Pulp Education #2 -- Those Amazing, Evolving Pulps

From one extreme...

The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction
by Mike Ashley

The earliest pulps grew out of the tradition of dime novels and boys' magazines, so were from the start tainted with a juvenile image. The first pulp was The Argosy published in New York by Frank A. Munsey. It had started as The Golden Argosy, a weekly boys' adventure magazine in dime novel format, in Dec. 1882. The title became The Argosy in Dec. 1888, trying to move away from the younger readership, and from Apr. 1894 it shifted to a monthly schedule, aimed at the same readership as Munsey's Magazine which Munsey had started in Feb. 1889. For two years The Argosy was similar to Munsey's, but in Oct. 1896 Munsey dropped the articles, making it the first all-fiction issue and, from Dec. 1896, the paper was all pulp.

Read the full article: http://www.pulpmags.org/history_page.html

To the other...

It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps
by Michael Nirenberg

We tend to think of the Eisenhower postwar era as an innocent time in American culture. As the conservative 1950s turned into the swinging 1960s, men's adventure magazines were a haven for the male fantasy. The struggle for male identity has its roots in postwar economics. We were still a young country in the 1950s and '60s ,and these magazines captured the imagination of boys and young men flexing before our collective self-image as the winners over the evil Axis Powers.

Read the full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-nirenberg/its-a-mans-world-mens-adventure_b_7986104.html