[Picture]       These things do a pulpateer no little harm. Primarily, a pulpateer is a very decent writer (he has to be that, you know). He is sincere about his work as any of the top rankers will testify. If you should happen to intimate to a pulpateer that his stories are trash, you are likely to be soundly punched in the nose – and rightly. He tries to write his very best and make his stories exciting and often he gets a lot more than excitement into them.

      There is no real reason for ignorant people to rip and tear at a man’s livelihood and vocation and avocation when it actually means nothing to said people. Such backhanded slaps hurt not a little. The idea that pulp writing is mechanical is already too prevalent.

      Here is what such a thing does: A friend of mine, earning his bread by adding figures or fixing streetcars or flying transport planes reads such an article or statement. He does not bother to acquaint himself with the facts any more than the man who wrote the remark did. Instantly, however, this friend of mine says, “So that’s what Hubbard is doing. Hell, I thought he was a real writer.”

      And the next time I see the man he is apt to make some jest concerning my work and he is no longer a friend of mine.

      These things put a bar between a pulpateer and the writing world, a bar which really should not exist. In articles, for instance, I often have to interview prominent men in this field and that. In stories I sometimes feel that my information is not quite sound. To give everyone an even break I look up someone who is directly connected with my subject. In explaining myself I say that this will be for “War Birds” or “Adventure” and if he is a reader of magazines in the so-called quality group, or of columns, he is apt to smile at me and tell me, “No thanks, I don’t want to appear in such cheap magazines.”

      That has happened to me before and it will happen again. How can I do a sincere and honest job, for instance, with the Coast Guard under such conditions? And yet the story or article will be read by a hundred thousand or more people who are rather impressionable. If I’m wrong, they get the Coast Guard wrong and then there’s a double howl about it.

      Outside of losing my friends, demeaning my profession and undermining my sources, the sales of such magazines may be hurt as a consequence. People (although I’m sure I don’t know why) believe what they read in the papers.

      Such remarks discourage pulp tyros and keep them from a possible living by causing them to write down to their markets.

      In the case of the old dime novel (which Odd McIntyre probably read and enjoyed in his true “homey” style as a kid) it has recently been discovered that the finest sources of Western America as it was lay in these same paper-covered books. The men who wrote those stories were, for the most part, former punchers, sailors, soldiers of fortune and God knows what else. In, for instance, “Colonel Prentiss Ingraham’s” LAFITTE’S LIEUTENANT, in his BRAND OF THE RED ANCHOR, I have found a startling knowledge of historical types of vessels, of gunnery, tactics, and costume. I had recourse to such sources while I was writing one called UNDER THE BLACK ENSIGN and I checked Ingraham and found he knew a lot more than I did for all my study.

      The dime novel, booed in its day, is now filed carefully in the rare book collection of the Library of Congress.
 




Contents Page Glossary Home Related Sites Bookstore on-line