Argosy

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Richard Digby-Junger

Born as a struggling weekly for adolescents in 1882, Argosy became the first adult magazine to rely exclusively on fiction for its content and the first to be printed on rough, pulpwood paper. "The story is worth more than the paper it is printed on," it was once said of Argosy, and thus was born the "pulp magazine." Between 1896 and its demise in 1979, Argosy introduced or helped inspire pulp fiction writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, H. P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Mickey Spillane, Earl Stanley Gardner, Zane Grey, and Elmore Leonard, and helped familiarize millions of readers with the detective, science fiction, and western writing genres.

Publisher Frank Munsey arrived in New York from Maine in 1882 with $40 in his pocket. Ten months later, he helped found Golden Argosy: Freighted with Treasures for Boys and Girls. Among the publication's early offerings were stories by the popular self-success advocate Horatio Alger, Jr., but the diminutive weekly fared poorly in the face of overwhelming competition from like juvenile publications "of high moral tone." Munsey gradually shifted the content to more adult topics, dropping any reference to children in the magazine in 1886 and shortening the title to Argosy in 1888. A year later, Munsey started another publication, what would become the highly profitable Munsey's Magazine, and Argosy languished as a weak imitation.

Munsey made two critical changes to rescue Argosy in 1896. First, he switched to cheap, smelly, ragged-edged pulpwood paper, made from and often sporting recovered wood scraps, as a way to reduce costs. More importantly, he began publishing serial fiction exclusively, emphasizing adventure, action, mystery, and melodrama in exotic or dangerous locations. No love stories, no drawings or photographs for many years, just "hard-boiled" language and coarse, often gloomy settings that appealed to teenaged boys and men. Circulation doubled, peaking at around 500,000 in 1907.

Munsey paid only slightly more for his stories than his paper. One author recalled that $500 was the top price for serial fiction, a fraction of what authors could make at other publications. Argosy featured prolific serial fictionists such as Frederick Van Rensselaer Deay, the creator of the Nick Carter detective series, William MacLeod Raine, Albert Payson Terhune, Louis Joseph Vance, and Ellis Parker Butler. It also published the writings of younger, undiscovered authors such as James Branch Cabell, Charles G. D. Roberts, Susan Glaspell, Mary Roberts Rinehart, a young Upton Sinclair, and William Sydney Porter (before he became known as O. Henry). Beginning in 1910, Munsey began merging Argosy with a variety of weaker competitors, a practice Munsey called "cleaning up the field." The new combination featured stories by authors such as Frank Condon, Courtney Ryley, Octavus Roy Cohen, P. G. Wodehouse, Luke Short, Van Wyck Mason, C. S. Forester, and Max Brand.

Munsey died in 1925 and ordered that his $20,000,000 magazine empire, including Argosy, be broken up and sold, but not before Argosy and the pulps had become a dominant force in American popular culture, making characters such as Tarzan, Zorro, the Shadow, Sam Spade, and the Phantom Detective household names. It was purchased by William T. Dewart, but the Depression and declining interest in pulp fiction reduced circulation to 40,000 by 1940. Renamed New Argosy in 1942, it was temporarily banned from the mails for "obscenity." Two months later it was sold to Popular Publications, Inc. Under the supervision of Henry Steeger, Argosy abandoned its all-fiction format and began featuring news and war articles. Influenced by the success of newly founded men's magazine Esquire, the renamed Argosy--The Complete Men's Magazine became a "slick," with four-color layouts, quality fiction, and adventure, sports, crime, science, and humor stories.

One of the most popular features was the "Court of Last Resort." Written by Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of attorney Perry Mason, the "court" presented the cases of men considered unjustly convicted of crimes. The feature helped free, pardon, commute, or parole at least 15 persons. Gardner was assisted by a criminologist, lie detector expert, detective, prison psychologist, and one-time FBI investigator.

The reformulated Argosy succeeded for a time. As Steeger explained to Newsweek in 1954, "After the Second World War 15 million veterans were no longer content to accept the whimsy and phoniness of fiction." By 1953, it had a circulation of 1,250,000 and charged over $5,000 for a single full-color page advertisement. An Argosy editor described an average reader to Writer magazine in 1965 as "factory-bound, desk-bound, work-bound, forced by economics and society to abandon his innate maleness and individuality to become a cog in the corporate machine."