Writers and illustrators, especially those new to the craft, found plenty of work between 1920 and 1950 when hundreds of inexpensive fiction publications—commonly referred to as "Dime Westerns"— flooded the American market.
To satisfy the appetite
for these magazines, covers and thousands of inside pages needed art and
written storylines produced in assembly-line fashion on a weekly or monthly
basis.
The pulp magazines, which
sold for between a dime and 25 cents, measured six-by-nine-inches and were made
of cheap wood pulp paper, which made the manufacturing
process economical. The 32-page Dime Western
novels were so popular, distribution averaged in the tens of millions.
The pulps featured a broad range of genres: detective stories, science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, gangster, war, mysteries, and sports—all usually featuring memorable main characters.
The most popular pulp themes
centered around cowboys and Indians and the Wild West.
According to The Pulp
Magazine Project, the inaugural issue of
the first all-western pulp appeared on newsstands on July 12, 1919—Street and
Smith's Western Story Magazine.
Hundreds of writers wrote for
the magazine, which enjoyed thirty straight years of publication promising
"Big Clean Stories of Outdoor Life."
Pulps attracted prolific
writers who sometimes two or more stories for the same issue.
Frederick Faust, also known as Max Brand, ranked among the most versatile of the writers. He sometimes wrote as many as three stories for a single issue but under different pen names.
Others included Paul S. Powers, who wrote for a variety of
magazines, including Wild West Weekly, Thrilling Ranch Stories, Exciting
Western, and others.
Laurie Powers, his
granddaughter, discovered six stories never before published and included them
in a book she edited, called
Riding the Pulp Trail,
Altus Press (2011) and consists of twelve Paul Powers
stories.
Several legendary literary
figures got their start and polished their writing craft in pulp magazines.
Among them: Louis L'Amour, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, Edgar Rice
Burroughs, and Mary Rinehart.
At the same time, plenty of
no-name writers logged grueling hours for paltry wages—no more than a penny a
word—to meet the production demands of pulp magazines.
John Dinan, who authored, The Pulp Western: A Popular History of the Western Fiction Magazine of America, wrote, "The art of the ballyhoo may not have been invented by dime-novel writers, but they certainly raised it to new heights."
Among the hundreds of
publications, Western pulp fiction appeared in such magazines as:
Lariat Story Magazine
- The Black Mask
- Crackshot Western
- Argosy Weekly
- Dime Western Magazine
- Indian Stories
- Masked Rider Western
- Outlaws West
- Quick Trigger Western
- Spicy Western Stories
Changing market factors accelerated the decline of pulp fiction magazines.
By the 1930s, more than a
thousand different pulp titles were in circulation. With the need to print so
many publications, the industry got hit hard by paper shortages after World War
II.
To trim expenses and keep
pace, some publishers switched to digest-size formats that were cheaper to
produce.
Declining popularity,
however, proved insurmountable. The public began turning from
pulp to other forms of entertainment, such as comic books, paperbacks, and
radio.
Television drove the deepest nail in the pulp fiction coffin. Post-war sales of RCA television sets skyrocketed and helped accelerate the demise of the pulps.
At the same time, talented
writers discovered they could make much more money by writing novels and having
them serialized.
Pulp westerns proved an
entertaining channel of storytelling while it lasted, and gave new writers and
artists an unparalleled training ground.
Frank Munsey, an American newspaper and magazine
publisher who launched the first ten-cent periodical in 1889, once wrote:
"The story is worth more than the paper it is printed on."
_______
_______
