I didn’t know they wrote Pulp! was one of the comments we have received from our first podcast. As discussed, many writers started in the Pulps then moved onto the Slicks and finally to hard cover book publication. (This was before paperbacks.) Because of this, their Pulp writing days were usually early in their career, sometimes while still in their teens. Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho was just out of high school when he started selling to Weird Tales.
Tennessee Williams
A young Tennessee Williams, under his real name of Thomas Lanier Williams wrote “The Vengeance of Nitocris” for Weird Tales, August 1928. He was sixteen.
Robert S. Carr
Carr would write The Rampant Age (1928) at age seventeen. Good thing he wrote “Spider Bite” for Weird Tales (June 1926) at fifteen. “Spider Bite” has a reputation among WT fans as one of its best stories. (Not that I agree.)
Lucy Maude Montgomery
The Canadian author of Anne of Green Gables (1908) was a prolific writer who sold to all kinds of magazines. Her “The House Party at Smoky Island” appeared in Weird Tales, August 1935.
Jim Kjelgaard
The master of the juvenile dog book, including Big Red (1945), wrote three stories for Weird Tales along with many Westerns. My favorite is his first “The Thing From the Barrens”(Weird Tales, September 1945).
Sinclair Lewis
The Nobel Prize winner of Babbitt (1922) wrote “The Ghost Patrol” (The Red Magazine, June 1917).
Upton Sinclair
The author of 1906’s The Jungle, also wrote dime novels and Pulps. He presented “The Radio Mind” in Ghost Stories, (January-February 1930). This edgy idea about telepathy was probably too hard a sell to the Slicks. Like Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard published his first presentation in a Pulp magazine, Astounding Science Fiction.
Theodore Dreiser
The author of An American Tragedy (1925) also appeared in Munsey’s and reprinted in Ghost Stories (June 1929)with “The Hand”.
Conrad Richter
Pulitzer Prize winner for The Town, Richter wrote “The Toad Man Specter” (June 1931)and “Monster of the Dark Places” (December 1931-January 1932), two occult detective stories for Ghost Stories.
Ray Bradbury
Some people are aware that Ray started in the SF Pulps but even before that he wrote for Weird Tales. One of his first stories was “The Candle” (November 1942). Before this he published several tales in fan publications. Those collections and novels you read in high school began in the Pulps.
Other Genres
There are many others that are a little more obvious: the big Mystery writers: Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Fredric Brown and even Agatha Christie. All the big Science Fiction writers besides Bradbury: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, and many more had no real choice if they wanted to write SF. Other genres like Westerns (Max Brand, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour) and Adventure (Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, Jim Kjelgaard, Jack London) were all Pulp magazine-oriented.
Pulps fans would celebrate when one of their own would break into the Slicks. Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post (February 8, 1947) and “The Fog Horn” by Ray Bradbury (June 23, 1951), The Day of the Triffids in Colliers (January 6-February 3, 1951). There was a need to say “Pulp fiction is worthy!”
Love’em or Hate’em
The Pulps were a massive generator of writers. Sadly, we have nothing like it today, where a young scribbler can get some success and build from there. Some writers remained in the Pulps, happily pumping out novellas and serials with a good income (Arthur J. Burks, W. C. Tuttle, Hugh B. Cave, come to mind). For others, it felt like a trap. Fritz Leiber has commented on how fans today see the Pulps with a thick coat of nostalgia, while those who wrote for pennies a word thought quite differently about them.
In the podcast, I admitted that if I owned a time machine I wouldn’t use it to solve any great mysteries of history. I would hop in that glittering mechanism of crystal and brass and go back to the 1930s. There, I would purchase a complete run of Weird Tales in pristine condition. (I mean I really thought this through. You’d have to make an effort in our time to locate 1930s coins to buy them with since a 2012 loonie isn’t going to do it. The cost isn’t a big deal because you could also win as many lotteries as you like.) Can you imagine that perfect set of Weirdies?
