Pulp magazines in the 1950s

Inexpensive periodicals printed on untrimmed seven-by-ten-inch pulpwood paper, featuring lurid stories in such genres as adventure, Western, romance, crime, fantasy, horror, and science fiction

After a fifty-year period when pulp magazines provided millions of Americans with entertaining, escapist reading, most of these publications failed during the 1950’s, mainly as a result of competition from paperback books, comic books, and television.

From their origin at the end of the nineteenth century to their demise during the 1950’s, the mass-market magazines called “pulps” became the chief form of recreational reading for many North Americans. Most scholars of popular culture trace the beginning of pulp magazines to 1896, when publisher Frank Munsey changed The Argosy from a boy’s magazine specializing in inspirational stories by writers such as Horatio Alger to a low-priced periodical for young adults concentrating on adventure stories. The new approach worked, and by the early twentieth century, Argosy was selling a half-million copies per month. Other publishers, particularly Street and Smith, profited from Munsey’s example, and they starting pioneering new markets by specializing with such pulps as Western Story, Detective Story, Love Story, and Sport Story. Writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard had already developed these genres, but pulp writers, most of whom earned two cents a word or even less, needed to churn out much material quickly in order to make a living, which resulted in stories with conventional characters and formulaic plots. Some famous pulp writers were Edgar Rice Burroughs, who created the character of Tarzan in 1912, and Frederick Schiller Faust, who wrote hundreds of Western stories under the name of Max Brand.

By the 1920’s, pulp magazines had become standardized: 128 pages containing several short stories and one or two novelettes. Their covers, printed in color on coated stock, were often tantalizing to catch a potential reader’s attention at the newsstand. Not all pulps catered to the mass market. Some, such as Weird Tales and Black Mask, generated small but passionate followings, and these magazines also offered apprenticeships for many new American writers. For example, Weird Tales published stories by writers such as Robert Bloch, August Derleth , Fritz Leiber , and Ray Bradbury . Tennessee Williams published his first story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris,” in Weird Tales in 1928. Such “hard-boiled” detective writers as Dashiell Hammett , Carroll John Daly, and Raymond Chandler perfected their styles, characters, and plots while writing for Black Mask and other pulps. These magazines peaked in popularity during the mid-1930’s, when more than ten million readers, one of whom was President Franklin D. Roosevelt , regularly purchased copies from the selection of two hundred kinds of pulps either by subscription or at newsstands. The magazines’ stories about heroes overcoming harrowing difficulties provided a theme with which many people in the Depression could identify. Some genres gave readers other worlds into which they could escape. For example, Hugo Gernsback , a former electrical engineer and inventor, founded Amazing Stories in 1926, and by 1930, when he named this new genre “science fiction,” his magazine had reached a circulation of 100,000.

The Pulps’ Demise

World War II marked the beginning of the end of pulp magazines. Readers and writers became involved in the war effort, and publishers were confronted with paper shortages and a breakdown in their distribution systems. Increased production costs continued into the postwar years, when certain enterprising publishers mass merchandized twenty-five-cent paperback books, causing a deep decline in pulp magazine sales. The war also created a new audience, more sophisticated than Depression readers. These new readers were eager to explore entertainment in the new medium of television.

By 1950, pulp magazines were no longer a significant form of popular diversion. Young people were reading comic books, and young adults were reading paperbacks. Both young and old were watching television, whose shows were often based on Western, crime, adventure, mystery, and detective stories that had been developed earlier by pulp writers. In fact, characters who had become familiar through serializations in the pulps now appeared on television: Detective characters Sam Spade, Philip Marlow, Perry Mason, and Nick Carter are examples.

Another serious competitor of the pulps was the “slick” magazine, so-called because it was printed on high-quality glossy paper. These magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, published both nonfiction and fiction and were attractively illustrated. Some pulp writers moved to the more lucrative pulps during the 1950’s. Others began writing for publishers of paperbacks, whose sales were so large during the 1950’s and 1960’s that their numbers were greater than all the books that had been published in the period since the invention of movable type.

Although most pulp magazines ceased publication by the early 1950’s, a small number struggled on. For example, adventure stories, a staple of the early pulps, continued to be written and read. William Coleman Tuttle had, for three decades, published a series of stories combining the adventure, mystery, and Western genres in Adventure Magazine. This series, which featured Hashknife Hartley, a picaresque cowboy who solved mysteries for the fun of it, lasted into the early 1950’s. Pure pulp Westerns also continued to be published, though with declining readers, before meeting their end during the 1960’s. As the Western pulps declined and died, writers and publishers sought reasons for their lost readership. Some cited competition from the commercial slicks and television, while others blamed publishers who compromised the genre by combining it with alien forms such as, for example, the “soap horse opera” in the pulps Ranch Romances and Romantic Range.

Television helped to keep the plots and characters of the traditional pulp Westerns in the public eye. In the second half of the 1950’s, for example, more than thirty Western series appeared on television, many of them based on pulp approaches, but others, such as Gunsmoke and The Rifleman, formed a new genre, the “adult Western.” So powerful was television that the only Western pulps to survive the 1950’s were a few magazines that anthologized old stories.

Some detective pulps managed to survive into the 1950’s, including Black Mask, although it became a bimonthly and subsequently was incorporated into Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , which for several years reprinted old stories by pulp mystery writers. Detective Story, Detective Tales, and Mystery Magazine were also commercially marketable for a while, but, like other specialized pulps, they encountered increasing competition from paperbacks, television, motion pictures, slick magazines, and even the weekly mystery in some newspapers. Some mystery writers for the pulps made the transition into this new environment by writing scripts for television and contributing to the outpouring of novels that ushered in what critics would later call the golden age of mystery writing. However, others failed to make this transition. For example, after writing stories that proved very popular during the 1920’s and 1930’s, Carroll John Daly encountered increasing difficulties during the 1940’s and 1950’s as pulp markets waned. He tried changing his style, and he even left New York for California, where he hoped to become a television writer, but he met with rejection. He died in 1958, destitute and forgotten.

Popularity of Science Fiction

The one specialized pulp genre that did not die with the others was science fiction. Fans of this genre were passionate about their pulp magazines, and they formed fan clubs and fanzines, or amateur magazines that kept their enthusiasms alive and growing. During the early 1950’s, more than twenty-five science-fiction pulp magazines existed, including such new ventures as Galaxy Science Fiction , edited by Herbert Gold, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher. Fans also pressured publishers into reissuing classic pulp stories from earlier periods. Their enduing popularity was proved when, by the end of the twentieth century, new and old science-fiction novels formed a significant percentage—some say 25 percent—of all novels published. The new science-fiction readers tended to be different from earlier readers of the 1930’s. Though they were still predominantly young and male, they were now better educated and wealthier. These readers were better able to appreciate scientific ideas, sophisticated plots, complex characterizations, and stylistic brilliance. Some science-fiction writers who exhibited these traits became prominent during the 1950’s, including Ray Bradbury, whose Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and many other works made him one of the world’s best-selling science-fiction writers.

Impact

By the 1950’s, the golden age of pulp fiction was over, with a residue of scattered, specialized pulps that were diminishing in numbers and readers. Though attempts, mainly nostalgic, to revive such pulps as Weird Tales and Black Mask occurred, these efforts came to naught. The pulps’ time had come and gone. For a few decades, pulps had been the chief entertainment for millions of Americans. During their heyday, literary critics paid little attention to these very popular magazines whose writings were, for them, close to worthless. Theodore Sturgeon, a pulp writer, once responded to this criticism by admitting, “Sure, 90 percent of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90 percent of everything is crud.” (Sturgeon is usually quoted as having used the word “crap,” instead of “crud.”) It is true that, like most magazines, the pulps contained material that varied greatly in quality, much of it reprehensibly inept. However, some pulp stories have withstood the test of time, and critics now consider them as classic American literature.

The pulps also provided the necessary experience for many young writers who went on to make significant literary contributions: Williams became a distinguished playwright, and Hammett proved that detective stories could be serious works of art. Although pulp publishers and writers wanted to make money rather than create literature, many scholars consider pulp magazines as an important part of American cultural history. Pulp stories reflected the society in which they were written. When the pulps were most popular, during the 1930’s, Americans were suffering through the Depression, seeking release from a disheartening world. The improved economy of the 1950’s created new needs that were satisfied by new forms of entertainment.

Though pulp magazines died out, the genre lived on in other forms in subsequent decades. Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino deliberately titled one of his most successful films Pulp Fiction (1994), since he made use of pulp plot devices, characters, and style. Furthermore, plays, films, comics, and other media continued to take advantage of such pulp characters as Tarzan, Sam Spade, and Zorro. American culture certainly changed during the 1950’s and afterward, but the emotions on which pulp writers capitalized continued to be very much a part of human nature.

Bibliography

Dinan, John A. The Pulp Western: A Popular History of the Western Fiction Magazine. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1983. This monograph, part of the series Studies in the Philosophy and Criticism of Literature, analyzes the significance of “this most maligned of literatures.” Illustrations and index.

Goldstone, Tony. The Pulps: Fifty Years of American Pop Culture. New York: Bonanza Books, 1970. This anthology contains representative examples of stories from many genres. A helpful survey history of a century of pulp fiction begins the book, which also has introductions to each of the genres.

Goulart, Ron. An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines. New York: Ace Books, 1972. Paperback reprint of a work originally titled Cheap Thrills that analyzes popular fiction from the dime novels of the nineteenth century to the paperbacks of the late twentieth century, with an emphasis on the period between the two world wars.

Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America: 1741-1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. The authors explore pulp fiction in chapters on “Developing the Mass Market” and “Pulps and Science Fiction.”