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This page lists books about the pulp magazines of the 1920s to 1940s.

Cheap Thrills: The Amazing! Thrilling! Astonishing! History of Pulp Fiction

Ron Goulart

1972

The paperback edition in 1973 had the calmer title: An Informal History Of The Pulp Magazine. An expanded edition with the same text was published in 2007.

"Spanning the years be­tween the dime novels of the 19th century and today's paperbacks, pulp magazines provided millions with their first and only taste of 'literature'. The noble, resourceful heroes of those gripping tales of fiction, along with their monstrous, evil antagon­ists, were depicted on cheap paper, and housed in lurid covers that shocked all but the near-blind. There was THE SHADOW, scourge of the underworld, DOC SAVAGE, superhuman adventurer, and THE PHANTOM DETECTIVE, sleuth extraordinaire, as well as the breath­taking exploits of World War I sky fighters, mad scientists, TARZAN and a host of now-immortal writers."

Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Magazines

Michael L. Cook

Greenwood Press

1983

Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction: A Checklist of Fiction in the U.S. Pulp Magazines, 1915-1974 (2 Vols)

Michael L. Cook and Stephen T. Miller

1988

A two volume publication which indexes over 50,000 stories in over 350 magazines.

The Classic Era of the American Pulp Magazine

Peter Haining

2000

"The pulp magazines developed out of the 19th-century dime novels and were eventually overtaken by comics and the arrival of the first paperback books, but for a brief period between the 20s and 40s the pulp magazines ruled supreme. Their lurid colour cover art depicting alluring sex and thrilling violence, with stories to match inside, fuelled the dreams and nightmares of a generation of readers. Ten inches by seven, for a few cents they offered what young red-blooded Americans want: sex, action and adventure. And what's more amongst the sleaze these magazines were the first to foster the talents of writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and John Wyndam, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. Peter Haining takes us on a tour of their publishing history and in particular their artistry."

Hard-Boiled: Working-class Readers and Pulp Magazines

Erin A. Smith

2000

"In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The hard-boiled stories published in Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Clues featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic. In Hard-Boiled Erin A. Smith examines the culture that produced and supported this form of detective story through the 1940s. Relying on pulp magazine advertising, the memoirs of writers and publishers, Depression-era studies of adult reading habits, social and labor history, Smith offers an innovative account of how these popular stories were generated and read."

Cheap Thrills: The Amazing! Thrilling! Astonishing! History of Pulp Fiction

Ron Goulart

2007

"Hermes Press is proud to announce the release of Ron Goulart's classic history of the pulps: Cheap Thrills. This book is more than just a reprint of Goulart's ground-breaking 1972 history of the pulps though. Hermes Press' complete redesigned version of this classic contains mountains of material not used in the original Amazing! Thrilling! Astonishing tome about the great pulps and pulp writers. The new edition of Cheap Thrills presents many remembrances by pulp fiction greats never before seen and not included in the original version of the book. The book is printed in an all color 12" square format filled with pulp cover art that inspired readers, artists, and everyone who ever read the pulps."

Pulp Icons: Erle Stanley Gardner and His Pulp Magazine Characters

Jeffrey Marks

2013

"This is the only in-depth look at the pulp characters created by mystery author Erle Stanley Gardner, the prolific author who would go on to write the series of Perry Mason mysteries. Gardner wrote over 650 pulp short stories and novelettes, writing nearly as many words for the pulps as he did for the novels that he is more well-known for. He began a rapid pace of 100,000 words a month for nearly 20 years, beginning in the mid-1920s. This monograph looks at the breadth of characters written by Gardner for the pulps."

The Art of the Pulps

F. Paul Wilson

2017

"Experts in the ten major Pulp genres, from action Pulps to spicy Pulps and more, chart for the first time the complete history of Pulp magazines--the stories and their writers, the graphics and their artists, and, of course, the publishers, their market, and readers. Each chapter in the book, which is illustrated with more than 400 examples of the best Pulp graphics (many from the editors' collections - among the world's largest) is organized in a clear and accessible way, starting with an introductory overview of the genre, followed by a selection of the best covers and interior graphics, organized chronologically through the chapter. All images are fully captioned (many are in essence "nutshell" histories in themselves) .... With an overall introduction on "The Birth of the Pulps" by Doug Ellis, and with two additional chapters focusing on the great Pulp writers and the great Pulp artists, The Art of the Pulps covers every aspect of this fascinating genre; it is the first definitive visual history of the Pulps"