an American pulp magazine hero of the 1940s. In many respects a typical costumed crime-fighter of the period, the Green Lama's most unusual feature was the fact that he was a practicing Buddhist...
  
  
• Hopalong Cassidy
  Hopalong Cassidy
  Hopalong Cassidy is a fictional cowboy hero created in 1904 by the author Clarence E. Mulford, who wrote a series of popular short stories and twenty-eight novels based on the character....
  
  
• Jim Anthony
  Jim Anthony
  Jim Anthony, Super Detective, was a fictional pulp magazine character published in Trojan Publications's Super Detective magazine. Jim Anthony was an attempt to create a Doc Savage like character...
  
  
• John Carter of Mars
• Jules de Grandin
  Jules de Grandin
  Jules de Grandin is a fictional occult detective created by Seabury Quinn for Weird Tales. Assisted by Dr. Trowbridge , de Grandin fought ghosts, werewolves, satanists in over ninety stories between 1925 and 1951. Jules de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge lived in Harrisonville, New Jersey...
  
  
• Ka-Zar
• Khlit the Cossack
  Khlit the Cossack
  Khlit the Cossack is a literary character created by Harold Lamb for Adventure between 1917 and 1926.A wandering Cossack hero, Khlit defies conventional stereotypes: he is not a lover, nor is he youthful or flamboyant...
  
  
• Kull
• Moon Man
  Moon Man (literary character)
  The Moon Man is a fictional pulp magazine character who appeared in Ten Detective Aces magazine, published by A.A. Wyn's Ace Magazines. He was a pulp hero in the Robin Hood mold. Frederick C. Davis created the character and wrote all the stories under his own name...
  
  
• Nick Carter
  Nick Carter (literary character)
  Nick Carter is a fictional character who began as a pulp fiction private detective and has appeared in a variety of formats over more than a century.-Literary history:...
  
  
• Operator No. 5
  Operator No. 5
  Operator #5 was a pulp hero that appeared in his own ten cent pulp magazine. It was soon renamed Secret Service Operator #5 and was published by Popular Publications between 1934 and 1939.-Characters:...
  
  
• The Phantom Detective
  The Phantom Detective
  The Phantom Detective was the second pulp hero character published, after The Shadow. The first issue was released in February of 1933, a month before Doc Savage, which was released in March of 1933. The title continued to be released until 1953, with a total 170 issues...
  
  
• Lord Lister(aka Raffles)
  Raffles (Lord Lister)
  Raffles and Lord Lister are the names of a popular fictional gentleman thief, who first appeared in a German pulp magazine entitled "Lord Lister, genannt Raffles, der Meisterdieb" published in 1908...
  
  
• Secret Agent X
  Secret Agent X
  Secret Agent X was the title of a U.S. pulp magazine published by A. A. Wyn's Ace Magazines, and the name of the main character featured in the magazine. The magazine ran for 41 issues between February 1934 and March 1939....
  
  
• Sexton Blake
  Sexton Blake
  Sexton Blake is a fictional detective who appeared in many British comic strips and novels throughout the 20th century. He was described by Professor Jeffrey Richards on the BBC in The Radio Detectives in 2003 as "the poor man's Sherlock Holmes"...
  
  
• The Shadow
  The Shadow
  The Shadow is a collection of serialized dramas, originally in pulp magazines, then on 1930s radio and then in a wide variety of media, that follow the exploits of the title character, a crime-fighting vigilante in the pulps, which carried over to the airwaves as a "wealthy, young man about town"...
  
  
• The Spider
  The Spider
  The Spider was one of the major pulp magazine heroes of the 1930s and 1940s.- Background :The Spider was created by Harry Steeger at Popular Publications in 1933 as competition to Street and Smith Publications' vigilante hero, The Shadow...
  
  
• Solomon Kane
  Solomon Kane
  Solomon Kane is a fictional character created by the pulp-era writer Robert E. Howard. A late 16th / early 17th century Puritan, Solomon Kane is a sombre-looking man who wanders the world with no apparent goal other than to vanquish evil in all its forms...
  
  
• Tarzan
  Tarzan
  Tarzan is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungles by the Mangani "great apes"; he later experiences civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer...
  
  
• Terence X. O'Leary
• Zorro
  Zorro
  Zorro is a fictional character created in 1919 by New York-based pulp writer Johnston McCulley. The character has been featured in numerous books, films, television series, and other media....
  
  

Illustrators

Pulp covers were printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper. They were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress

Damsel in distress

The subject of the damsel in distress, or persecuted maiden, is a classic theme in world literature, art, and film. She is usually a beautiful young woman placed in a dire predicament by a villain or monster and who requires a hero to achieve her rescue. She has become a stock character of fiction,...

, usually awaiting a rescuing hero

Hero

A hero , in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion...

. Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines. The early pulp magazines could boast covers by some distinguished American artists; The Popular Magazine
had covers by N.C. Wyeth, and Edgar Franklin Wittmack

Edgar Franklin Wittmack

Edgar Franklin Wittmack was an illustrator and cover artist for many of the most popular magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. His covers, just as the artwork of his contemporary, Norman Rockwell, were usually created as oil paintings. Where Rockwell specialized in the humorous aspects of small town...

 contributed cover art to Argosy and Short Stories. Later, many artists specialized in creating covers mainly for the pulps; a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as the authors featured on the interior pages. Among the most famous pulp artists were Walter Baumhofer, Earle K. Bergey

Earle K. Bergey

Earle K. Bergey was an American illustrator who painted cover art for a wide diversity of magazines and paperback books...

, Margaret Brundage

Margaret Brundage

Margaret Brundage, born Margaret Hedda Johnson was an American illustrator and painter who is remembered chiefly for having illustrated the pulp magazine Weird Tales...

, Edd Cartier

Edd Cartier

Edward "Edd" Daniel Cartier , was an American pulp magazine illustrator.Born in North Bergen, New Jersey, Cartier studied at Pratt Institute. Following his 1936 graduation from Pratt, his artwork was published in Street and Smith publications, including The Shadow, to which he contributed many...

, Virgil Finlay

Virgil Finlay

Virgil Finlay was an American pulp fantasy, science fiction and horror illustrator. While he worked in a range of media, from gouache to oils, Finlay specialized in, and became famous for, detailed pen-and-ink drawings accomplished with abundant stippling, cross-hatching, and scratchboard techniques...

, Earl Mayan

Earl Mayan

Earl Mayan was an American illustrator whose early career spanned the era of pulp magazines to the post WWII years alongside Norman Rockwell at The Saturday Evening Post...

, Frank R. Paul

Frank R. Paul

Frank Rudolph Paul was an illustrator of US pulp magazines in the science fiction field. He was born in Vienna, Austria and died at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey....

, Norman Saunders

Norman Saunders

Norman Blaine Saunders was a prolific commercial artist who produced paintings for pulp magazines, paperbacks, men's adventure magazines, comic books and trading cards...

, Nick Eggenhofer, (who
specialized in Western

Western (genre)

The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...

 illustrations), Rudolph Belarski and Sidney Riesenberg.
Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown the cover art and asked to write a story to match.

Later pulps began to feature interior illustrations, depicting elements of the stories. The drawings were printed in black ink on the same cream-colored paper used for the text, and had to use specific techniques to avoid blotting on the coarse texture of the cheap pulp. Thus, fine lines and heavy detail were usually not an option. Shading was by crosshatching or pointillism

Pointillism

Pointillism is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. Georges Seurat developed the technique in 1886, branching from Impressionism. The term Pointillism was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works...

, and even that had to be limited and coarse. Usually the art was black lines on the paper's background, but Finlay and a few others did some work that was primarily white lines against large dark areas.

Authors and editors

Another way pulps kept costs down was by paying authors less than other markets; thus many eminent authors started out in the pulps before they were successful enough to sell to better-paying markets, and similarly, well-known authors whose careers were slumping or who wanted a few quick dollars could bolster their income with sales to pulps. Additionally, some of the earlier pulps solicited stories from amateurs who were quite happy to see their words in print and could thus be paid token amounts.

There were also career pulp writers, capable of turning out huge amounts of prose on a steady basis, often with the aid of dictation

Dictation

Dictation can refer to:*Dictation , when one person speaks while another person transcribes what is spoken.*A dictation machine, a device used to record speech for transcription....

 to stenographers, machines or typists. Before he became a novelist, Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...

 was turning out at least 8,000 words per day seven days a week for the pulps, keeping two stenographers fully employed. Pulps would often have their authors use multiple pen names so that they could use multiple stories by the same person in one issue, or use a given author's stories in three or more successive issues, while still appearing to have varied content. One advantage pulps provided to authors was that they paid upon acceptance for material instead of on publication; since a story might be accepted months or even years before publication, to a working writer this was a crucial difference in cash flow

Cash flow

Cash flow is the movement of money into or out of a business, project, or financial product. It is usually measured during a specified, finite period of time. Measurement of cash flow can be used for calculating other parameters that give information on a company's value and situation.Cash flow...

.

Some pulp editors became known for cultivating good fiction and interesting features in their magazines. Preeminent pulp magazine
editors included Arthur Sullivant Hoffman

Arthur Sullivant Hoffman

Arthur Sullivant Hoffman was an American magazine editor. Hoffman isbest known for editing the acclaimed pulp magazine Adventurefrom 1912-1927,as well as playing a role in the creation of the American Legion .-Early Life:...

 (Adventure)

Adventure (magazine)

Adventure magazine was first published in November 1910 as a monthly pulp magazine. Adventure went on become one of the most profitable and critically acclaimed of all the American pulp magazines...

, Robert H. Davis (All-Story Weekly), Harry E. Maule (Short Stories

Short Stories (magazine)

-Origin of Short Stories:Short Stories began its existence as a literary periodical, carrying work by Rudyard Kipling,Emile Zola, Bret Harte, Ivan Turgenev and Anna Katharine Green. The magazine advertised...

), ,
Donald Kennicott (Blue Book

Blue Book (magazine)

Blue Book was a popular 20th-century American magazine with a lengthy 70-year run under various titles from 1905 to 1975.Launched as The Monthly Story Magazine, it was published under that title from May 1905 to August 1906 with a change to The Monthly Story Blue Book Magazine for issues from...

),
Joseph T. Shaw  (Black Mask), Farnsworth Wright

Farnsworth Wright

Farnsworth Wright was the editor of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the magazine's heyday.He was born in California, and educated in the University of Nevada and the University of Washington....

 (Weird Tales

Weird Tales

Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre....

,Oriental Stories

Oriental Stories

Oriental Stories, later retitled The Magic Carpet Magazine, was a pulp magazine of 1930-34, an offshoot of the famous Weird Tales....

), John W. Campbell

John W. Campbell

John Wood Campbell, Jr. was an influential figure in American science fiction. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction , from late 1937 until his death, he is generally credited with shaping the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction.Isaac Asimov called Campbell "the most powerful force in...

(Astounding Science Fiction,Unknown

Unknown (magazine)

Unknown was an American pulp fantasy fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1943 by Street & Smith, and edited by John W. Campbell. Unknown was a companion to Street & Smith's science fiction pulp, Astounding Science Fiction, which was also edited by Campbell at the time; many authors and...

) and Daisy Bacon (Love Story Magazine, Detective Story Magazine).

Authors featured

Well-known authors who wrote for pulps include:

• Poul Anderson
  Poul Anderson
  Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories...
  
  
• Isaac Asimov
  Isaac Asimov
  Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...
  
  
• H. Bedford-Jones
  H. Bedford-Jones
  Henry James O'Brien Bedford-Jones was a Canadian historical, adventure fantasy, science fiction, crime and Western writer who became a naturalized United States citizen in 1908. After being encouraged to try writing by his friend, writer William Wallace Cook, Bedford-Jones began writing dime...
  
  
• Robert Leslie Bellem
  Robert Leslie Bellem
  Robert Leslie Bellem was a prolific American pulp magazine writer, best known for his creation of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective. He was born in either 1894 or 1902, and died in 1968. Before becoming a writer he worked in Los Angeles as a newspaper reporter, radio announcer and film extra...
  
  
• Alfred Bester
• Robert Bloch
  Robert Bloch
  Robert Albert Bloch was a prolific American writer, primarily of crime, horror and science fiction. He is best known as the writer of Psycho, the basis for the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock...
  
  
• Leigh Brackett
  Leigh Brackett
  Leigh Douglass Brackett was an American author, particularly of science fiction. She was also a screenwriter, known for her work on famous films such as The Big Sleep , Rio Bravo , The Long Goodbye and The Empire Strikes Back .-Life:Leigh Brackett was born and grew up in Los Angeles, California...
  
  
• Ray Bradbury
  Ray Bradbury
  Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...
  
  
• Max Brand
  Max Brand
  Frederick Faust, aka Max Brand|thumb|rightFrederick Schiller Faust was an American author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary Westerns. Faust wrote mostly under pen names, but today is primarily known by only one, Max Brand...
  
  
• Fredric Brown
  Fredric Brown
  Fredric Brown was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was born in Cincinnati.He had two sons: James Ross Brown and Linn Lewis Brown ....
  
  
• Edgar Rice Burroughs
  Edgar Rice Burroughs
  Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...
  
  
• William S. Burroughs
  William S. Burroughs
  William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
  
  
• Ellis Parker Butler
  Ellis Parker Butler
  Ellis Parker Butler was an American author.Butler was born in Muscatine, Iowa. He was the author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays and is most famous for his short story "Pigs is Pigs", in which a bureaucratic stationmaster insists on levying the livestock rate for a...
  
  
• Hugh B. Cave
  Hugh B. Cave
  Hugh Barnett Cave was a prolific writer of pulp fiction who also excelled in other genres.-Life:Born in Chester, England, Hugh B. Cave moved during his childhood with his family to Boston, Massachusetts, following the outbreak of World War I...
  
  
• Paul Chadwick
  Paul Chadwick (author)
  Paul Chadwick was a pulp magazine author who wrote many stories under his own name and various pseudonyms. As was the case with many prolific contributors to the pulps, he wrote in a number of different genres including detective stories, science fiction and westerns...
  
  
• Raymond Chandler
  Raymond Chandler
  Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
  
  
• Agatha Christie
  Agatha Christie
  Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...
  
  
• Arthur C. Clarke
  Arthur C. Clarke
  Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
  
  
• Joseph Conrad
  Joseph Conrad
  Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
  
  
• Stephen Crane
  Stephen Crane
  Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...
  
  
• Ray Cummings
  Ray Cummings
  Ray Cummings was an American author of science fiction, rated one of the "founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre". He was born in New York and died in Mount Vernon, New York....
  
  
• Jason Dark
  Jason Dark
  Jason Dark is the pseudonym of Helmut Rellergerd , author of widely read horror detective fiction in the German language.- Life :...
  
  
• Lester Dent
  Lester Dent
  Lester Dent was a prolific pulp fiction author, best known as the creator and main author of the series of novels about the superhuman scientist and adventurer, Doc Savage. The 159 novels written over 16 years were credited to the house name Kenneth Robeson.-Early years:Dent was born in 1904 in...
  
  
• August Derleth
  August Derleth
  August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first publisher of the writings of H. P...
  
  
• Philip K. Dick
  Philip K. Dick
  Philip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...
  
  
• Arthur Conan Doyle
  Arthur Conan Doyle
  Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...
  
  
• J. Allan Dunn
  J. Allan Dunn
  Joseph Allan Dunn , best known as J. Allan Dunn, was one of the high-producing writers of the American pulp magazines. He published well over a thousand stories, novels, and serials from 1914–41. He first made a name for himself in Adventure...
  
  
• Lord Dunsany
• C. M. Eddy, Jr.
  C. M. Eddy, Jr.
  Clifford Martin Eddy, Jr. was an American author best known for his horror and supernatural short stories. He is best remembered for his work in Weird Tales magazine.- Career :...
  
  
• Arthur Guy Empey
  Arthur Guy Empey
  Arthur Guy Empey was a soldier in both the British and American armies of World War I who later reinvented himself as an author, screenwriter, actor and prolific author of pulp fiction....
  
  
• C. S. Forester
  C. S. Forester
  Cecil Scott "C.S." Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith , an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the 11-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen...
  
  
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
  F. Scott Fitzgerald
  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
  
  

• Arthur O. Friel
  Arthur O. Friel
  Arthur Olney Friel was one of the most popular writers for the adventure pulps. He began appearing in Adventure magazine in 1919 with stories set in the Amazon jungle featuring the characters Pedro and Lourenço, two rubber-industry workers who undergo harrowing experiences in the impenetrable...
  
  
• Erle Stanley Gardner
  Erle Stanley Gardner
  Erle Stanley Gardner was an American lawyer and author of detective stories, best known for the Perry Mason series, he also published under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J...
  
  
• Walter B. Gibson
  Walter B. Gibson
  Walter Brown Gibson was an American author and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow...
  
  
• David Goodis
  David Goodis
  David Loeb Goodis was an American noir fiction writer.Born to a respectable Jewish family in Philadelphia, Goodis had two younger brothers, but one died of meningitis at the age of three...
  
  
• Zane Grey
  Zane Grey
  Zane Grey was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the Old West. Riders of the Purple Sage was his bestselling book. In addition to the success of his printed works, they later had second lives and continuing influence...
  
  
• H. Rider Haggard
  H. Rider Haggard
  Sir Henry Rider Haggard, KBE was an English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a founder of the Lost World literary genre. He was also involved in agricultural reform around the British Empire...
  
  
• Edmond Hamilton
  Edmond Hamilton
  Edmond Moore Hamilton was an American author of science fiction stories and novels during the mid-twentieth century. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, he was raised there and in nearby New Castle, Pennsylvania...
  
  
• Dashiell Hammett
  Dashiell Hammett
  Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade , Nick and Nora Charles , and the Continental Op .In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on...
  
  
• Margie Harris
  Margie Harris
  Margie Harris was a pulp writer from 1930-39. She was one of the most popular authors in the short-lived gang pulp genre. Even in an era of hardboiled crime fiction, her stories were unusually hard-edged and bitter. Her best work includes ingenious plotting, remorselessly violent characters, and...
  
  
• Robert A. Heinlein
  Robert A. Heinlein
  Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
  
  
• O. Henry
  O. Henry
  O. Henry was the pen name of the American writer William Sydney Porter . O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.-Early life:...
  
  
• Frank Herbert
  Frank Herbert
  Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr. was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful American science fiction author. Although a short story author, he is best known for his novels, most notably Dune and its five sequels...
  
  
• Robert E. Howard
  Robert E. Howard
  Robert Ervin Howard was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. Best known for his character Conan the Barbarian, he is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre....
  
  
• L. Ron Hubbard
  L. Ron Hubbard
  Lafayette Ronald Hubbard , better known as L. Ron Hubbard , was an American pulp fiction author and religious leader who founded the Church of Scientology...
  
  
• Carl Jacobi
  Carl Richard Jacobi
  Carl Richard Jacobi was an American author. He wrote short stories in the horror, fantasy, science fiction and crime genres for the pulp magazine market.-Biography:...
  
  
• Donald Keyhoe
  Donald Keyhoe
  Donald Edward Keyhoe was an American Marine Corps naval aviator, writer of many aviation articles and stories in a variety of leading publications, and manager of the promotional tours of aviation pioneers, especially of Charles Lindbergh.In the 1950s he became well-known as an UFO researcher,...
  
  
• Rudyard Kipling
  Rudyard Kipling
  Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
  
  
• Henry Kuttner
  Henry Kuttner
  Henry Kuttner was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror.-Early life:Henry Kuttner was born in Los Angeles, California in 1915...
  
  
• Harold Lamb
  Harold Lamb
  Harold Albert Lamb was an American historian, screenwriter, short story writer, and novelist.Lamb was born in Alpine, New Jersey. He attended Columbia University, where his interest in the peoples and history of Asia began. Lamb's tutors at Columbia included Carl Van Doren andJohn Erskine. ...
  
  
• Louis L'Amour
  Louis L'Amour
  Louis Dearborn L'Amour was an American author. His books consisted primarily of Western fiction novels , however he also wrote historical fiction , science fiction , nonfiction , as well as poetry and short-story collections. Many of his stories were made into movies...
  
  
• Fritz Leiber
  Fritz Leiber
  Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. was an American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theatre and films, playwright, expert chess player and a champion fencer. Possibly his greatest chess accomplishment was winning clear first in the 1958 Santa Monica Open.. With...
  
  
• Murray Leinster
  Murray Leinster
  Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history...
  
  
• Elmore John Leonard
• Jack London
  Jack London
  John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
  
  
• H. P. Lovecraft
  H. P. Lovecraft
  Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
  
  
• Giles A. Lutz
  Giles A. Lutz
  Giles Alfred Lutz was a prolific author of fiction in the Western genre. Born in March 1910 in Missouri, United States, Lutz for many years wrote short stories about the American West that were published in pulp magazines...
  
  
• John D. MacDonald
  John D. MacDonald
  John Dann MacDonald was an American crime and suspense novelist and short story writer.MacDonald was a prolific author of crime and suspense novels, many of them set in his adopted home of Florida...
  
  
• Elmer Brown Mason
  Elmer Brown Mason
  Elmer Brown Mason, graduated from Yale College in 1906, and became an entomologist for the now-defunct Bureau of Entomology in 1910. In addition, he was a seasoned world traveler. In 1915, his fantastic stories of scientists hunting rare species in the remote corners of the world started appearing...
  
  
• F. Van Wyck Mason
  F. Van Wyck Mason
  Francis Van Wyck Mason was an American historian and novelist. He had a long and prolific career as a writer spanning 50 years and including 78 published novels, many of which were best sellers and well received.- Life :Van Wyck Mason was born to a patrician Boston family which traced its roots...
  
  
• Horace McCoy
  Horace McCoy
  Horace McCoy was an American writer whose hardboiled novels took place during the Great Depression. His best-known novel is They Shoot Horses, Don't They? , which was made into a movie of the same name in 1969, fourteen years after McCoy's death.-Early life:McCoy was born in Pegram, Tennessee...
  
  
• Johnston McCulley
  Johnston McCulley
  Johnston McCulley was the author of hundreds of stories, fifty novels, numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro...
  
  
• John D. McDonald

• Merriam Modell
  Merriam Modell
  Merriam Modell was an American author of pulp fiction, who wrote under the pen-name 'Evelyn Piper'....
  
  
• C.L. Moore
• Walt Morey
  Walt Morey
  Walter "Walt" Morey , was an award-winning author of numerous works of children's fiction, set in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Alaska, the places where Morey lived for all of his life...
  
  
• Talbot Mundy
  Talbot Mundy
  Talbot Mundy was an English writer. He also wrote under the pseudonym Walter Galt.-Life and work:...
  
  
• Philip Francis Nowlan
  Philip Francis Nowlan
  Philip Francis Nowlan was an American science fiction author, best known as the creator of Buck Rogers.-Career:...
  
  
• Fulton Oursler
  Fulton Oursler
  Charles Fulton Oursler was an American journalist, playwright, editor and writer. Writing as Anthony Abbot, he was an notable author of mysteries and detective fiction.-Life:...
  
  
• Hugh Pendexter
  Hugh Pendexter
  Hugh Pendexter was an American journalist, novelist, screenwriter.Pendexter began his career as a humorous writer; some of this early work was anthologised in Mark Twain's book,Library of Humor and Wit....
  
  
• Emil Petaja
  Emil Petaja
  Emil Petaja was an American science fiction and fantasy writer whose career spanned seven decades. He was the author of 13 published novels, nearly 150 short stories, numerous poems, and a handful of books and articles on various subjects...
  
  
• E. Hoffmann Price
• Seabury Quinn
  Seabury Quinn
  Seabury Grandin Quinn was an American pulp magazine author, most famous for his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, published in Weird Tales.-Biography:...
  
  
• John H. Reese
  John H. Reese
  John Henry Reese was an American author of Western and Crime Fiction. He won the prestigious 1952 New York Herald Tribune award for his first children's book, Big Mutt. He produced more than 40 Western novels and well over three hundred short stories...
  
  
• Tod Robbins
  Tod Robbins
  Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins was an American author of horror and mystery fiction. Robbins attended Washington and Lee University and—along with Mark W...
  
  
• Sax Rohmer
  Sax Rohmer
  Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward , better known as Sax Rohmer, was a prolific English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Dr...
  
  
• Theodore Roscoe
  Theodore Roscoe
  Theodore Roscoe was an American biographer and writer of adventure, fantasy novels and stories. Roscoe's stories appeared in pulp magazines including Argosy, Wings, Flying Stories, Far East Adventure Stories, Fight Stories, Action Stories and Adventure. A collection of his stories, The Wonderful...
  
  
• Rafael Sabatini
  Rafael Sabatini
  Rafael Sabatini was an Italian/British writer of novels of romance and adventure.-Life:Rafael Sabatini was born in Iesi, Italy, to an English mother and Italian father...
  
  
• Richard S. Shaver
• Robert Silverberg
  Robert Silverberg
  Robert Silverberg is an American author, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple nominee of the Hugo Award and a winner of the Nebula Award.-Early years:...
  
  
• Upton Sinclair
  Upton Sinclair
  Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
  
  
• Clark Ashton Smith
  Clark Ashton Smith
  Clark Ashton Smith was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne...
  
  
• E. E. Smith
  E. E. Smith
  Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D., also, E. E. Smith, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Doc Smith, "Skylark" Smith, and Ted was a food engineer and early science fiction author who wrote the Lensman series and the Skylark series, among others...
  
  
• Guy N. Smith
  Guy N. Smith
  Guy Newman Smith is a prolific English writer best known for his pulp fiction-style horror fiction, though he has also written non-fiction, soft-porn, and children's literature..-Biography:...
  
  
• T.S. Stribling
  Thomas Sigismund Stribling
  Thomas Sigismund Stribling was an American writer and lawyer who published under the name T.S. Stribling. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1933 for his novel The Store.-Life:...
  
  
• Jim Thompson
  Jim Thompson (writer)
  James Myers Thompson was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction....
  
  
• Thomas Thursday
  Thomas Thursday
  Thomas Thursday was a lesser-known pulp writer who ended up having one of the longest careers writing for the pulp magazines. His first published short story, "A Stroke of Genius," appeared in Top-Notch . He submitted the story to them after finding an old issue in the subway. He used the penname...
  
  
• W.C. Tuttle
• Mark Twain
  Mark Twain
  Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
  
  
• Jack Vance
  Jack Vance
  John Holbrook Vance is an American mystery, fantasy and science fiction author. Most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance. Vance has published 11 mysteries as John Holbrook Vance and 3 as Ellery Queen...
  
  
• E. C. Vivian
  E. C. Vivian
  Evelyn Charles Henry Vivian was the pseudonym of Charles Henry Cannell, a British editor and writer of fantasy and supernatural, detective novels and stories.-Biography:...
  
  
• H. G. Wells
  H. G. Wells
  Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...
  
  
• Tennessee Williams
  Tennessee Williams
  Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
  
  
• Cornell Woolrich
  Cornell Woolrich
  Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was an American novelist and short story writer who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley....
  
  

Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...

, first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Nobel Prize in Literature

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...

, worked as an editor for
Adventure

Adventure (magazine)

Adventure magazine was first published in November 1910 as a monthly pulp magazine. Adventure went on become one of the most profitable and critically acclaimed of all the American pulp magazines...

, writing filler paragraphs (brief facts or amusing anecdotes designed to fill small gaps in page layout), advertising copy and a few stories.

Publishers

• A. A. Wyn's Magazine Publishers
  A. A. Wyn's Magazine Publishers
  A. A. Wyn's Magazine Publishers was a publishing house established and owned by A. A. Wyn. It began in the 1930s as a pulp magazine publisher, and included titles such as Ace Mystery and Ace Sports. They also used the name "Periodic House", and also branched out to publishing comic books as Ace...
  
  
• Clayton Publications
• Culture Publications, originators of the Spicy line of titles.
• Dell Publishing
  Dell Publishing
  Dell Publishing, an American publisher of books, magazines and comic books, was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte, Jr.During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Dell was one of the largest publishers of magazines, including pulp magazines. Their line of humor magazines included 1000 Jokes, launched in...
  
  
• Frank A. Munsey Co.
  Frank Munsey
  Frank Andrew Munsey was an American newspaper and magazine publisher and author. He was born in Mercer, Maine but spent most of his life in New York City...
  
  
• Harold Hersey
  Harold Hersey
  Harold Brainerd Hersey was a pulp editor and publisher, and published several volumes of poetry. His pulp industry observations were published in hardback as Pulpwood Editor .-Early life:...
  
  
• Hugo Gernsback
  Hugo Gernsback
  Hugo Gernsback , born Hugo Gernsbacher, was a Luxembourgian American inventor, writer, editor, and magazine publisher, best remembered for publications that included the first science fiction magazine. His contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant that, along with H. G...
  
  
• Martin Goodman
  Martin Goodman (publisher)
  Martin Goodman born on was an American publisher of pulp magazines, paperback books, men's adventure magazines, and comic books, launching the company that would become Marvel Comics....
  
  
• Popular Publications
  Popular Publications
  Popular Publications was one of the largest publishers of pulp magazines during its existence, at one point publishing 42 different titles per month. Company titles included detective, adventure, romance, and Western fiction. They were also known for the several 'weird menace' titles...
  
  
• Street & Smith
  Street & Smith
  Street & Smith or Street & Smith Publications, Inc. was a New York City publisher specializing in inexpensive paperbacks and magazines referred to as pulp fiction and dime novels. They also published comic books and sporting yearbooks...
  
  
• Better/Standard/Thrilling (The Thrilling Group)
  Thrilling Publications
  Thrilling Publications, aka Beacon Magazines , Better Publications and Standard Magazines , was a pulp magazine publisher run by Ned Pines, publishing such titles as Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories.A native of Malden, Massachusetts, Pines became the president of Pines Publications...
  
  

Legacy

The term pulp fiction can also refer to mass market paperback

Paperback

Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...

s since the 1950s. The Brown Popular Culture Library News noted:

Many of the paperback houses that contributed to the decline of the genre–Ace, Dell, Avon, among others–were actually started by pulp magazine publishers. They had the presses, the expertise, and the newsstand distribution networks which made the success of the mass-market paperback possible. These pulp-oriented paperback houses mined the old magazines for reprints. This kept pulp literature, if not pulp magazines, alive. The Return of the Continental Op reprints material first published in Black Mask; Five Sinister Characters contains stories first published in Dime Detective; and The Pocket Book of Science Fiction collects material from Thrilling Wonder Stories, Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories.

In 1994, Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...

 directed a film titled Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction (film)

Pulp Fiction is a 1994 American crime film directed by Quentin Tarantino, who co-wrote its screenplay with Roger Avary. The film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence, nonlinear storyline, and host of cinematic allusions and pop culture references...

. The working title

Working title

A working title, sometimes called a production title, is the temporary name of a product or project used during its development, usually used in filmmaking, television production, novel, video game, or music album.-Purpose:...

 of the film was Black Mask, in homage to the pulp magazine of that name, and it embodied the seedy, violent, often crime-related spirit found in pulp magazines.

After the year 2000, several small independent publishers released magazines which published short fiction, either short stories or novel-length presentations, in the tradition of the pulp magazines of the early 20th century. These included Blood 'N Thunder, High Adventure and a short-lived magazine which revived the title Argosy. These specialist publications, printed in limited press runs, were pointedly not printed on the brittle, high-acid wood pulp paper of the old publications and were not mass market publications targeted at a wide audience. In 2004, Lost Continent Library published Secret of the Amazon Queen by E.A. Guest, their first contribution to a "New Pulp Era", featuring the hallmarks of pulp fiction for contemporary mature readers: violence, horror and sex. E.A. Guest was likened to a blend of pulp era icon Talbot Mundy and Stephen King by real-life explorer David Hatcher Childress.

Moonstone Books

Moonstone Books

Moonstone Books is an American comic book, graphic novel, and prose fiction publisher based in Chicago focused on pulp fiction comic books and prose anthologies as well as horror and western tales....

, a comic book and prose anthology publisher, began publishing original pulp tales featuring characters such as The Phantom

The Phantom

The Phantom is an American adventure comic strip created by Lee Falk, also creator of Mandrake the Magician. A popular feature adapted into many media, including television, film and video games, it stars a costumed crimefighter operating from the fictional African country Bengalla.The Phantom is...

, Zorro

Zorro

Zorro is a fictional character created in 1919 by New York-based pulp writer Johnston McCulley. The character has been featured in numerous books, films, television series, and other media....

, The Spider

The Spider

The Spider was one of the major pulp magazine heroes of the 1930s and 1940s.- Background :The Spider was created by Harry Steeger at Popular Publications in 1933 as competition to Street and Smith Publications' vigilante hero, The Shadow...

, The Avenger, Domino Lady

Domino Lady

The Domino Lady was a masked pulp heroine who first appeared in the May 1936 issue of Saucy Romantic Adventures. All of her stories were published under the house name "Lars Anderson" owned by the publisher, Fiction House. The author's real identity is unknown.Saucy Romantic Adventures was a "spicy...

and more in 2001.

In 2002, the tenth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly

Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern

Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is a literary journal, first published in 1998, edited by Dave Eggers. The first issue featured only works rejected by other magazines, but thereafter the journal began to include pieces written with McSweeney's in mind. McSweeney’s has since published works by...

was guest edited by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon born May 24, 1963) is an American author and "one of the most celebrated writers of his generation", according to The Virginia Quarterly Review....

. Published as McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, it is a collection of "pulp fiction" stories written by such current well-known authors as Stephen King

Stephen King

Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...

, Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby is an English novelist, essayist and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels High Fidelity, About a Boy, and for the football memoir Fever Pitch. His work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists.-Life and career:Hornby was...

, Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer, known for her surreal plots and characters.-Biography:Bender received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at San Diego, and a Master of Fine Arts from the distinguished creative writing MFA program at University of...

 and Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his more recent work as a screenwriter. He is also the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia.-Life:Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts,...

. Explaining his vision for the project, Chabon wrote in the introduction, "I think that we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be, and I hope that if nothing else, this treasury goes some small distance toward reminding us of that lost but fundamental truth."

The Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 publisher DC Thomson publishes "My Weekly Compact Novel" every week. It is literally a pulp novel, though it does not fall into the hard-edged genre most associated with pulp fiction.

See also

• Gay male pulp fiction
• George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection
• Hard Case Crime
  Hard Case Crime
  Hard Case Crime is an American imprint of hardboiled crime novels founded in 2004 by Charles Ardai, also known as the founder of the Internet service Juno Online Services, and Max Phillips....
  
  
• Lesbian pulp fiction
  Lesbian pulp fiction
  Lesbian pulp fiction refers to any mid-20th century paperback novel with overtly lesbian themes and content. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 60s by many of the same paperback publishing houses that other genres of fiction including Westerns, Romances, and Detective Fiction...
  
  
• Science fiction magazine
  Science fiction magazine
  A science fiction magazine is a publication that offers primarily science fiction, either in a hard copy periodical format or on the Internet....
  
  
• Serial (film)
  Serial (film)
  Serials, more specifically known as Movie serials, Film serials or Chapter plays, were short subjects originally shown in theaters in conjunction with a feature film. They were related to pulp magazine serialized fiction...
  
  

Further reading

• Goodstone, Tony (1970) The Pulps: 50 Years of American Pop Culture, Bonanza Books (Crown Publishers, Inc.), SBN 394-4418-6.
• Goulart, Ron (1972) Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine, Arlington House, ISBN 0-87000-1722-8.
• Hamilton, Frank and Hullar, Link (1988), Amazing Pulp Heroes, Gryphon Books, ISBN 0-936071-09-5.
• Sampson, Robert (1983) Yesterday's Faces: A Study of Series Characters in the early pulp magazines . Volume 1. Glory figures, Vol. 2. Strange days, Vol. 3. From the Dark Side, Vol. 4. The Solvers ,Vol 5. Dangerous Horizons, Vol. 6. Violent lives. Bowling Green University Popular Press, ISBN 0879722177.

Sources

• Lesser, Robert. Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines (Book Sales, 2003) ISBN 0-7858-1707-7
• Parfrey, Adam, et al. It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps (Feral House, 2003) ISBN 0-922915-81-4
• Gunnison, Locke and Ellis. Adventure House Guide to the Pulps (Adventure House, 2000) ISBN 1-886937-45-1
• Ellis, Doug. Uncovered: The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulps - Gold Medal Winner for Best Popular Culture Book BEA 2004 (Adventure House, -2003) ISBN 1-886937-74-5
• Locke, John-editor. Pulp Fictioneers - Adventures in the Storytelling Business (Adventure House, 2004) ISBN 1-886937-83-4
• Hersey, Harold. The New Pulpwood Editor (Adventure House, 2003) ISBN 1-886937-68-0
• Locke, John-editor. Pulpwood Days - Vol. 1 Editors You Want To Know (Off-Trail Publications, 2007) ISBN 0-9786836-2-5
• Robinson, Frank and Davidson, Lawrence. Pulp Culture (Collector's Press, 2007) ISBN 978-1933112305

• Chambliss, Julian and William Svitavsky, "From Pulp Hero to Superhero: Culture, Race, and Identity in AmericanPopular Culture, 1900-1940," Studies in American Culture 30 (1) (October 2008)

External links

• The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access digital archive dedicated to the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century's most influential literary & artistic forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine.
• ThePulp.Net
• Pulp Illustration Art
• CNN: "Girls, Guns and Money," November, 2005
• Mt. St. Vincent University Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection
• "Pulp Winds", December 2009
• In Praise of Pulp Fiction — slideshow by Life magazine