 | |
| Categories | Pulp magazine |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Semi-monthly |
| First issue | 1890 |
| Final issue | 1959 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Short Stories was an American fiction magazine published between 1890 and 1959.
| | |
| Categories | Pulp magazine |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Semi-monthly |
| First issue | 1890 |
| Final issue | 1959 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Short Stories was an American fiction magazine published between 1890 and 1959.
Short Stories began its existence as a literary periodical, carrying work by Rudyard Kipling, Émile Zola, Bret Harte, Ivan Turgenev and Anna Katharine Green. [1] The magazine advertised itself with the slogan "Twenty-Five Stories for Twenty-Five Cents". After a few years, Short Stories became dominated by reprinted fiction. The magazine was sold in 1904 and eventually purchased by Doubleday, Page and Company, which in 1910 transformed Short Stories into a "quality pulp". The magazine's new editor, Harry E. Maule (1886-1971) placed an emphasis on Short Stories carrying well-written fiction; pulp magazine historian Robert Sampson states "For Short Stories, like Adventure and Blue Book to follow, rose above the expedient prose of rival magazines like ivory towers thrusting up from swampland". [1] By 1916, Maule's Short Stories was selling 95,000 copies a month. [2]
Short Stories was initially known for publishing crime fiction by authors including Max Pemberton, Thomas W. Hanshew and Hugh Pendexter. [1]
In the 1920s and 1930s, however, Short Stories was best known as a publisher of Western stories, with many of the best-known Western fiction writers such as Clarence E. Mulford, Max Brand, Luke Short, Ernest Haycox, W. C. Tuttle, James B. Hendryx, Barry Scobee, [3] Bertrand William Sinclair and B. M. Bower appearing in its pages. [4] Short Stories also carried adventure fiction, such as "Northern" tales set in the Yukon, and adventures in the South Seas or Sub-Saharan Africa. The magazine's writers in the adventure genre included George Allan England, H. Bedford-Jones, Gordon MacCreagh, J. Allan Dunn, L. Patrick Greene (stories set in Africa), William Wirt (who chronicled the exploits of a mercenary, Jimmie Cordie) and George F. Worts (who wrote about South Sea adventures). [5] Thriller writers Edgar Wallace, Sax Rohmer and Dornford Yates had stories in the magazine in this period, as did Vincent Starrett, who wrote about private investigator Jimmie Lavender for Short Stories. [6] Albert Richard Wetjen contributed sea stories to the magazine. [7] Short Stories also published a large number of adventure stories featuring the Foreign Legion. The magazine's practitioners in this sub-genre included J.D. Newsom (with humorous stories about Legionnaires Mike Curialo and Albert Withers), Georges Surdez, Robert Carse and Bob Du Soe. [7] Some of the serials published in Short Stories were later published in hardback by Doubleday. These included Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope Murder, by Frank L. Packard. [7]
The magazine adopted the symbol of a red sun on its covers; nearly all the issues of the pulp-era Short Stories featured a red sun as part of its cover illustration. [7] Circulation for Short Stories rose to 174,899 copies in 1922. [8]
In addition to fiction, Maule also created "The Story Teller's Circle", a forum for readers to write in and discuss issues (similar to "The Camp-Fire" department in Adventure magazine). [4] Edgar Franklin Wittmack, [9] Remington Schuyler and Nick Eggenhofer all painted several covers for Short Stories.
Maule edited the magazine for almost two decades. Between 1929 and 1932 Roy De S. Horn served as editor; Maule returned as editor in 1932. [3] During his tenure, De Horn created "Adventurers All", a column where writers and readers of Short Stories related true-life adventures they had experienced. [7] In 1936, Maule was succeeded in the role of editor by Dorothy McIlwraith. The next year, Doubleday sold the publication to a new owner, Short Stories, Inc. (McIlwraith would also edit Weird Tales when Short Stories, Inc. purchased that magazine). [5] [10] During the 1940s, writers such as Frank Gruber, Arthur O. Friel, Theodore Roscoe and Carl Jacobi [11] appeared in Short Stories.
A British edition of Short Stories was published between 1920 and 1959; it merged with the UK version of the West magazine in 1954 and was known as Short Stories Incorporating West. [12] The September 1950 issue of Short Stories carried Robert A. Heinlein's story Destination Moon , an adaptation of the film. This was unusual as Short Stories rarely published science fiction. [4]
Like other pulps, the advent of World War II, and the arrival of paperbacks and television had a negative effect on Short Stories; circulation figures plummeted and by the 1950s the magazine was dominated by reprints. [5] Despite the efforts of new editor M.D. Gregory and his associate editor, Frank Belknap Long, Short Stories ceased publication in 1959. It had become a men's adventure magazine in 1957.
Single author/team collections from Short Stories:
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 through the 1960s. 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.
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.
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. They also published several pulp hero or character pulps.
Blue Book was a popular 20th-century American magazine with a lengthy 70-year run under various titles from 1905 to 1975. It was a sibling magazine to The Red Book Magazine and The Green Book Magazine.
Oriental Stories, later retitled The Magic Carpet Magazine, was an American pulp magazine published by Popular Fiction Co., and edited by Farnsworth Wright. It was launched in 1930 under the title Oriental Stories as a companion to Popular Fiction's Weird Tales, and carried stories with far eastern settings, including some fantasy. Contributors included Robert E. Howard, Frank Owen, and E. Hoffman Price. The magazine was not successful, and in 1932 publication was paused after the Summer issue. It was relaunched in 1933 under the title The Magic Carpet Magazine, with an expanded editorial policy that now included any story set in an exotic location, including other planets.
Perley Poore Sheehan was an American film writer, novelist and film director. He was once married to Virginia Point (1902-unknown). Sheehan also wrote detective and adventure fiction for the pulp magazines. Sheehan wrote two fantasy novels, The Abyss of Wonders (1915), about a lost civilization in the Gobi Desert, and The Red Road to Shamballah (1932–1933) about a hero with a Tibetan magic sword.
Henry Steeger III was an American magazine editor and publisher. He co-founded Popular Publications in 1930, one of the major publishers of pulp magazines, with former classmate 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 Dell Publishing while Goldsmith had served as an editor at A. A. Wyn's Magazine Publishers.
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.
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.
Everybody's Magazine was an American magazine published from 1899 to 1929. The magazine was headquartered in New York City.
Lewis Patrick Greene (1891–1971), who usually wrote under the name L. Patrick Greene, was an English writer of adventure stories.
Western Story Magazine was a pulp magazine published by Street & Smith, which ran from 1919 to 1949. It was the first of numerous pulp magazines devoted to Western fiction. In its heyday, Western Story Magazine was one of the most successful pulp magazines; in 1921 the magazine was selling over half a million copies each issue. The headquarters were located in New York City.
Georges Arthur Surdez (1900–1949) was a writer of adventure stories. He invented the term "Russian Roulette" in a story of the same name published in Collier's magazine.
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.
War Birds was a pulp magazine published by Dell from 1928 to 1937. It was the first pulp to focus on stories of war in the air, and soon had competitors. A series featuring fictional Irishman Terence X. O'Leary, which had started in other magazines, began to feature in War Birds in 1933, and in 1935 the magazine changed its name to Terence X. O'Leary's War Birds for three issues. In these issues the setting for stories about O'Leary changed from World War I to the near future; when the title changed back to War Birds later that year, the fiction reverted to ordinary aviation war stories for its last nine issues, including one final O'Leary story. The magazine's editors included Harry Steeger and Carson W. Mowre.
The Spider was an American pulp magazine published by Popular Publications from 1933 to 1943. Every issue included a lead novel featuring The Spider, a heroic crime-fighter. The magazine was intended as a rival to Street & Smith's The Shadow and Standard Magazine's The Phantom Detective, which also featured crime-fighting heroes. The novels in the first two issues were written by R. T. M. Scott; thereafter every lead novel was credited to "Grant Stockbridge", a house name. Norvell Page, a prolific pulp author, wrote most of these; almost all the rest were written by Emile Tepperman and A. H. Bittner. The novel in the final issue was written by Prentice Winchell.
Dime Mystery Magazine was an American pulp magazine published from 1932 to 1950 by Popular Publications. Titled Dime Mystery Book Magazine during its first nine months, it contained ordinary mystery stories, including a full-length novel in each issue, but it was competing with Detective Novels Magazine and Detective Classics, two established magazines from a rival publisher, and failed to sell well. With the October 1933 issue the editorial policy changed, and it began publishing horror stories. Under the new policy, each story's protagonist had to struggle against something that appeared to be supernatural, but would eventually be revealed to have an everyday explanation. The new genre became known as "weird menace" fiction; the publisher, Harry Steeger, was inspired to create the new policy by the gory dramatizations he had seen at the Grand Guignol theater in Paris. Stories based on supernatural events were rare in Dime Mystery, but did occasionally appear.
Captain Zero was an American pulp magazine that published three issues in 1949 and 1950. The lead novels, written by G.T. Fleming-Roberts, featured Lee Allyn, who had been the subject of an experiment with radiation, and as a result was invisible between midnight and dawn. Under the name Captain Zero, Allyn became a vigilante, fighting crime at night. Allyn had no other superpowers, and the novels were straightforward mysteries in Weinberg's opinion, though pulp historian Robert Sampson considers them to be "complex...[they] pound along with hair-raising incidents..full of twists and high suspense". Captain Zero was the last crime-fighter hero magazine to be launched in the pulp era, ending an era that had begun with The Shadow in 1931. There was room in the magazine for only one or two short stories along with the lead novel; these were all straight mystery stories, without the veneer of science fiction of the Captain Zero novels.
G-8 and His Battle Aces was an American air-war pulp magazine published from 1930 to 1944. It was one of the first four magazines launched by Popular Publications when it began operations in 1930, and first appeared for just over two years under the title Battle Aces. The success of Street & Smith's The Shadow, a hero pulp, led Popular to follow suit in 1933 by relaunching Battle Aces as a hero pulp: the new title was G-8 and His Battle Aces, and the hero, G-8, was a top pilot and a spy. Robert J. Hogan wrote the lead novels for all the G-8 stories, which were set in World War I. Hogan's plots featured the Germans threatening the Allied forces with extraordinary or fantastic schemes, such as giant bats, zombies, and Martians. He often contributed stories to the magazines as well as the lead novel, though not all the short stories were by him. The cover illustrations, by Frederick Blakeslee, were noted for their fidelity to actual planes flown in World War I.
Battle Birds was an American air-war pulp magazine, published by Popular Publications. It was launched at the end of 1932, but did not sell well, and in 1934 the publisher turned it into an air-war hero pulp titled Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds. Robert Sidney Bowen, an established pulp writer, provided the lead novel each month, and also wrote the short stories that filled out the issue. Bowen's stories were set in the future, with the United States menaced by an Asian empire called the Black Invaders. The change was not successful enough to be extended beyond the initial plan of a year, and Bowen wrote a novel in which, unusually for pulp fiction, Dusty Ayres finally defeated the invaders, to end the series. The magazine ceased publication with the July/August 1935 issue. It restarted in 1940, under the original title, Battle Birds, and lasted for another four years. All the cover art was painted by Frederick Blakeslee.