Historians all agree that the Twentieth Century was dominated by American Culture. What dominated America, taking it over lock, stock and two smoking barrels, was pulp culture. In 1900, the major funding for arts were going to museums for painting and sculpture, or concert halls and opera houses. By 2000, all of those functions were taken over by the state, federal and local funding for 'philanthropic' attempts to support a collapsing culture. How had this happened?
The very term 'pulp' is based on cheap paper, no neutral density, no permanence, capable of being bound into cheap publications. It was the content of these publications, starting with 'Argosy' magazine in 1896, that was important. 'Argosy' and 'All Story' magazine in the beginning were omnibuses, trying to capture all audiences by having something for everyone. The covers were plain and there was an attempt at being all things to all people. As the magazines began using more color and more frank and lurid imagery, the boom in pulp began in earnest.
The cover art of pulp magazines is a genre unto itself; you that can tell much about the society from which it came. While science fiction imagery now seems the most quaint, SF didn't emerge as a force for decades, until after the Second World War. In the beginning, fiction drew on Victorian and French authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G.. Welles and Jules Verne, feeding an appetite for novel adventure in a growing middle class. But it was Western fiction that really soared, a particularly American subject that became popular around the world.
Soon there were magazines devoted just to Western fiction, but it took a while for other genres to catch up. While authors like Jack London had their work serialized to great success, it was Edgar Rice Burroughs who revolutionized the field. Starting in 1912 with 'Under the Moon of Mars', Burroughs became a one-man literary factory, his success both instantaneous and saturating. More importantly, he was the first author to use copyright on his creations. Every subsequent writer owes him a debt of gratitude.
Burroughs was a perfect pulp author. There was not a hint of pretension to literary quality, only a very transparent style that was easy to read and full of imagination. Prolific, he constantly wrote in different genres and sold to various magazines, the only way to succeed by not becoming too dependent on one outlet. He was perhaps the first person to cross media platforms, using his iron grip on hot properties like Tarzan to get into comic strips, movies and merchandising in a way that would be very familiar to modern audiences.
While adventure with a hint of sex sold like gangbusters, the pulps soon learned the lesson that only entertainment industries like music and television would adapt decades later; subdivide the market. Soon, railroad and boxing stories, mystery and romance magazines started to appear. The biggest developments happened in the 1920s with the publication of two new magazines, 'The Black Mask' and 'Weird Tales'. Both would change the cultural landscape in profound ways.
'The Black Mask' was quickly a success, specializing in and largely defining what we know know as detective fiction. Dashiell Hammett was the breakout author, although over its long career it also published Raymond Chandler, Earl Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, and John D. McDonald, all titans in the genre. Hollywood was quick to pick up on the Americanized version of the crime fighter, in contemporary dress and speaking contemporary lingo. For decades after, even to today, all media was inundated with variations of the gumshoe, from 'Peter Gunn' to 'The Rockford Files' right through to today's 'Instinct'.
'Weird Tales' was an entirely different story, spending its entire existence on the brink of financial ruin, paying its most famous authors late or only partially, if at all. Despite this, the magazine provided a vital outlet to a tremendous variety of writers whose work would become influential, although in almost every case decades later. Starting with H. P. Lovecraft, whose character Cthulhu actually managed to get the greatest amount of write in votes during the last presidential election, through Robert E, Howard, Robert Block, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Theodore Sturgeon, and Richard Matheson, to name but a few, tons of important American authors first were published there. All these authors would have a profound influence of popular culture in the future.
The career of Robert Bloch, perhaps the quintessential 'Weird Tales' writer, demonstrated how the effect of the magazine trickled down over decades. Bloch started in his teens as a letter writer to the publication, proclaiming the genius of H. P. Lovecraft while expressing open hatred of Robert E. Howard's barbarian fiction. Soon, he was contributing his own short stories, reminiscent of Lovecraft but using more modern settings and language. Professionally, however, he was more like Howard, proficient at hitting many major markets at the same time, quickly finding his own voice.
Moving in political speech writing got Bloch a foot into radio work, and while still providing many short stories and novels, he also became involved television screenplays. Alfred Hitchcock used his work constantly in the 1950s, both in his monthly mystery magazine and in his television show. Adapting Bloch's novel 'Psycho' was both a major turning point in modern cinema and in Bloch's life. He was one of the few 'Weird Tales' writers to benefit from his work in his lifetime, but his great powers as a storyteller and decades of disciplined hard work also helped. Here, Bloch is even treated as an equal to producer William Castle and screen legend Joan Crawford:
Robert Bloch was the first writer, as far as I can tell, to focus in on the fascination that the modern public has with serial killers. He moved from supernatural and imaginary horrors to those found in the real world. As our society, through Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dalmer, and so many others moved into a more terrifying space, Bloch was there waiting for us. He also wrote about Jack the Ripper and H. H. Holmes, and his influence, particularly in horror films world wide, was seminal.
Sword & Sorcery fiction also emerged from 'Weird Tales', although the route was rather torturous. Robert E. Howard borrowed parts of Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as Talbot Mundy's 'Tros of Samothrace' series, trying this formula on a number of characters before hitting paydirt with Conan the Barbarian. Immediately and immensely popular, Howard committed suicide before any of his work ever made it out of the pulps. His horror fiction was put into hardback first, but Conan roared back into life when Lancer Books started publishing them with Frank Frazetta covers.
While Conan was a perfect anti-hero for the modern era, it was Fritz Leiber, who took elements of Howard's approach and crossed it with his Shakespeare background as an actor in his father's touring company, to created the template. 'Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser', created by Leiber, written from the 1930s through the 1980s, was the basis of Dungeons and Dragons. Without the widespread popularity of that game, modern media phenomenon such as 'Game of Thrones' would be unimaginable.
The Great Depression stopped the proliferation of magazines, but the best ones survived. During World War II, the US military spread the use of paperback books among the armed forces, and soon after the war, paperbacks, along with television and comic books, eroded the pulp magazines' readership base. I'm not even going to go into the relationship between pulp subject matter and comic books, since it seems so self-evident. All but the mystery and science fiction publications dried up, but the better writers found new homes, often writing for the small screen or any of the new 'men's' magazines that sprung up in the new era.
Pulp culture didn't end, it simply proliferated to other media. Most immediately, it could be seen in the paperback and magazine boom of the 1950s and 1960s. It also creeped into television through 'Thriller', 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', 'Twilight Zone' and 'Outer Limits' and all the private detective shows, not to mention westerns. Charles Beaumont wrote one of the earliest appreciations of pulp culture for Playboy in 1962, and a decade later Hollywood made the first movie with 'Pulp' in the title, starring Michael Caine. People instinctively knew what the word meant without a definition ever having been made.
It was 'Star Wars', leftover Buck Rogers with a touch of samurai, and 'Indiana Jones',a mash up of all pulp with a dash of horror, that signified the wholesale adoption of pulp values by the media establishment. Interestingly, actual pulp characters haven't done well in the new cultural landscape, often being too politically incorrect to survive into the new millennium with the same impact and popularity. Tarzan, John Carter of Mars and the Lone Ranger have all failed at the box office in the last few years.
We are truly living in a pulp cultural landscape. What had been considered high art (classical forms such as painting, opera and poetry) are now funded by governments and special groups to prevent them from disappearing. The huge money is in the more common entertainment, all with roots at least once removed from pulp. It has become a worldwide avalanche, spreading to every culture around the globe. True cultural imperialism did not occur through use of force, but by the forces of entertainment. That is true subversion on the grandest scale imaginable.
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