Pulp Fiction
Pulp fiction magazines were the main source of everyday entertainment for the masses during the first half of the 20th Century. These magazines delivered action and heroes that were some of the most creative in literary history. Pulp heroes and their authors have influenced every medium including comics, movies, and television.
The Pulps delivered stories for every possible genre, including detective, western, adventure, spicy, spy/military, as well many other, smaller niche genres. The Pulps were also responsible for the creation of the hardboiled detective story as well as the sci-fi genre.
The pulps emerged out of the cheap “dime novels” of the late 19th century. From 1900 to 1920, the newspaper like dime novels evolved into the well known magazine format. Magazines such as Argosy, All-Story Weekly, and Blue Book dominated the field with general fiction stories. Tarzan and Zorro are two classics from this era come to mind qucikly.
The 1920s saw the transformation from general fiction to genre fiction. The general fiction magazine Black Mask evolved away from standard fiction and cozy style mysteries into the home of Dashiell Hammet and the Hard Boiled Detective. Meanwhile, Weird Tales the Unique Magazine provided an outlet for weird and fantastical writings which launched the fantasy and horror genres for writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and many others. Soon came along Astounding Stories and Astonishing Stories which launched the Golden Age science fiction and speculative fiction.
The 1930s saw an explosion in terms of number of magazines and genres. This decade was the prime period producing some of the best (and worst) pulp fiction that impacted American entertainment then and continues to reverberate today with derivative works. The writing careers of Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and many others began in the pulps.
With the 1940s and World War II, paper shortages and changing readers the pulps began their decline. The paperback industry was begining to take hold. The Radio and Movie industry had been tempting away talent and competing for audiences for some time.
But the end for the pulps came in about 1952. Television was in its infancy and about to captivate a nation. But a collapsing newstand distribution network effectively end the pulp fiction era.
Although the pulps were incredibly popular during its day most were destined to be forgotten quickly. Much of the innovation and creativity that occurred in the pulps has been forgotten or attibuted to later mediums, authors and characters.
On the verge of extinction something incredible occurred. A band of fans during the 1950s and into the 1960s began to slowly organize through fanzines and conventions. The fanzines recorded pulp history and the conventions provided a means for the fans to get together, collect and perserve pulps, and to continue the hobby.
The late 1960s and 1970s saw a number pulps reissued as paperback reprints including the Doc Savage paperback run bringing in a new generation of fans. During the 1980s, the pulp community continued to grow in both numbers of fans as well as the start of a small press publishing network for pulp reprints.
The 1990s and the internet generation allowed the pulp community to move online. During late 1995 we approached Joel Frieman and Bob Weinberg at Argosy Communications who owns the rights to a number of the Popular Publications magazines. We obtained a license to begin reprinting their hero pulp stories online in electronic format.
On May 10, 1996, the Vintage Library opened its doors for business. We currently have over 150 stories available for immediate download. But the power of the internet has gone much farther than just electronic downloads. Its brought together a fan base and created a market where we’ve encouraged a number of small press publishers to create a regular stream of pulp reprints and to constantly improve quality. The result…
Today we are experiencing a pulp fiction revivial where new fans are coming into the hobby in large numbers and we have more and more books, magazines, reprints and replicas available than ever before. Adventure House, Girasol Collectables, and Wildside Press are some of today’s top publishers keeping us awash in pulp fiction.