JanusV+Pulp+fiction

Janus Varela ENGL-337-01, Modern American Fiction Dr. Laura Nicosia Spring 2010 Pulp Fiction

Pulp fiction, not the 1994 film by Quentin Tarantino, but referring to the magazines of fictional stories produced mostly in the early 1900s, was a popular form of entertainment during much of the first half of the 20th century. The term refers to the cheap, wood pulp paper that its pages consisted of. The physical contents of the pages were usually of poor, dingy quality. However, most pulp magazines often had lavishly illustrated and colored cover arts, which reflected the equally captivating stories contained inside. Pulp fiction provided a good dose of entertainment for Americans in the years after World War I, to the years leading to World War II, even including during the Great Depression. It was a hotspot for aspiring creative writers at the time, and it paved the way for many fictional classics to come. Pulp magazines started with general fiction stories, but expanded to encompass a wide variety of genres, from Adventure, to Fantasy, to Horror, to Mystery, to Sci-Fi, to Western. Some pulps were actually a compilation of different stories by different authors, with their cover art perhaps featuring a scene from one of the single stories, or a general image that suggests a common theme that a certain issue’s stories had. But some of the most popular pulp issues were those that featured a single main or recurring character, who often was on a different adventure for every issue. These larger-than-life heroes, who often had super abilities, took readers to far flung places while meeting pretty women and sinister villains alike. Physically, the average pulp magazine was approximately “seven inches wide by ten inches high, a half an inch thick, and 128 pages long.” They sold for only ten cents per issue, although limited special editions of pulps that used better quality, lustrous paper sold for twenty five cents, in which they were sometimes called “slicks” or “glossies”. Pulp companies were able to keep the costs of pulp magazines quite low by using cheap material and paying their authors less than in other media markets. The low cost of pulps allowed them to be mass produced as well as widely distributed in newsstands, making them more accessible to much of the general public, and gave people a chance to read fiction than they could afford otherwise. An increasing number of Americans were also becoming more literate at that time, reaching readers of many age groups. Beginning and amateur authors also turned to the pulp magazine industry before they moved on to larger markets. Many of them were eager enough to even just have their works published in printed text, and more prominent authors also sometimes looked to pulp companies for small amounts of quick money in times of a fluctuating economy. In the demands of World War II, it became more difficult to produce pulp magazines as widely, due to rationing, increasing taxes and production costs, and more limited resources. The pulps also faced competition from other rising media, such as the radio, television, screen, and emerging comic books and novels. They slowly disappeared from the local street newsstands, and once prolific authors who contributed to the pulp business were now turning to better paying outlets. But that is not to say that pulp magazines haven’t had their own contributions to classic American literature. There have been many former pulp writers who became the great authors we know today, including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, Upton Sinclair, and Tennessee Williams just to name a few. Read again in the contexts of present day, some elements of the pulp magazines of the 20th century now seem outdated, as many changes and developments have occurred since then. But nevertheless, the pulp age is still always an entrancing read.  Works Cited “Pulp magazine.” __Wikipedia__. 24 March 2010. []. __The Pulp Gallery __. 2 April 2010. []. __The Vintage Library __. March 24 2010. [].