Weird Tales

Abstract

This chapter examines a pulp magazine that productively challenges the limiting categories that often frame analysis of interwar periodical and print culture: Weird Tales, which was, in its first iteration, conceived and marketed as a category-defining magazine and published from March 1923 to September 1954. Weird Tales continues to be one of the most valued, preserved, and consequently enduring pulp magazines of the pulp archive. Weird Tales came to position itself against this pulp marketplace by promoting itself as an artistic pulp, a unique bastion of high literature in an otherwise nonliterary newsstand. Consider the reflections of Arthur J. Burks, a preeminent pulp writer from the 1920s to the 1950s, in an editorial for Writer’s Digest, a trade journal for professional and pulp writers. Weird Tales should be viewed as a dialectical response to the conventionalized form that the business of pulp fiction magazines had assumed by 1923 and maintained until their disappearance in the 1950s.