In the early part of the twentieth century in the United States mass entertainment was still limited to what could be broadcast over the radio or published in magazines that could be sold throughout the country. Magazines ranged from the Benjamin Franklin-founded Saturday Evening Post, with its sentimentalized vision of American life personified by the Norman Rockwell pictures that adorned its covers, to the down and dirty world of pulp magazines with their sensationalist and lurid stories of crime, passion, and violence.
Of the two it should come as no surprise that the pulp magazines were the breeding ground for some rather remarkable writers. Without these erstwhile purveyors of filth and scandal, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Raymond Chandler, and Robert E. Howard may well have never had the opportunity to even begin their careers as writers, let alone created the works and characters they have become famous for. Conan The Barbarian from Howard, Phillip Marlow from Chandler, I Robot from Asimov, and The Martian Chronicles from Bradbury are only a few of the works and characters that the literary world owes these magazines a debt of thanks to.
It was on these pages that genres we now take for granted like science fiction and fantasy, detective fiction, and romance novels all had their humble beginnings. While the literary magazines like The Paris Review were trumpeting the avant-garde for a select audience, the pulp magazine was heralding the creation of the inexpensive paperback novel and the concept of popular fiction.
Today the inheritors of these early authors are plentiful, as the crowded mystery and science fiction/fantasy shelves of any bookstore can attest. While some authors have managed to create their own voice within this framework, far too many seem like pale imitations of the originals. How many ways for instance can you recreate the private investigator role created by Raymond Chandler before it just starts to get trite? There are just only so many ways some pies can be cut before the slices are so thin as to be non-existent.
Article comments