After Frank Munsey converted The Argosy to all-fiction pulpwood paper in 1896, hundreds of American magazines paid around a cent a word for westerns, detective stories and space opera, and a fast typist could earn a middle-class living on volume alone. Raymond Chandler and Isaac Asimov apprenticed there. Paperback originals and television destroyed the pulps in the early 1950s; the surviving titles converted to digest size or died.
Pulp fictioneer no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1740s – 1900
Serialization and the novelist as public figure
Circulating libraries, monthly numbers and newspaper feuilletons turned fiction into a mass industry and its best practitioners into celebrities. Dickens toured two continents reading his own work; two million people lined the streets of Paris for Victor Hugo's funeral in 1885; Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Polyana became a pilgrimage site. For the first time, a substantial number of people earned a full living writing novels.
What else was happening then
1857
Madame Bovary on trial
France prosecutes Gustave Flaubert for offending public morals after the Revue de Paris serializes Madame Bovary. His acquittal in February 1857 — the same year Baudelaire is convicted for Les Fleurs du mal — makes the novel's right to depict adultery and provincial despair a matter of settled law, and the scandal makes the book famous.
1922
Ulysses published in Paris
Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company publishes James Joyce's Ulysses on 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday, after serial excerpts were prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The ban stands until Judge John Woolsey's 1933 decision. Modernism makes the novelist an avant-garde figure — and makes difficulty itself a form of prestige.
1935
Penguin's sixpenny paperback
Allen Lane launches Penguin Books in London with ten titles at sixpence each — the price of a packet of cigarettes — after failing to find a decent cheap book at Exeter station. Quality fiction in paperback reaches railway kiosks and tobacconists, multiplying the reading public and, with it, the royalties a successful novelist could earn.
1967
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires prints 8,000 copies of Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad; they sell out in weeks. The Latin American Boom — García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Fuentes — proves that the novel's center of gravity no longer sits in Europe or the United States, and magical realism becomes a global export.
Where that work lives now
The maker of book-length fiction, from Murasaki Shikibu's Heian court to the Kindle's self-publishing flood — a trade with no license, no ladder and no retirement age.
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