Pulp Magazines in the 1920s
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- Опубліковано 17 вер 2024
- Most people can name a few novels from the 1920s, but few can name many titles of pulp fiction stories. While they weren't meant to be lasting pieces of literature, pulp magazines sold way more copies than traditional literature. But what influence did they have on society? Let's find out.
Charles Dickens was a pulp writer. The fictional landscape is littered with hundreds of “literary” and respected writers who were big in the slicks and completely forgotten today. Literature is an entertainment medium. When academics come around to a work decades later it mysteriously becomes art.
Nailed it.
Now I the age of mass media, all it takes is someone with an internet connection to post an opinion, and bam suddenly any ill-concieved shlock can be art, especially if they know how to do any slick editing or pick really grandiose sound tracks.
What are you getting at?
Great video. One thing to keep in mind is that pulps in many ways gave birth to modern comics. Much of the talent from the pulp work went on to become writers in the comic world. Siegel and Shuster who created Superman were influence by the pulps. Martin Goodman Publisher of Marvel Comics, was a prodigy of Hugo Gernsback and started Marvel as a pulp magazine prior to launching it as a comic brand. The magazine was called Marvel Science Stories and was launched about a year prior to Marvel Comics being born. Mort Weisenger who edited Superman for decades also made his start in the pulp world as an editor and writer. He created Captain Future. The list goes on and on and is endlessly fascinating.
Joshua Sky you’re totally right! Thanks for the info!
I've been reading and researching pulps and comics for year, and am not aware of many pulp writers who also wrote for comics. Walter Gibson is the only one I can think of. Some pulp characters made a transition, but most pulp writers were trying to move up to writing for slick magazines and the like, not comics.
Yes, there were influences. Further several pulp publishers also had comic book lines. Street & Smith, Fiction House, Dell, Martin Goodman, Thrilling, etc all had comic book lines as well.
@@MichaelRBrown-lh6kn Gardner Fox
Also Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Indian, African and middle eastern mythology, fairy tales and folk lore including 1001 nights also called The Arabian nights it had Alladin with a magic lamp and ring that inspired Green Lantern and the Mandarin. Robin Hood and Robinson Caruso inspired Green Arrow, Hawkeye was name of a character from Last of the Mohicans, science fiction inspired superheroes also.
Much more important: they gave birth to the whole science fiction genre (I don't consider Frankenstein or Jules Verne as sci fi). Dune was written in the Analog Magazine. Asimov "copied" the hyperspace concept from Amazing Stories... Okay, let's say birth to the prime time of sci fi.
With over 200 fiction magazines a month they were the TV of their time, following trends and creating knockoffs. They created the Weird Tale, the Hardboiled Mystery, and Science fiction. They were the literal pioneers of all genre fiction. If you like a genre, thank the pulps. Not a small thing.
Radio also inspired comic books and TV. Chandu the magician1930 was originally on Radio and later had black and white films he could have inspired Mandrake the magician 1934, Zatara the magician Action comics #1, Sargon the Sorcerer, Dr. Fate and Dr. Strange. Gunsmoke was name of a film, then an unrelated radio program with different characters and TV show based on Radio program. Magazines of course also inspired comics and movies. Some comics also went to radio such as Superman and Batman. Some movies inspired comic books King Kong inspired comic character Titano.
@@hydrolito The Shadow himself was the greatest product of radio/pulps of all. They printed the pulp to get the copy rite on the radio show host. Everything collided in the thirties.
On the Snappy Stories cover: "in a voice that dripped strawberry jam." I ADORE that so much!
"Prepare to be JAMMED!"
I knew Pulp magazines were huge but didn't know they were outdoing Hemingway & Fitzgerald.
I have even more admiration for pulps now.
They were the true art of the time. Claiming that low selling authors selected by later generations were representative of the time is just rewriting history. Hemingway became loved for his writing of the 30s by those later commentators.
My favorite type of art is art from subcultures of any decade. The type that society (at its time) thought was dangerous, scandalous, or had no so-called artistic 'value'.
Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was another pulp writer, and his work managed to transcend the pulps, with later books, comics, and movies. Another pulp writer, Erle Stanley Gardner, "graduated" from the pulps to regular hardback books. Interestingly, he didn't try to continue any of his pulp characters in the books, but created new characters, like Perry Mason, and Donald Lam & Bertha Cool.
Robert E. Howard was also creator of Red Sonya but she was originally in a different time period than Conan the Barbarian. Name later changed to Red Sonja and put in Conan's time period.
@@hydrolito Sure, Howard created several characters besides Conan: King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, Black Vulmea, Breckinridge Elkins, Steve Costigan, and others. But Conan is his best known creation, and arguably, the one that best exemplifies the sword and sorcery genre.
Definitely one of the best videos you’ve done yet. And that’s saying something because nearly all of your videos are excellent, both in conception and execution. The research, the use of period appropriate visuals, engaging narration and an overall feel of warm, personalized professionalism render your channel one of UA-cam’s finest. Thanks for all your contributions and keep the videos coming. -Glen
Thanks so much!
I think you may be overplaying your hand as to the "low quality literature" in the pulps. They too suffered from Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is crap but that is also true of the little read Modernist "Little" magazines and much of the literature of the day. Many stories from the pulp have had a lasting impact and upon reevaluation were in fact, very much, not crap.
I agree with you 100% and would add that 90% of today's fiction is also crap, regardless whether we are talking online magazines, print books, ebooks, web novels, etc.
he sounded like he was talking about the MCU honestly
Agreed! I don't care for the dismissive attitude of this video, which ignores just how many stellar writers wrote for the pulps, not just H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs, but Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Manly Wade Wellman, E. Hoffman Price, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, Jack Williamson, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Tanith Lee, the list goes on and on... Some of the greatest examples of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror were written in the pages of Weird Tales alone.
strongly agree, "c'était mieux jamais"
I commented this in one of the retrofuturism videos but I couldn't resist repeating myself. The famous "Buck Rogers" cover at 4:42 (in this video) is actually an illustration for the E.E. "Doc" Smith story "Skylark of Space." But many people know it as a Buck Rogers illustration because that particular issue was the debut of the story Armageddon 2149 A.D. which was the first appearance of Anthony (later known as "Buck") Rogers. Just a little bit of trivia because I always wondered why that picture didn't seem to have anything to do with the story until I read "Skylark" and saw this illustration connected to that, and it's something that does actually happen in "Skylark."
The pulps filled the niche that latter was occupied by a lot of TV from the 1950's onward. Into the 1960's there were men's magazines that carried on this tradition of exciting stories, lurid covers, and throwaway writing. Although they were officially aimed at adults, I suspect that a lot of the buyers were boys in high school and younger.
Men's Adventuer Magazines (MAM) where one of the replacements for the pulps. They started in the 40s and lasted to the 70s.
Some pulps became MAMs. Some became digests. Many died. Paperback books also replaced pulps.
It all makes perfect sense: there was no TV and movies were a treat, so, the growing literacy in America led to young people wanting inexpensive written entertainment. Even when TVs became popular, there were no TVs in kids’ rooms, so kids could read entertaining stories in relative privacy.
Both "Tarzan" and "John Carter On Mars", both from author Edgar Rice Burroughs, were introduced to the public in 1912. Their adventures continued into the 1920's, 1930's, 1940' and even into 1950, when Burroughs died.
Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2 th century.
@@glennso47 Join Space Cadet Stimpy in the amazing year four hundred billion!
@@canuckprogressive.3435 But we already have a space cadet. His name is Joe Biden. In the year…um…hmm… 🤔. And if you are Canadian you have a space cadet named Trudeau.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' assessment of himself as a writer and pulp fiction in general was pretty funny! I especially liked where he said he could write stuff just as rotten as any of the rot that was pulp fiction.
What's sad about this is that pulp magazines died long before the rise of the internet and electronic technology, thus, a lot, lot of them are completely lost to time, or rotten in the cellar of some old collector. There's only a handful of pulp magazines that managed to survive long enough to be scanned and preserved, but most did not fare as well.
A lot have been scanned and preserved. There have been hundreds reprinted as pulp fascimile and many other stories reprinted. There are a dozen or so publishers today reprinting pulp fiction. And many scanning pulp mags.
I remember reading a writing advice book that stated that when doing the whole "Read as much as you can" aspect, you should read bad books as much as good ones.
Seeing things you want to emulate is important, but so is reading stuff that makes you say "I can do better than that!"
Seemed like a relevant observation to the video haha
Don't get me wrong, I love classic literature. Jack London, Conan Doyle,
Jules Verne, and others. But I also love the pulps. Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. In fact I'd rather read them as some of this high brow crap they call literature. Yeah, gimme the pulps. You can have Shakespeare.
Exactly, these stories were written to be read by real readers, not people wishing to posture.
It’s funny. Those authors were actually kinda pulp esque. Particularly Verne. They still wrote adventure stories and published in magazines. Not fully pulp, but close.
Shakespeare is riddled with crude jokes, lol! One of my few takeaways from high school english was that Shakespeare's plays were meant to appeal to the masses, in that same pulp tradition. Same with Canterbury Tales IIRC. the more I think about it the more I realize that "Art" meant to appeal to and entertain other artists and critics is a modern luxury.
Let us not forget Robert E. Howard who gave us Solomon Kane and Conan.
And H.P Lovecraft who revolutionized horror...they were friends and pen pals and Howards suicide took its toll on Lovecraft
@@johannesdenzer240
Based dudes.
"Pulp" specifically refers to a grade of paper these magazines were printed on. It was lower quality than newsprint. People used to refer to paper by grades like, pulp, newsprint, stationary, bond... It didn't originate from the quality of writing, but the type of paper -- which then came to identify a "grade" of fiction.
Great video! I have been interested in pulp literature of the time. A video request I would like to make is about the comic strips of the 1920s. Thank you!
If you do a search on the internet archive they have a ton that you can read if you are interested!
To me these magazines are similar to shows like Brooklyn 99. Might not win any awards but it's good to just relax and enjoy yourself!
Not everything has to hold up in a university course to be enjoyable. I feel it is still art just a different form.
Thanks for the vid! :)
Great video. Loved the Rice Burroughs "rot" quote.
I love those painted covers.
I would add that one reason you have not heard of many pulp magazine authors is they used a pseudonym.
I just suscribed, greetings from México
Escapism is a glimpse into the nature of humanity.
Like wow such far forward other worldly thinking futuristically phantasmagorical artworks, totally luv them > 8:24 😊
great - great - great , really enjoyed that - thanks a bunch ...
I think “The Great Gatsby” became famous because free copies were given to American soldiers during WWII. Many other books were given to soldiers during the war.
Pulp Magazines developed the superhero trope and directly influenced comicbooks. The most important point you forgot to mention. Many heroes were developed in pulps such as Shadow (the shadowy , Spider, Zorro, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Doc Savage
Pulps from the 20s and early 30s are still some of my favorite reading materials. I was lucky enough to have gotten my hands on a slew of them at a yardsale or two as a kid (sci-fi anthologies and detective). They may have been a bit wordy by 70s tastes and especially being so young but the great covers and sketches inside made it too irresistable not to give it a try and after that I was hooked. Still recall a few of my first ones: a remote control robot with a build in camera sent to the moon to finally see what it looked like (considering we had only reached it a few years earlier it was an exciting idea for me) and one, a multip-parter that I never had the ending to, about a scientist discovering all termites were not only intelligent but part of a single enormous colony that wanted to take over the world. Hope pulps make a (affordable) comeback.
Amazing to consider how these literary works were considered garbage … they’re better written and more exciting than what pretends to be “literature” nowadays.
Merry Christamas and happy new year from Romania
Wow. You are falling prey to all the accepted tropes about the value of the fiction that appeared in pulp magazines. In fact, much of it was art. And much did survive to our day. The writers that wrote for these magazines were writers in deed, far more so than the authors that produced much-lauded books once every six years or more. They turned out stories with dramatic characters, settings, and most of all entertaining stories constantly. The reason a pulp had hundreds of thousands of subscribers was that it delivered entertainment to those who were paying for it.
Those stories went on to be sold again and again in short story collections, including some of the finest literature ever created. Serialized novels from pulps were printed separately as novels and sold well. Again, many are still on bookstore shelves or high ranking sellers on Amazon and B&N today.
Do not fall prey to the art house mindset that claims there is "great literature" that deals with the human condition and that nothing else is of merit. The fact is, the great stories from pulp had greater influence than any of those "great books", and deal with the human condition in a more realistic and more approachable way than the books that have been anointed by the self-proclaimed intelligentsia.
Exactly. Howard and Lovecraft were first class writers, though lovecraft could be a bit dense. There are plenty of less remembered icons as well. Leigh Bracket, CL Moore, Clark Ashton smith(his prose is the gold standard for weird literature if you ask me.)
And Raymond Chandler is rightly considered an American master. One of our countries best stylists.
Right, literary works by Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft are not particularly well written. It's true that the pulps were not meant to last yet, I would argue that Pulp Fiction is the most influential literature of the 20th century.
At the 60's Playboy, a men's magazine, began to introduce quality fiction like Ray Bradberry's "Fahrenheit 451"
Yeah this is pretty reductive
Yeah, many people try to dismiss all pulp fiction not realizing that while a lot is dreak, there was a lot of quality writing. The quality pulps (Blue Book, Argosy, Short Stories, Adventure, Black Mask) all put out great fiction. And the good stuff is still readable today.
They didn't expect the magazine to be the only place the story would appear. Good stories would get picked up for reprint in collections. The authors that made a serious living at it sold their stories 3 or 4 times.
Bingo. Bradbury was pulp at heart. His mentor was Leigh bracket.
Great content. That music is fitting & catchy!
If it is entertaing it is good writing, if the goal was to be entertaining.
Another great video.
While you might not be able name titles of pulp fiction, most people CAN name characters who came out of the pulps: Tarzan, Zorro, and many others.
Its incorrect to claim that pulp fiction were only short stories. They ran from short stories to long novels that were often serialized. Pulp magazines different from dime novels NOT in the story length, but in being larger magazines with a variety of story lengths.
Genre-specific pulp magazines came a little later. Detective fiction was the biggest genre, but romance was also huge.
You left out other major pulps like Adventure, Blue Book, Short Stories and others like Popular magazine and People's.
Excellent execution and delivery
I would have read them if I’d been alive then.
New sub here... Amazing channel.
Back in the 80s we had to gwt by on:
Soldier of fortune and True Detective!
Although I dis have some Argosy magazines from the 70s.
Also.
Who remembers Ninja magazines!
I bet the art of Bioshock may have been aesthetically influenced by some pulp fiction covers.
I wonder if there is any modern equivalent to pull fiction magazines today, especially online.
A lot of the mainstream literature that was pushed wasn't appreciated for good reason. The Waste Land is crowned as some grand achievement when, in truth, it is quite the bore.
Thanks for making this video
An excellent watch!
Goof of you to share.
I read all the Tarzan books as a kid.
Life Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, Modern Romances, True Story,
Because it was written for the masses it was not art? Wow... that is offensive.
Who do you think you are?
I am really interested in this subject and have been watching all your videos from the start, but your viewpoint is just too elitist for me. I don't think I care for someone who talks so much about the 20s, but never mentions lynchings or the Klan, then goes and judges art for the masses as literally not art. What about the Red Scare? Never heard of it, have you?
Your view of the 20s is very conservative.
What I meant was that, generally, pulp fiction was not written to be "literary," meaning not accepted by the literary world. Once in a while, an author like H.P. Lovecraft came around and was able to bridge the two together, or at least he was eventually recognized as a "literary" writer. But generally, the two worlds were separate. High-brow people didn't often read pulp magazines, and not many low-brow people read what was considered "real literature" because it wasn't very accessible, while pulp fiction was very accessible. I didn't really include my own opinion much in this video, but rather the attitude toward pulp fiction at that time from different perspectives, including the elitist literary world. And I have covered lynchings/racism in my video on the Harlem Renaissance and my video on the "race problem" in the 1920s, and have featured contemporary articles about that kind of sensitive subject matter. I also covered the First Red Scare a bit in my video on Sacco and Vanzetti as background to the case. I hope this cleared some things up.
Chris, I completely agree. It is an elitist attitude, and it is propagated casually and without thought. It is offensive to say that there were 600,000 idiots subscribing to a magazine and more buying it off shelves while the "real art" was limited to just a small number of intelligent readers, and "not appreciated in its day." Not to mention stating that pulp stories did not deal with the human condition, and that it was not "art."
@@saundby Thank you very much, sir, for this thoughtful reply. Your clear understanding of my position makes me feel less alone in the world.
You made my day good.
@The1920sChannel You might be surprised what people were reading in the pulps. Hugo Gernsback thought that real science was critical to "science fiction" and went looking for stories (and experts) who could provide the "masses" with stories to interest them in learning about real science. To that end, he republished obscure stories from other journals, not just Jules Verne, et al, but also Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue Culture King” (1927). (J. Huxley invented the term transhumanism and was the brother of Aldous Huxley of "Brave New World" fame.) Capt. Bishop’s story, “On the Martian Way” (Feb. 1927) was reprinted from “Broadway Magazine” (a slick) in 1907 and featured the first use of computing machines for space orbit calculations. Also in 1928, Gernsback published what is considered the first type of mass-societal-breeding-experiment story, called "Stenographer's Hands" by Dr. Keller. This story predates "Brave New World" by 5 years. Gernsback’s magazine, "Air Wonder Stories" was filled with commentaries and essays by real pilots and flyers. And "Science Wonder Stories", like "Science and Invention" and "The Electrical Experimenter", had interesting essays attempting to put some science fiction "things" into perspective for the regular person. My point is that unless you've read the magazines you miss out on the really interesting things being written about in there. In the 1950's Gernsback was publishing "Science Fiction Plus" which didn't run for many issues because tastes in sci-fi had changed. He had an on-going editorial debate with H.L. Gold, editor of "Galaxy" magazine about what the masses really wanted to read in sci-fi-adventure stories or the more psychological stories being promoted in the early 1950's. People have commented that your attitude is elitist visa vie “real literature” vs. pulp stories. I wouldn’t say that, you’ve done a nice summary in your video which is engaging and creates curiosity. But it’s a shallow look. There were many hard working writers in the pulps, many who went on to work in the slicks. Some of the best science fiction writers of all time started in the pulps and their stories continue to be classics. Sorry for the long comment but I write about the history of the pulps on the regular. Cheers!
Death Doll long before Chucky.
Mad Magazine? Playboy? Esquire, police Gazette?
Conan the Barbarian! 😎🍺
Is thare a archive of pulp magazines online?
7:33 That kid is 30.
LETS GOOO
WELLS
No mention of Robert E Howard? Conan people Conan 😢
mazing Stories was not printed on "cheap, pulp paper". In fact, Gernsback commssioned the creation of a special, bulky, thick, pretty high quality paper just for Amazing.
Do you have anything to back this up?
I've been researching pulps for years and have never heard of this.
While some pulp magazines got better grade pulp paper, and a few here and there had better grade paper, such as "Adventure" being published on book paper for about a year, I've never head of Amazing being published on better grade paper, and certainly not Gernsback commissioning special paper. I'll have to ask around on this.
Just an FYI it's pronounced Fi Low Vance. At least where i'm from.
This