When I Think of Pulp

[Charles]

When I think of pulp fiction, the first characters that come to mind are Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, and such. Although Robert E. Howard's Conan stories were published in pulp magazines literally, do people generally consider them pulp as well? What about Sword and Planet fiction, like ERB's Barsoom series. Do people regularly see this kind of fiction as pulp? What abotu Space Opera, like old Hamilton and his type? In other words, I guess, how broad is pulp?

[Rob]

Pulp is a storytelling style, not a genre. So, yes, it's very broad. It even encompassed, at one time, Romance stories. If you think about it today's action movies are an offspring of Pulp style.
"many reviewers describe books by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen as pulp. Such cases suggest that the term pulp is interchangeable with noir, another descriptor that gets bandied about often without too much meaning. Certainly much of the fiction in the pulp magazines was fast-paced and often violent as part of the formula, but pick up an early pulp, and you might find that the pace is not nearly as fast, nor the action as violent, as you imagined. Equating pulps with detective or crime fiction ignores the other 99% of the genres they published; there were western pulps, science-fiction pulps, the love pulps, the sports pulps, adventure pulps, and general-interest titles like People’s and The Popular Magazine. The early pulps encompassed a whole range of genres, and the hundreds of pulps that followed had something of interest for everyone."--http://www.pulpmags.org/contexts_page...

[Charles]

Rob, I like the idea of it being a storytelling style rather than genre. That makes perfect sense. I guess "noir" is kind of the same thing, storytelling style rather than genre.

I never read the actual pulps. Of any kind. When I found out later in my life about the pulps the term was most usually associated with the crime pulps. I know intellectually that they weren't limited to that, but my mind still tends to go there.

[Greg]

Definitely not a genre in the John Cawelti sense. I like to think of pulp as the historical publishing category that continues from the dime novel tradition and shades into the paperback originals, 1929-59 or so. These days there seems to be a resurgence of interest, and more reprinted or digitized titles available.

I also get the connotation of a certain nostalgic mood, which I find quite fascinating.

As for the Spider, I've never read a Spider story, but I've got one on order. From a quick glance at Kindle previews, Norvell Page seems like a very engaging writer with a sense of flow.

[Jim]

I guess I'm old fashioned but I have a much narrower concept of what pulp fiction is. First I think that it can only be applied to short stories that appeared in magazine form. Several conditions that occurred in the 1930's enabled the writing form known as pulp fiction although it had it's origins around the beginning of the 20th century with Argosy Magazine. The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed.

Magazines produced on cheap paper also brings up another main ingredient. These magazines were inexpensive and therefore only paid small amounts to the writers compared to more expensive magazines which were often referred to as "slicks". Low costs also contributed to a general low quality of this type of literature. But because of the sheer volume there were many "diamonds in the rough" produced.

Pulp fiction included all genres but two genres in particular took a big leap forward in this period. The first was science fiction and the second was the crime/mystery/detective/noir genre. Westerns, horror and occult mysteries were also common but these already had a good start in the "dime novel" era at the end of the 19th century.

Notable authors who got their starts in pulp include Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Earle Stanley Gardner, Max Brand, Zane Grey, HP Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, L Ron Hubbard and a whole lot more.

While there were some novels being produced by these authors in pulp fiction style it was usually the case that these novels were previously serialized in the magazines or were expansions of short pulp fiction stories.

I consider the "golden era" of pulp fiction to be the 30's 40's and very early 50's. By the mid 50's the authors that had cut their teeth on pulp magazines were now moving into another rapidly increasing part of fiction writing - the paperback novel. The magazines that survived had increased their budgets and were paying more for better stories. Paperbacks were also good vehicles for creating anthologies of pulp magazine stories either by author or genre.

I understand that many want to make the idea of "pulp" fiction to be looked at as a style of writing. But I think that the context of the times is what makes "pulp" fiction stories unique. At this point i could go into my favorite pulp writers and stories but that would take way too long.

[Rick]

Question: would pulp magazines be considered the same as Penny Dreadfuls or are the two literary cousins?

[Vincent]

Literary cousins. Although both were published on cheap pulp wood paper, the Penny Dreadful was a British thing, and focused on lurid horror, while pulp fiction was more American, and spanned science fiction, space fantasy, weird tales, detective stories, yellow menace, westerns, and many other genres.

My definition of pulp fiction matches Jim's answer above. He nailed it.

[Rick]

Vincent wrote: "Literary cousins. Although both were published on cheap pulp wood paper, the Penny Dreadful was a British thing, and focused on lurid horror, while pulp fiction was more American, and spanned scien..."

Thanks, I kinda figured as much but I wanted to be certain.