Introduction to Pulp Fiction

From the 1920s through the 1940s, Americans turned to their newsstands for a huge selection of monthly fiction magazines for adventure, mystery and entertaining story-telling. Printed on cheap "pulp" paper and priced for a dime, magazines catered to every conceivable niche with the most popular titles reaching pop culture status.

Although most pulp fiction magazines disappeared from the public view quickly, some have become timeless icons while others continue to influence pop culture today.

Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade perfected the Hard Boiled Detective genre that started in the pulps. The golden age of science fiction started in magazines such as Astounding Stories. Weird Tales, the Unique Magazine, provided an outlet for the ground breaking H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos as well as the classic fantasy stories of Robert E. Howard including the Conan series.

The "hero pulps" were some of the most popular magazines featuring characters that are now embedded in the American myth including Zorro, The Shadow, Doc Savage, Tarzan and hundreds and hundreds of others.

Pulp fiction had hundreds of different niches, styles, successes and failures. The industry provided a starting point to many writing careers, especially during the Great Depression years, as well the creative freedom that allowed many ground breaking and influential works to emerge.

The cheap pulp paper made the magazines affordable to everyone but it also contributed to their disappearance.  Many copies simply flaked away with spines falling apart, pages worn out from reading, resulting in comparatively few magazines  surviving  today.  Collectors passioniately protect and preserve the remaining copies today.

Pulp fiction is occassionaly remembered for the more sensationalist of pulp niches like the 'spicy' pulps or mistakenly identified as the 'sleaze' paperbacks of the 1960s.

But pulp fiction has been kept alive, first by generations of fans during the 1960s and 1970s who devotedly chronicled the era through fanzines and built communities through fan conventions. Then, the 1980s brought the start of a small press revival of pulp fiction. Today, pulp fiction is thriving with pulp fiction tribute sites, numerous pulp conventions across the country, and a small press publishing industry that is making more and more classic pulp fiction available every month.