There’s no single date for when the pulps actually died, but April 8, 1949, was certainly the date that their eventual demise became official.
As I wrote in “The Day the Pulps Died,” that was the date that Street & Smith Publications announced that it was canceling its line of pulp magazines, as well as its comic books.
Before the end of the year, the last issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage, Detective Story, and Western Story had been published. And the pulp era would gradually fade away as pulp magazine after pulp magazine ceased publication or morphed into digests during the 1950s.
I was wondering what the reaction to Street & Smith’s announcement was at the time. I took a look at the newspapers from that year, and came across several short editorials on the topic. Let’s take a look.
From The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), April 10, 1949:
New Keys Open Doors For Escape to Romance
We pause in the day’s occupation to heave a few sighs over the passing of the pulp magazines. It is not that the pulps have been our reading fare for a long time. But news that Street & Smith Publications are leaving the field of fictional adventure, romance, and crime-does-not-pay is like a reminder of the fading of youth.
Many is the greying citizen who will be thinking back fondly today upon the news stands of 25 or 30 years ago, and all those irresistible covers that beckoned to an hour of escape into the realms of derring-do and love. Many is the respectable and best-selling author who recalls the start he got in that wide, motley, and insatiable list for which he wrote gratefully at a cent a word.
The world has not changed. It has only moved. There is still a way to momentary forgetfulness of the atom bomb and inflation, but there are other keys to the door. The movies, the radio. and the daily comic strips have come along to charm those magic casements into opening on perilous seas. They give reality to the crack of .44s, the beat of hoofs, the long-drawn susurrations of ecstasy and the sobs of affronted virtue. What cold and crude type can suffice against them?
The lady of the house can get it all without moving from her dishes or the washing machine. Even over the hum of the vacuum cleaner rise the accents of the soap opera; and in the evening the whole family can enjoy it all together on the screen, without hating one another because the printed page is for one pair of eyes at a time.
Before Street & Smith moved to uptown Manhattan into quarters to match the chic and glamorous slicks to which they turned with the times, their gloomy old house was a citadel of fantasy. One by one the old titles were weeded out with changing tastes and demands. A few withstood the pressure of new mediums, but now, with television for all just around the comer, it is too much.
From The Baltimore Sun, April 11, 1949:
On the Passing of the ‘Pulp’ Magazines
The adventure-filled “pulp” magazines — those printed on cheap paper with flashy and, sometimes, fleshy, illustrations — are gradually vanishing from their traditional place on the American magazine stands. Several of the large “pulp” houses have been cutting down their strings of magazines in recent months, and last week the oldest publishing firm in the field, Street & Smith, announced the demise of its last four “pulps:” Western Story, Detective Story, Doc Savage, and The Shadow.
For those who make a living at writing, the passing of the “pulps” means the passing of a ready meal ticket. Some authors, using half a dozen different names in dealing with competing publishers, made the formalized “pulp” stories their specialty and, at a cent a word or better, made a good living at their trade.
But in addition to them, many a famous author, under an assumed name, has paid the rent and bought his meals between great novels on the money to be had for excursions into the adventures and romances of western sheriffs, barnstorming flyers, sand-hogs, soldiers of fortune, and gang busters.
Just as the legitimate theater today is peopled with actors and actresses who got their start in burlesque, so, too, is the world of books indebted to the early schooling of the “pulps.” Street & Smith alone, in 94 years of “pulp” production, helped to start on their way such well-known authors as Booth Tarkington, Fannie Hurst, Theodore Dreiser, A. Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, Clarence Buddington Kelland, Frank Norris, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and many others. And along with writers, the best-known cover artists also got their first breaks in the “pulps.”
Why the demand for “pulp” magazines has fallen off is not clear. Some blame it on television, and others on the increasing popularity of inexpensive reprints of western novels, whodunits, and love stories. Certainly the so-called “slick” magazines (those with better quality paper) have taken over many of the “pulp” type of stories in their competition for mass circulation, and the radio dramas have also made a strong bid for the tears and fears that kept the “pulps” alive.
In their heyday, the “pulps” were branded as unfit for juvenile consumption, just as comic books are today. But crime has continued without the “pulps,” just as it would continue if there were no comic books or radio dramas. The passing of the “pulps,” in fact, probably has no more sociological significance than the passing of a fad. It would be nice to say that it indicates a change for the better in American tastes, but that would be hard to prove. The medium may have changed, but the “pulp”-type story goes on forever.
Okay, maybe the Sun‘s unnamed editorial writer was stretching it a bit with the authors list.
From the Detroit Free Press, April 12, 1949:
As We See It…
We trust that the profound thinkers who gauge social trends will not overlook the announcement from Street & Smith, a publishing firm which has provided a large part of America with its literary diet for nearly a century.
By all odds the most famous of the “pulp” houses, Street & Smith is discontinuing its last pulp magazines, and its comic books, too. Henceforth it will edit and print only “slicks.”
For the uninitiated, the physical difference is in format and paper stock. Intellectually, the slick is supposed to be the superior. Maybe it is, but the old rough-paper magazines with their specialized content, have come up with some top-notch stories in their day — and have been the starting point for numerous authors who arose to higher publishing dignity.
Just for the historical record, and to throw a little more light on the character of the pulp, the four last Street & Smith survivors, now expiring, were Detective Story, Western Story, Doc Savage, and The Shadow.
The thing we’re not sure of and hope the profound thinkers can determine is this: Does the fade-out of the pulp indicate changed literary desires or is their audience merely turning to another medium for the same fare? Let’s say, for example, radio’s soap operas.
And, lastly, from The Times (Shreveport, La.), April 20, 1949:
The Pulpers and Literature
In using the word “literature” in connection with writings to be preserved, people normally think of culture and intellect. But the word also means specifically the collective literary works or the preserved writings of an era, a nation or a people. In the latter senses American pulp magazines, the “cheap” publications on paper often rougher than newsprint, are part of the literature of this nation, ami its people, and specifically are part of the literature of current generations — present, immediately past, and perhaps in the near future.
Originals of the Nick Carter series and of the Horatio Alger series are more valuable in dollars and cents than some books published a century or more ago; this coming from the rarity of the document rather than from its content, as a rule. For nearly a century, a major portion of American literary diet has come not only from pulp magazines, but from one firm publishing them — Street & Smith. So, it is with varying feelings that we read that Street & Smith no longer will publish “pulpers” but will confine itself to slicks — slick paper productions which may or may not be of any greater cultural quality than the pulps.
But, though the content of most of the pulps always has been trash from the cultural viewpoint, it is fact that quite a few cultural gems first were printed in these quick-sale and catch-penny magazines. And, many an author whose later productions gained cultural recognition earned a living writing pulp trash while climbing the ladder of culture — or perhaps “success” would be a better word. Some of the big salaried writers of Hollywood and some of the modern authors whose works are looked on as more than passing fancy never could have stayed in the literary game long enough to write worthwhile things or to gain material success but for the small sums gathered in writing for pulp magazines through their early years of literary effort.
In years past, we have known young men and young women who wrote for half a dozen or more pulp magazines simultaneously, under half a dozen or more pen names, or sometimes under several pen names for a single magazine. One name would be used for love-mush stories, one for westerns, one for detective stories, and so on. We have read letters from pulp readers to the publishers saying that “Sheila Sheilcross” was the only woman writer in the world who really understood the emotions of young girls, and others saying that “Norcross Madre” must have roamed the Seven Seas and all the lands between, so broad was the scope of his thrilling adventure stories; and we have seen a young man, half starving in a Greenwich Village attic, hastily searching encyclopedias for material to use in his “Norcross Madre” stories and reading newspaper advice to the lovelorn columns to get material for the love-mush type, the same young man writing under both names and in two very different fields.
Once, we joined a “Literary Factory” — a group of young Chicago reporters who decided to grind out pulp magazine stories by the yard and split the proceeds. The trouble was no one could agree who to write what. Each wanted to tell the other how to form his plot, and when a check did come in everybody claimed precedence on it. This naive effort at collectivism failed completely.
Of course, there’ll be pulp magazines — millions of issues, perhaps — despite the self-removal from the field of the century-old firm of Street & Smith. But, this removal definitely will make a hole in American contemporary literature, and its past productions definitely are a part of American literature — poor, bad, or indifferent. After all, there’s many a dime pulp magazine story that will last far longer in literary history than most of the trash now appearing in the so-called top flight magazines of three times or more that price, printed in gaudy colors and getting thousands of dollars per page for advertising.
“Pulpers”? I’m not sure where the unnamed editorial writer came up with that. I’ve never heard the term associated with our beloved magazines before. Apart from that, I think the final paragraph is very fitting.
