Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
Murray Leinster was a pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of genre fiction, particularly of science fiction. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.
Black Mask was a pulp magazine first published in April 1920 by the journalist H. L. Mencken and the drama critic George Jean Nathan. It is most well-known today for launching the hardboiled crime subgenre of mystery fiction, publishing now-classic works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, Paul Cain, Carroll John Daly, and others.
Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine founded by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger in late 1922. The first issue, dated March 1923, appeared on newsstands February 18. The first editor, Edwin Baird, printed early work by H. P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, and Clark Ashton Smith, all of whom went on to be popular writers, but within a year, the magazine was in financial trouble. Henneberger sold his interest in the publisher, Rural Publishing Corporation, to Lansinger, and refinanced Weird Tales, with Farnsworth Wright as the new editor. The first issue under Wright's control was dated November 1924. The magazine was more successful under Wright, and despite occasional financial setbacks, it prospered over the next 15 years. Under Wright's control, the magazine lived up to its subtitle, "The Unique Magazine", and published a wide range of unusual fiction.
Amazing Stories is 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. Science fiction stories had made regular appearances in other magazines, including some published by Gernsback, but Amazing helped define and launch a new genre of pulp fiction.
Argosy was an American magazine, founded in 1882 as The Golden Argosy, a children's weekly, edited by Frank Munsey and published by E. G. Rideout. Munsey took over as publisher when Rideout went bankrupt in 1883, and after many struggles made the magazine profitable. He shortened the title to The Argosy in 1888 and targeted an audience of men and boys with adventure stories. In 1894 he switched it to a monthly schedule and in 1896 he eliminated all non-fiction and started using cheap pulp paper, making it the first pulp magazine. Circulation had reached half a million by 1907, and remained strong until the 1930s. The name was changed to Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1920 after the magazine merged with All-Story Weekly, another Munsey pulp, and from 1929 it became just Argosy.
Frederick Orlin Tremaine was an American science fiction magazine editor, most notably of the influential Astounding Stories. He edited a number of other magazines, headed several publishing companies, and sporadically wrote fiction.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction, often identified in the United States as the years 1938–1946, was a period in which a number of foundational works of science fiction literature appeared. In the history of science fiction, the Golden Age follows the "pulp era" of the 1920s and 1930s, and precedes New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1950s are, in this scheme, a transitional period. Robert Silverberg, who came of age in the 1950s, saw that decade as the true Golden Age. According to historian Adam Roberts, "the phrase Golden Age valorises a particular sort of writing: 'Hard SF', linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom."
Fiction House was an American publisher of pulp magazines and comic books that existed from the 1920s to the 1950s. It was founded by John B. "Jack" Kelly and John W. Glenister. By the late 1930s, the publisher was Thurman T. Scott. Its comics division was best known for its pinup-style good girl art, as epitomized by the company's most popular character, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
Tales of Wonder was a British science fiction magazine published from 1937 to 1942, with Walter Gillings as editor. It was published by The World's Work, a subsidiary of William Heinemann, as part of a series of genre titles that included Tales of Mystery and Detection and Tales of the Uncanny. Gillings was able to attract some good material, despite the low payment rates he was able to offer; he also included many reprints from U.S. science fiction magazines. The magazine was apparently more successful than the other genre titles issued by The World's Work, since Tales of Wonder was the only one to publish more than a single issue.
Adventure was an American pulp magazine that was first published in November 1910 by the Ridgway company, a subsidiary of the Butterick Publishing Company. Adventure went on to become one of the most profitable and critically acclaimed of all the American pulp magazines. The magazine had 881 issues. Its first editor was Trumbull White. He was succeeded in 1912 by Arthur Sullivant Hoffman (1876–1966), who edited the magazine until 1927.
Henry James O'Brien Bedford-Jones was a Canadian-American historical, adventure fantasy, science fiction, crime and Western writer who became a naturalized United States citizen in 1908.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact is an American science fiction magazine published under various titles since 1930. Originally titled Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the first issue was dated January 1930, published by William Clayton, and edited by Harry Bates. Clayton went bankrupt in 1933 and the magazine was sold to Street & Smith. The new editor was F. Orlin Tremaine, who soon made Astounding the leading magazine in the nascent pulp science fiction field, publishing well-regarded stories such as Jack Williamson's Legion of Space and John W. Campbell's "Twilight". At the end of 1937, Campbell took over editorial duties under Tremaine's supervision, and the following year Tremaine was let go, giving Campbell more independence. Over the next few years Campbell published many stories that became classics in the field, including Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, A. E. van Vogt's Slan, and several novels and stories by Robert A. Heinlein. The period beginning with Campbell's editorship is often referred to as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
Joseph Allan Elphinstone 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 to 1941. He first made a name for himself in Adventure. At the request of Adventure editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, Dunn wrote Barehanded Castaways, a novel about people trapped on a desert island which was intended to avoid the usual cliches of such stories. Barehanded Castaways was serialised in 1921 and was well received by Adventure's readers. Well over half of his output appeared in Street & Smith pulps, including People's, Complete Story Magazine, and Wild West Weekly. Dunn wrote over a thousand stories. He wrote approximately 470 stories for Wild West Weekly alone. His main genres were adventure and western; although he did write a number of detective stories, most of them appearing in Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective. Dunn wrote The Treasure of Atlantis, a science fiction story about survivals from Atlantis living in the Brazilian jungle. The Treasure of Atlantis was published in All-Around Magazine in 1916 and later reprinted in 1970. He was a specialist in South Sea stories, and pirate stories. He also published a lot of juvenile fiction; including many stories for Boys' Life, primarily in the 1920s. A number of his novel-length stories were reprinted in hardbound, some under the pen name "Joseph Montague" for Street & Smith's Chelsea House imprint; many of his books were issued in the United Kingdom. His stories were frequently syndicated in newspapers, both in America and around the world, making him, for a time, a very widely known author.
The Shadow was an American pulp magazine that was published by Street & Smith from 1931 to 1949. Each issue contained a novel about the Shadow, a mysterious crime-fighting figure who had been invented to narrate the introductions to radio broadcasts of stories from Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. A line from the introduction, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows", prompted listeners to ask at newsstands for the "Shadow magazine", which convinced the publisher that a magazine based around a single character could be successful. Walter Gibson persuaded the magazine's editor, Frank Blackwell, to let him write the first novel, The Living Shadow, which appeared in the first issue, dated April 1931.
Thrilling Adventures was a monthly American pulp magazine published from 1931 to 1943.
The Thrill Book was a U.S. pulp magazine published by Street & Smith in 1919. It was intended to carry "different" stories: this meant stories that were unusual or unclassifiable, which in practice often meant the stories were fantasy or science fiction. The first eight issues, edited by Harold Hersey, were a mixture of adventure and weird stories. Contributors included Greye La Spina, Charles Fulton Oursler, J. H. Coryell, and Seabury Quinn. Hersey was replaced by Ronald Oliphant with the July 1 issue, probably because Street & Smith were unhappy with his performance.
Doc Savage was an American pulp magazine that was published from 1933 to 1949 by Street & Smith. It was launched as a follow-up to the success of The Shadow, a magazine Street & Smith had started in 1931, based around a single character. Doc Savage's lead character, Clark Savage, was a scientist and adventurer, rather than purely a detective. Lester Dent was hired to write the lead novels, almost all of which were published under the house name "Kenneth Robeson". A few dozen novels were ghost-written by other writers, hired either by Dent or by Street & Smith. The magazine was successful, but was shut down in 1949 as part of Street & Smith's decision to abandon the pulp magazine field completely.
Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters. Gernsback wanted the fiction he printed to be scientifically accurate, and educational, as well as entertaining, but found it difficult to obtain stories that met his goals; he printed "The Moon Pool" by Abraham Merritt in 1927, despite it being completely unscientific. Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, but quickly started several new magazines. Wonder Stories, one of Gernsback's titles, was edited by David Lasser, who worked to improve the quality of the fiction he received. Another early competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which appeared in 1930, edited by Harry Bates, but Bates printed only the most basic adventure stories with minimal scientific content, and little of the material from his era is now remembered.
Daisy Sarah Bacon was an American pulp fiction magazine editor and writer who was best known as the editor of Love Story Magazine from 1928 to 1947. She moved to New York in 1917, working at several jobs before being hired in 1926 by Street & Smith, a major pulp magazine publisher, to assist with "Friends in Need", an advice column in Love Story Magazine. Two years later she was promoted to editor of the magazine, and stayed in that role for nearly twenty years. Love Story was one of the most successful pulp magazines, and Bacon was frequently interviewed about her role and her opinions of modern romance. Some interviews commented on the contrast between her personal life as a single woman, and the romance in the stories she edited; she did not reveal in these interviews that she had a long affair with a married man, Henry Miller, whose wife was the writer Alice Duer Miller.
