During the first half of the 20th century, the written word was the king of popular entertainment. Although radio was growing in popularity, movies were developing quickly, and television was on the horizon, reading still remained a common pastime for people of all classes and levels of education. Writers and publishers recognized the breadth of their audience, and produced fiction for every taste.
One new taste that rapidly exploded in popularity was that of the working-class individual. People of that era relied on fiction for the kind of vicarious, entertaining thrills that television provides today. Writers soon identified the interests of their audience and began to cater to them. They started producing stories that were shocking and exciting. This had not really been seen prior to this time in literary history.
Publishers soon jumped into the game. They began collecting and publishing these lurid stories in small, cheap magazines, released monthly. To keep costs down, these magazines were printed on the lowest-quality paper, made from wood pulp. The only place the publishers splurged on money was on the covers: The new magazines featured bright, memorable artwork designed to shock and entice. Pulp fiction was born.
Over the span of decades, the content of the pulps became highly refined and highly diversified. Magazines started to specialize in genres, and the newsstands offered readers mystery pulps, science fiction pulps, and hardboiled detective pulps. Across all of the different genres, pulp authors cultivated a certain tone and style that became synonymous with pulp fiction. Their writing was powerful and direct. Their stories were complex, if sometimes roughly put together. Their morality was clear-cut into "good" and "bad" - although readers delighted in darker stories that concentrated on the bad guys. Excitement was the watchword of the pulps.
The Second World War signaled the end of the pulps. Paper grew more expensive, and the audience had less time for reading. By the time the war was over, television was on the rise, and paperback novels captured the attention of the nation's readers. The pulp magazines died out as pulp paperbacks took over, but their legacy lived on. The action-packed, thrilling, morally-challenging style that was born in their pages had a lasting influence on future writers - and on Americans' taste in entertainment, no matter what its medium was. We can even see hints of pulp fiction today in movies and TV from time to time. The era may have ended a long time ago, but the legacy lives on in other mediums.
