Wikipedia: Pulp magazine

Pulp magazine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Pulp magazines, often called simply "pulps", were cheap, often sensationalistic and/or exploitative text fiction magazines widely published in the 1930s - 1950s. The first "pulp" is considered to be Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy of 1893. Most of the few pulps still thriving today are science fiction or mystery magazines.

The name comes from the cheap woodpulp paper on which they were printed. Magazines printed on better paper and usually offering content more oriented towards family reading were often called "slicks". Pulps were the successor to the "penny dreadfuls" and "dime novels" of the nineteenth century.

Pulp magazines can be categorized into the following genres:

Detective/Mystery
Romance
Science Fiction
True Crime
Western
Character (the precursor to the superhero fantasy genre)

Popular regular pulp fiction characters included:

Many well-known authors wrote for the pulps at one time or another. Note that many people would make a distinction between an author who wrote for the pulps but later went on to transcend the limitations of the genre, and a "pulp author", who did not.

Well-known authors who wrote for the pulps include:

Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originally serialized in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Black Mask.

The format eventually declined with rising paper costs, competition from comic books, television, and the paperback novel.

The genre also gave name to the movie Pulp Fiction.