Impact of Pulp Magazines on American Culture
“The story is worth more than the paper it is printed on.” Frank Munsey’s words symbolized the history of the pulp magazine. Frank Munsey started the pulp magazine craze with his first magazine, the Argosy, in 1896. The Argosy was a revamping of his children’s magazine, the Golden Argosy, shifting its focus from children to adults. The Argosy offered large amounts of fiction for a low price, because these stories would be printed on cheap pulpwood scraps, thus gaining the name ‘pulp magazine’. The pulp magazine has been a part of American history for well over a hundred years. During the late 1890’s, there was a period of high immigration. These immigrants and other working poor had no source of inexpensive literature, and this led to the development of the pulp magazine. Pulp magazines held a collection of stories in every issue, serialized so that in the following issue the next chapter of the story would appear. Since the first pulp magazine’s success, the Argosy, other magazines spawned, such as All-Story and Weird Story, and sinc...
Angell, Marcia. "The Ethics of Clinical Research in the Third World." New England Journal of Medicine. 337.12 847-849. Web. 9 Feb. 2014.
At the beginnings of the 1900s, some leading magazines in the U.S have already started to exhibit choking reports about unjust monopolistic practices, rampant political corruption, and many other offenses; which helped their sales to soar. In this context, in 1904, The Appeal to Reason, a leading socialist weekly, offered Sinclair $500 to prepare an exposé on the meatpacking industry (Cherny). To accomplish his mission, Sinclair headed to Chicago, the center of the meatpacking industry, and started an investigation as he declared“ I spent seven weeks in Packingtown studying conditions there, and I verified every smallest detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact as a government report” (Sinclair, The Industrial Republic 115-16). To get a direct knowledge of the work, he sneaked into the packing plants as a pretended worker. He toured the streets of Packingtown, the area near the stockyards where the workers live. He approached people, from different walks of life, who could provide useful information about conditions in Packingtown. At the end of seven weeks, he returned home to New Jersey, shut himself up in a small cabin, wrote for nine months, and produced The Jungle (Cherny).
Also, early Abolitionist works--Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Helper's The Impending Crisis used muckraking to get a point across. However, events during the 1890s most directly paved the way for the critiques and exposures of existing conditions. This period was able to reach a limited upper class and the muckrakers were able to expand appeal to the average middle class citizen (Reiger 49-50). One reason for the outspread of muckraking was the explosion of journalism. From 1870-1909 the number of daily newspapers circulated boomed from 574 to 2,600 and the number of subscribers from 2,800,000 to 24,800,000.
Mintner, David. "The Fate of Writing during the Great Depression". A Cultural History Of the American Novel. http://ocean.st.usm.edu/ ~wsimkins/minter.html>. 19 June 1997. (5 May 1999).
Short stories are temporary portals to another world; there is a plethora of knowledge to learn from the scenario, and lies on top of that knowledge are simple morals. Langston Hughes writes in “Thank You Ma’m” the timeline of a single night in a slum neighborhood of an anonymous city. This “timeline” tells of the unfolding generosities that begin when a teenage boy fails an attempted robbery of Mrs. Jones. An annoyed bachelor on a British train listens to three children their aunt converse rather obnoxiously in Saki’s tale, “The Storyteller”. After a failed story attempt, the bachelor tries his hand at storytelling and gives a wonderfully satisfying, inappropriate story. These stories are laden with humor, but have, like all other stories, an underlying theme. Both themes of these stories are “implied,” and provide an excellent stage to compare and contrast a story on.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985.
Myers, J., Frieden, T., Bherwani, K., & Henning, K. (2008). Ethics in public health research. American Journal of Public Health, 98(5), 793-801.
At that time, I had been generally acknowledged for several years as the top American writer both seriously and, as far as prices went, popularly. I...was confidant to the point of conceit. Hollywood made a big fuss over us and the ladies all looked very beautiful to a man of thirty. I honestly believed that with no effort on my part I was a sort of magician with words...Total result - a great time and no work. I was to be paid only a small amount unless they made my picture - they didn't. (Mizener 205)
Giving more insights about how racist ideologies are born or even transmitted from one generation to another is probably the main mission of this movie. This is definitely a movie about racism which does not follow the traditional way Hollywood has of showing the victim’s side of the story. The audience of this movie will be attached, this time, to the racist’s point of view, thanks to the help various film elements and a literary design that are used to force the viewer to empathize and maybe even like the hero/bad guy of the story.
Last but not least, O’Connor confirms that even a short story is a multi-layer compound that on the surface may deter even the most enthusiastic reader, but when handled with more care, it conveys universal truths by means of straightforward or violent situations. She herself wished her message to appeal to the readers who, if careful enough, “(…)will come to see it as something more than an account of a family murdered on the way to Florida.”
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Perennial, 2002.
As the story goes we start with a family who appears as a typical family where the desires of the parents are for their children to be smart and successful in life and the desires of the children are those of any typical child. However, as the story unfolds we are given the insight of the true nature of the family that follows most laws of nature that there is greed and deception even among loved ones. That every family has its secrets and that every secret comes with a cost no matter how small.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.
Therefore, for nurses to see themselves as empowered, they must be free of oppressive leadership, work in a structurally empowering environment, as well as, believe they are capable of providing patient care independently (Rao, 2012, p. 400).
When compiling The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway wanted to make use of his knowledge in journalism to write fiction. This decision was based on his belief that a story could be based on real events of a writer’s own distilled experiences wou...