Battling the stigma of ‘pulp’

Of course, some of the fiction published in the pulp magazines was dreck. But there was also a fair share of excellent storytelling.

I’m certain you can name one (or more) of your favorite pulp fictioneers that is a great author. A number of you frequently comment just that in response to one of the pulp fictioneers who appear in ThePulp.Net’s tweets marking fictioneer births or deaths.

I’ve written before about the stigma of “pulp.” But I don’t think you call attention to this problem too often.

A couple of weeks ago during a stop at Bookman’s in Phoenix, I picked up a copy of Stephen King‘s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.” About halfway through he touches on this very subject:

While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

I’m afraid this idea is rejected by lots of critics and plenty of writing teachers, as well. Many of these are liberals in their politics but crustaceans in their chosen fields. Men and woman who would take to the streets to protest the exclusion of African-Americans or Native Americans (I can imagine what Mr. Strunk would have made of these politically correct but clunky terms) from the local country club are often the same men and women who tell their classes that writing ability is fixed and immutable; once a hack, always a hack. Even if a writer rises in the estimation of an influential critic or two, he/she always carries his/her early reputation along, like a respectable married woman who was a wild child as a teenager. Some people never forget, that’s all, and a good deal of literary criticism serves only to replace a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it. Raymond Chandler may be recognized now as an important figure in 20th-century American literature, an early voice describing the anomie of urban life in the years after World War II, but there are plenty of critics who will reject such a judgment out of hand. He’s a hack! they cry indignantly. A hack with pretensions! The worst kind! The kind who thinks he can pass for one of us!

Critics who try to rise above this intellectual hardening of the arteries usually meet with limited success. Their colleagues may accept Chandler into the company of the great, but are apt to seat him at the foot of the table. And there are always those whispers: Came out of the pulp tradition, you know… Carries himself well for one of those, doesn’t he? … Did you know he wrote for Black Mask in the ’30s? … Yes, regrettable…

I wish folks would take the time to read more works by pulp magazine authors and not automatically spurn them based on the widespread definition of “pulp.”

What pulp magazine fictioneer is a good example of an excellent author that would you recommend to someone who won’t read pulps because they were written by “hacks”?