This post is brought to you by an upcoming collection, Strange Adventures. This book features Weird Westerns, exotic tales of far away places and their nastier monsters, as well as strange Northerns set in the cold climes of Canada. (How’s that for alliteration!) This book is inspired by Pulps like Adventure, Thrilling Adventures, Short Stories and the classic writers who paired deserts, jungles and snowy mountains with exotic dangers. G. W. Thomas adds a jigger of Lovecraftian terror to spice up the mix.
Adventure Pulps made their bread and butter on tales of brave men and women facing off against nature. The classic image is a man fighting a polar bear with only a knife. (Good luck!) But in the 1920s a new movement of storytelling culminated to portray those fierce and friendly animals not as Fantasy creatures like those in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) but as actual living beings. This trend began with novels as early as England’s Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) and hung around for Germany’s Felix Salten and Bambi, A Life in the Woods (1923). It was two magazine writers, both Canadians, who set the mold for the Pulp story version: Charles G. D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, giving us a slightly different type of Northern tale. Both were blessed to have great art (for Roberts that of Charles Livingston Bull) and for Seton, his own, to grace their work.
Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943)
Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts was knighted for his poetry but he paid his bills with stories for the magazines. (His brother was Theodore Goodrich Roberts, another novelist and magazine writer.) Roberts wanted to write about animals but not in the sugary way that Victorians had done it. He wanted if not scientific at least naturalistic facts. He felt this type of story could take us from the woes of the world and let us breathe again the crisp, pure air of nature. This kind of story has been called the “one native Canadian art form” since the first big writers were from above the 49th Parallel.
Roberts wrote many pieces collecting them in dozens of volumes beginning with Earth’s Enigmas (1896) along with the novel, Red Fox (1905). As I mentioned earlier, he had the good fortune to attract the artist Charles Livingston Bull (1874-1932) to his work. Bull’s art gave the animal characters accurate depiction at the same time as his work was brilliantly appealing, not just a dull photograph. Together they filled the pages of The Sunday Magazine. We are very fortunate that Roberts’ worksare in the public domain and available for free.
The Watchers of the Trail (1904)
The Haunters of the Silences (1905)
In the Deep of the Snow (1907)
More Kindred of the Wild (1911)
The Feet of the Furtive (1913)
Jim: The Story of a Backwoods Police Dog (1921)
Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946)
At the same time that Roberts was pioneering animal stories, Ernest Thompson Seton was drawing tales as well as writing them. He was born in England but came to Canada early on and trained at the Ontario College of Art then returned to England to study at the Royal Academy. After school he homesteaded in Manitoba while working on books like The Birds of Manitoba. Like Roberts, he would eventually move to New York, the center of publishing in North America. His most famous book was Wild Animals I Have Known (1898).
Four-Footed Americans and Their Kin (1898)
The Trail of the Sandhill Stag (1899)
Bannertail: The Story of a Gray Squirrel
Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac (1904)
The Biography of a Silver Fox (1923)
Albert Payson Terhune (1872-1942)
Terhune wrote many different kinds of magazine stories but his best were about his favorite subject: dogs, in particular, collies. He collected these tales in a book called Lad, A Dog (1919) which would later get a gender switch in Hollywood to Lassie. Terhune wrote many volumes about different dogs, sometimes setting the stories in his own estate of Sunnybank in New Jersey. Terhune’s work inspired later writers like Harlan Ellison in A Boy and His Dog (1969).
Buff: a Collie and Other Dog Stories (1921)
Further Adventures of Lad (1922)
F. St. Mars (Frank Howard Atkins) (1882-1921)
F. St. Mars was really the son of adventure writer Frank Aubrey (Francis Henry Atkins) so he came by his love of animal stories honestly. St. Mars published mostly in Adventure. He did collect some of his tales in two volumes.
Kenneth Gilbert (1889-1973)
Kenneth Gilbert was a prolific Pulpster, publishing most of his animal stories in Western magazines like Western Story. His other works tend towards Northerns.
“Blue, of the Arctic” (Popular Magazine, May 7, 1924)
“Musky, the Mighty” (Western Story, May 12, 1928)
“Happy Ending” (Blue Book, January 1934)
“Wild Born” (Adventure, November 1938)
“The Last Kill” (Western Story, March 4, 1939)
“Foal in the Forest” (Blue Book, October 1948)
Paul Annixter (1894-1985)
Paul Annixter was one of the kings of magazine writing. He got his start with a poor Weird Tales story before finding his meter with the adventure tale. Annixter wrote about animals in every kind of environment, from the cold forests of Canada to the bottom of the ocean. These tales were later collected in books like The Devil of the Woods (1958) and Pride of Lions and Other Stories (1960). Along with his wife, Jane, he wrote several novels for young adults like Windigo (1963), a personal favorite.
“Call of the Wild” (Adventure, August 1937)
“Deep Water Rat” (Adventure, March 1942)
“Man-Killer” (Cosmopolitan, December 1942)
“Song in the Night” (Everywoman’s Magazine, October 1945)
Jim Kjelgaard (1910-1959)
When you think of dog books, after Lassie, you come to Big Red. Jim Kjelgaard, who wrote the Big Red trilogy, started off in the Pulps. He wrote Westerns and Northerns and even some animal stories. After the Pulps died, he became YA’s king of the dog books before his early death in 1959.
“The Snow Devil” (Adventure, March 1943)
“The Possum” (Western Adventures, April 1943)
“Night Hunter” (Western Story, November 1944)
“Dusky” (Short Stories, February 1946)
Conclusion
There were other animal writers in the Pulps. Some, like Anthony M. Rud, were editors as well, and wrote a wide range of stories. Others were famous for other forms of adventure writing like Science Fiction, then switched to the more lucrative Young Adult markets. These include S. P. Meek and Austin Hall. Others better known in book publishing include James Curwood, Walt Morey and Jack O’Brien, who all got their start in the training ground known as the Pulps.
As a kid, I read some of these books. Before I discovered Tarzan (and everything changed!) I grudgingly worked my way through books like Jane and Paul Annixter’s Windigo (1963) and Jim Kjelgaard’s Fire Hunter (1950). In recent years this nature story background has helped with my Sword & Sorcery series about Arthan the Bear-man. While I am quite able to make up the feeding habits of ethereal blood wraiths, I like to keep to the real world as much as possible with Arthan. He is, in many ways, just a bear. I have to thank these Pulpsters for showing me the way. I think it is ironic that the fiction my father approved, and I spurned (I was a teen!), should come back to me eventually when I can actually appreciate it.
NB. Jack London
Morgan Wallace quite rightly asked me where was Jack London? This got me looking seriously at London’s work within the context of a naturalistic animal storyteller. At first I was no, Jack London doesn’t fit because he was all worried about Darwinian Survivalism (The strongest survive and that is all that matters. A story like “Love of Life”). This certainly is the theme of such dog classics as Call of the Wild (Dog Becomes Wolf) and White Fang (Wolf Becomes Dog). Jack had some other stories like “Brown Wolf” and “Diablo” (also known as “Batard”) where dog are front and center. White Fang does a pretty good job of the natural animal story in the opening chapters before humans show up. Again, where I put London in a different category is that his dog stories are also human stories.
And then there is the Romance. (Not kissy-kissy Romance but the Kipling type.) Are the events of Call of the Wild realistic, possible, or are they just another form of Jungle Book? Is this just a hero tale in animal clothes? Jack London is such a powerful writer that it is easy to forgive him small excesses. Compared to Sir Charles G. D. Roberts I would place him outside the true animal genre. When I compare him to Albert Payson Terhune, not so much. I mentioned James Oliver Curwood and Walt Morey, two writers clearly working inside the “Jack London” genre of dog books so there goes that argument!
So does jack London belong…sometimes. Thanks to Morgan Wallace btw.
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