The period between the World Wars—the era of sexual liberation, Prohibition, the rise of organized crime, and the Great Depression—was also the classic era of American pulp magazines, the subject of this fascinating volume. Pulps, with their lurid color covers depicting the thrills of sex and violence, and with stories to match inside, fuelled America’s dreams—and nightmares. For a few cents they offered everything young men wanted: sex, action, adventure. But they also fostered the talents of some of the greatest popular writers of the century—Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett, among others—and virtually invented the genres of science fiction and hard-boiled crime. From the cheap thrills of the “hot” and “spicy” pulps and the sexual sadism of the “shudder” pulps to the weird worlds of the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror pulps, this book displays their art and tells their history, capturing the original magazines in all their sleazy, sensational glory.

Expanded edition covering the Adventure Magazine genre of Cold-War masculinity including new material wartime xenophobic American magazine articles and advertisements.

The first half of the twentieth century was a golden age of American storytelling. Mailboxes burgeoned with pulp magazines, conveying an endless variety of fiction. Comic strips, with their ongoing dramatic storylines, were a staple of the papers, eagerly followed by millions of readers. Families gathered around the radio, anxious to hear the exploits of their favorite heroes and villains. Before the emergence of television as a dominant--and stifling--cultural force, storytelling blossomed in America as audiences and artists alike embraced new mediums of expression. This examination of storytelling in America during the first half of the twentieth century covers comics, radio, and pulp magazines. Each was bolstered by new or improved technologies and used unique attributes to tell dramatic stories. Sections of the book cover each medium. One appendix gives a timeline for developments relative to the subject, and another highlights particular episodes and story arcs that typify radio drama. Illustrations and a bibliography are included.

Detective, sci-fi, Western, supernatural, jungle, pirate, aviation, war, sports, horror, super hero, love, sex - these and more are the fantastic array of categories for the wonderful stories, features, articles, poems collected here from 50 years of pulp magazines ... the cradle and school of sensationalism for American pop culture.

A collection of stories featuring characters of African origin, or descent, in stories that run the gamut of genre fiction.

The term pulp fiction has always had a certain resonance; but it is the artwork--bold, energized, dramatic, garishly colorful, and frequently grotesque--that has made pulp magazines memorable to so many people. Pulp Art is the groundbreaking--and ultimate--book on one of America's most important and spectacular forms of illustration art. At last, preserved in this volume are most of the still-existing originals created for the pulp covers, never before seen in all their sharply focused, vibrantly colored brilliance. Robert Lesser, a pioneering collector of this work and an expert on American popular culture, has assembled a gallery of these now-priceless originals. The dynamically pulp-flavored text is a complete historical survey of the pulps and their most important cover artists--Virgil Finlay, J. Allen St. John, Rafael de Soto, Hannes Bok, George and Jerome Rozen, Frank R. Paul, and many others. Also offered are critical discussions of individual paintings, as well as the major themes of the pulp magazines.

During the 20th century's first half, millions of Americans flocked to newsstands every month in search of thrills provided by all-fiction magazines printed on cheap pulp paper. These periodicals introduced and popularized such famous characters as Tarzan, Zorro, Sam Spade, Buck Rogers, Doc Savage, Hopalong Cassidy, and Conan the Barbarian, to name just a few. The producers of pulp fiction churned out their vigorous and occasionally outre stories at a feverish pace, generally for a mere penny per word. Some eventually graduated from the pulps to become world-famous, best-selling authors-among them Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ray Bradbury, Louis L'Amour, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Often derided in their own time, the "rough paper" magazines had an incalculable effect on American pop culture. They gave birth to modern science fiction and the hardboiled detective story, but also to plot devices, character types, and storytelling innovations that live on in today's most popular novels, movies, and TV shows. Illustrated with more than 600 magazine covers and original paintings, THE BLOOD 'N' THUNDER GUIDE TO PULP FICTION presents a complete and lively history of this unique literary form, covering genres individually and identifying key titles, authors, and stories. It also offers advice on collecting the vintage magazines and directs readers to recently published reprints of classic pulp."