Pulp History

The pulps got their start over a hundred years ago, as American cities were filling up with millions of poor immigrants, just arriving from Europe. At the time, there were few reliable sources of fiction for poor or working-class readers. There were no paperback books (the paperback was introduced in the late 1930's) and hardcovers were far too expensive for readers who might earn a couple of dollars a day. A number of "slick" magazines, such as Collier's, Cosmopolitan, and the Saturday Evening Post, offered fiction to their readers, but the "slicks" were also a little too pricey, and they were written for a largely middle and upper-middle class audience, holding little appeal for a working-class readership.

There was one source of fiction that was within the reach of the poor: The dime novels.   32 pages long, stapled like comic books, they usually sold for a dime at first, and then for a nickel.  Some of the magazines were devoted to the inspirational stories of Horatio Alger and other authors.  Others specialized in the adventures of a single, larger-than-life hero: Nick Carter, master detective; Buffalo Bill, Western gunman; Jesse James, romantic outlaw; Frank Meriwell, clean-cut athlete.  Publishers churned out thousands of these weekly stories, but most were poorly written, and their juvenile subject-matter held little appeal for older readers. It was time for a new medium - the pulp magazine.

The first pulp magazine began publication in the late 19th century. In 1896, Frank Munsey decided to take his ailing children's magazine -- The Golden Argosy-- and pitch it towards a more adult audience. The new magazine -- renamed, simply, Argosy -- would offer a large selection of fiction for a cheap price. To cut costs, Munsey decided to print the new magazine on low-quality, wood-pulp paper, giving the pulps their name.

The new Argosy was a big hit, and it spawned a host of imitators, including The Popular Magazine, All-Story, Top-Notch, Short Story, Blue-Book and Adventure. Specialized pulps also appeared, as Street & Smith converted many of their old dime novels, such as Nick Carter Weekly and Buffalo Bill Weekly, into the new pulp format (turning them into Detective Story and Western Story, respectively). By the early 20th century, the new pulp magazines had completely eclipsed the dime-novels; they did so by offering more fiction, of higher quality, at equivalent prices.

The first pulps offered competent but undistinguished fiction -- little different from the "slick" magazines of the period. Soon, however, the pulps were filled with more imaginative and adventurous material, such as the fantasies of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Abraham Merritt, the romantic Westerns of Max Brand, the historical adventures of Talbot Mundy and Howard Lamb, and the costumed crusaders of Johnson McCulley and Frank Packard. It was these authors, and they stories they wrote, that defined the pulps in the decades to come.

Bibliography

Any of the general books on the pulps will include at least a brief summary of their history. Another good source is Robert Sampson's five-volume collection, Yesterday's Faces, an exhaustive (and often exhausting) catalogue of early series characters. Books on the dime novels -- the predecessors of the pulps -- are hard to find; Nine Dime Novels is a collection of these stories, with a helpful historical introduction. (Be warned: Dime novel prose can be hard to take in large doses.)

Other Sites

Some other sources for the history of the pulps include the following:

• Adventure House provides this useful History of the Pulps.
• Here's another History of the Pulps, written by Michael Jarrett, an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.
• Here's a site devoted to the Dime Novel Collection at Stanford.
• Here's another page devoted to Dime novels- story magazines and pulps.
• This page offers Bibliographic Information on Talbot Mundy, one of the great adventure writers in the early pulps.
• Here's The Page of Fu Manchu, one of the most famous villains of the early pulps.