A Popular Medium.

Inexpensive magazines publishing fiction that appealed to a popular audience dated back to the end of the nineteenth century. The pulp magazines — so named for the thick, inexpensive pulpwood paper on which they were printed — got their start early in the twentieth century. The pulps flourished in the 1930s, along with radio shows and motion pictures, as a reasonably priced form of escapist entertainment. Hundreds of these magazines appeared between the 1920s and the 1950s, when they disappeared because of competition from paperbacks and television. At their peak pulps were purchased by millions of readers.

Violence.

The pulps were more adventuresome than radio or movies, which catered to family audiences. The world of the pulps was generally a violent place, whether the stories dealt with cowboys and Indians, crime fighters and gangsters, spacemen and bug-eyed monsters, or warriors such...