Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Pulps: The Expansion of Genre Fiction by Ryan Harvey The first pulp magazine was Argosy, which changed to an all-fiction format in 1896. Each issue delivered a thick stack of stories printed on low-cost paper. More pulp magazines followed, and by the 1920s, they had changed the way people across the country consumed fiction. They made reading stories of wild adventures, Western action, granite-jawed private eyes, shadowy superheroes, and the new worlds of science fiction and fantasy into popular pastimes. The pulps didn’t survive the 1950s, but the reading habits they created did—as did the genres they fixed into the popular imagination. It might never have happened if not for one author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who turned the smaller, general interest pulp field into a wide-open extravaganza of high adventure and bizarre new vistas in 1912—sixteen years after the modest start with Argosy. Burroughs was born in Chicago in 1875. Until he sold his novel Under the Moons of Mars to All-Story (part of the magazine group that owned Argosy), he’d struggled through an unremarkable career of unsuccessful business ventures and a brief stint in the military that he mostly spent ill with dysentery. While trying to pass the time as a manager for pencil-sharpener salesmen, Burroughs wrote a story about a human adventurer transported to a wild frontier version of Mars. Despite no extensive fiction writing background, Burroughs’s imagination proved formidable. When Under the Moons of Mars appeared as a serial in All-Story starting in February 1912, readers were dazzled at the swashbuckling action and spectacular visions of his Martian setting. Protagonist John Carter was an early superhero, capable of gargantuan leaps and immense feats of strength in the lesser gravity of Mars. He fought with and alongside towering green Martian warriors and rescued the beautiful red-skinned princess Dejah Thoris. Readers had never seen anything like it in the pulps. Retitled A Princess of Mars for book publication, the story started a series of Martian adventures that stretched over the rest of Burroughs’s life. Later in 1912, All-Story published in one issue a complete Burroughs novel: Tarzan of the Apes. And then the pulp universe exploded. Readership skyrocketed, and the magazines multiplied to meet demand. (How popular was Tarzan? In a letter to All-Story’s editor, Burroughs wrote, “About a score of readers here...