Pulp Magazines
Pulp magazines were a cheap form of popular entertainment that emerged just before the dawn of the twentieth century, grew to immense popularity during the 1930s, and withered away by the early 1950s. Sold for 10 to 25 cents each and chocked full of sensational action, the pulps appealed primarily to the middle class and the educated lower class, but drew avid readers from every strata of society. As pulp publisher Henry Steeger noted in the preface to Tony Goodstone's The Pulps, "the names of Harry Truman, President of the United States, and Al Capone, lowest figure of the underworld, graced our subscription lists at the same time." Beneath the garish and lurid covers, the rough-edged pages (made from the cheapest wood-pulp) were often filled with hastily written purple prose. Yet, a few of the pulp magazines contained genuinely fine writing, and many of them contained crude, but powerful storytelling that shaped American popular culture. The pulps offered a proving ground for some of America's most popular authors, and introduced some of the world's best known fictional heroes.
The pulp magazines grew out of a nineteenth-century tradition of stories for the masses that began with religious chapbooks that warned against "the pernicious effects of dram drinking" and other vices.
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