Author Description

During the pulp era - roughly the first five decades of the 20th century - more than one thousand all-fiction magazines reached the nation's newsstands, if only for a single issue. Of that number, just a couple dozen attained any reputation for literary quality, and fewer than half that many regularly published stories considered to be on a par with those accepted by the prestigious "slick" magazines. The top periodicals in the field - ADVENTURE, ARGOSY, BLUE BOOK, SHORT STORIES, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, and a few others - were edited and packaged with loving care and consistently reflected the best that rough-paper magazines had to offer. And for decades American readers, ravenous for escapist entertainment, devoured them in weekly or monthly intervals. PRIDE OF THE PULPS contains lengthy, in-depth surveys of the most prestigious all-fiction magazines. Considerably revised and expanded from their original appearances in the award-winning journal BLOOD 'N' THUNDER, these essays reflect scholarly devotion and fannish enthusiasm in equal measure. They chart the evolutions of ADVENTURE, SHORT STORIES, THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, and several other periodicals of comparable quality, noting the memorable authors, stories, and characters that paraded across their woodpulp pages, entertaining readers through two World Wars and a Great Depression. PRIDE OF THE PULPS, profusely illustrated with cover art and interior illustrations from the pulp magazines under consideration, is the first volume in BLOOD 'N' THUNDER PRESENTS, a series of book-length histories of vintage American popular culture as reflected in books, magazines, comic strips, radio dramas, and motion pictures.