Pulp magazine
fiction magazines made from 1896 to the 1950s
Pulp magazines, also called "the pulps", were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The word pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine was 128 pages long, 7 by 10 in (18 by 25 cm), and 0.5 in (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and some of the short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid and sensational subject matter, even though this was but a small part of what existed in the pulps. Digest magazines and men's adventure magazines were incorrectly regarded as pulps, though they have different editorial and production standards and are instead replacements. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as Flash Gordon, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom Detective.
The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature. Successors of pulps include paperback books, such as hardboiled detective stories and erotic fiction.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Pulp magazine” is fiction magazines made from 1896 to the 1950s. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Pulp, magazine and fiction, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q865585. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1896 and 1955.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pulp magazine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.