PULP FICTIONEERS edited by John Locke
This collection is the result of combing through hundreds of issues of writing journals from the pulp era, mostly Writer’s Digest and Author & Journalist, but also a variety of lesser-known magazines: The Writer, The Editor, Writer’s Review, and two magazines issued by correspondence schools, Writers’ Markets and Methods and Writer’s Monthly. One of the surprises of the project was in discovering how many magazines were devoted to the craft of writing at that time. This speaks, in some measure, to the opportunities presented by the pulps to the freelance writer. With hundreds of pulp magazines publishing thousands of stories, there may never have been a better time for making money selling fiction.
Many of the pulp-related articles in these journals deal with storytelling technique, usually genre-specific, e.g. “Action in Westerns,” “Live Your Love Story,” or “Why Aren’t Your Detective Stories Selling?” Others assess the markets and advise on slanting for specific titles. But another category of article presents behind-the-scenes looks into the pulp world, the rise and fall of the business, the experiences of writers, editors, and publishers. And it is the most interesting and informative of this latter group that Pulp Fictioneers attempts to gathers together.
If you were to ask the average pulp aficionado to supply a thumbnail history of the pulps, you’d probably get something like this: Frank Munsey established the field by issuing, on cheap, pulpwood paper, an all-fiction version of his magazine The Argosy. Edgar Rice Burroughs became the first superstar writer when All-Story published Tarzan of the Apes in 1912. In the Twenties and Thirties, individual pulp magazines became highly genre-specialized, with westerns, mysteries, love, and adventure stories—and tales of larger-than-life characters like The Shadow—all the rage. Comic books, paperbacks, and eventually television, siphoned off the readership of the pulps, and so they died out in the fifties. That version of pulp history, centered about the nature and content of the pulps, has been written about in great detail. But there is another history of the pulps, the business and the experience of the people involved, that has largely been neglected. Not from lack of interest, though. There simply has been a dearth of material available. Harold Hersey’s 1937 memoir, Pulpwood Editor (reprinted by Adventure House in 2002) is one of a very small handful of books written about the pulps at the time. There have a few reminiscences written since the pulp era, notably Frank Gruber’s Pulpwood Jungle (Sherbourne Press, 1967), and Hugh B. Cave’s Magazines I Remember (Tattered Pages Press, 1994). But much of what was interesting about the time has been lost to death and memory. Or buried in the pages of these hard-to-find old writers’ mags.
Copyright © 2004 John Locke and Adventure House
10-62153
Weight: 1.00 lbs
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