William Edmund Barrett (1900 – 1986) was an American writer, best known for the 1962 novella The Lilies of the Field, later made into a movie that won Sidney Poitier his best actor Oscar. Before Barrett got into movies, he wrote many stories for the pulps, including this one that I reviewed a few years… Continue reading Interview William E. Barrett – Best-selling writer, movie man
Category: Secrets
One writer looks at the evolution of the western story
John A. Saxon (1886-1947) wrote mostly western and detective stories in a writing career that spanned more than twenty five years. Working as a law clerk, he wrote stories on the side and was part of a California writing circle that included Robert Leslie Bellem, the author of the Dan Turner stories. ABOUT THE AUTHOR… Continue reading One writer looks at the evolution of the western story
Wm Clayton and his magazines
The Clayton pulps offered a range of genres to the casual reader – western, detective and science-fiction. In this article, he lays out the policies of his magazines. The President of This Group of Magazines Gives You in This Article Instructions He Has Outlined to His Various Editors Concerning the Manuscripts They are to Buy… Continue reading Wm Clayton and his magazines
Ralph S. Kendall on becoming a writer
Ralph S. Kendall was an Englishman who became a member of the RCMP, a Mountie as they were called then. After a long career, he wrote two novels partly based on his experiences: Benton of the Royal Mounted and its sequel, The Luck of the Mounted. His hero, Benton, was the younger son of a… Continue reading Ralph S. Kendall on becoming a writer
Know their policy, insure against rejection
This article is on how different magazines even within the same genre have different requirements for what and how stories should be told. Richard A. Martinsen was editor at Dell and Fiction House in addition to being an author who had published stories in many of the magazines mentioned here. Martinsen was the editor who… Continue reading Know their policy, insure against rejection
Meeting the editors – Butterick & Hersey
I CAN’T say truthfully that I received any immediate practical benefit from my visit to the editorial offices of Adventure Magazine, toward the end of my stay in New York City. I gathered, in fact, that Adventure’s policy rather discourages personal visits from authors, although it is entirely possible that I am mistaken in this… Continue reading Meeting the editors – Butterick & Hersey
Meeting the editors – Munsey & Fiction House
BEFORE I went to New York on this editor-interviewing trip I had a very inadequate idea of the indescribable vastness of our metropolis, in spite of all I had read and heard about it. For instance, I thought that the job of visiting the editors would be a comparatively simple one, involving at most a… Continue reading Meeting the editors – Munsey & Fiction House
Meeting the editors – Doubleday
ANY writer who suffers from the hallucination that magazine publishing falls short of being a business, in any particular, should make a pilgrimage to New York and conduct a first-hand investigation. He will discover, among other things, that ‘ the editor who is not a business man as well as an editor has no permanent… Continue reading Meeting the editors – Doubleday
Meeting the editors – Street & Smith
This is the first in a series of four articles published in 1926 by Albert William Stone in The Author and Journalist(A&J) on meeting various pulp editors in person. Stone was a Denver based author who mostly wrote western stories; A&J was also in Denver so Stone was writing mostly for a western audience in… Continue reading Meeting the editors – Street & Smith
Point, Counterpoint: Contemporary opinions of the pulps from 1940
An exchange in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, Tribune on the merits of pulps caught my attention recently. The instigator of this exchange was Donald Raub, then a schoolboy attending what used to be Central High School in Scranton, Pa who sent many letters to the editor. The first letter was this screed printed on 15 May,… Continue reading Point, Counterpoint: Contemporary opinions of the pulps from 1940