Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Weird Tales September 1937

The Magazine of the Week is the September 1937 issue of Weird Tales, with cover art by legendary pulp illustrator Margaret Brundage. Margaret Brundage was a Chicago housewife who delighted in pushing the limits of the time with her racy covers for Weird Tales. This particular cover illustrates the story "Satan's Palimpsest" by Seabury Quinn. Seabury Quinn was by no means the best of the Weird Tales authors (although his Jules de Grandin supernatural mystery stories were popular at the time), yet he consistently managed to get his stories on the cover. His secret? He made sure each of his stories had at least one nude scene.

During the 1930's, Weird Tales boasted a tremendous array of talented authors, including in particular Robert E. Howard, discussed last week, and hugely influential horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The September 1937 issue is a good example of the wealth of talent writing for Weird Tales in the 1930's. In addition to Howard and Lovecraft, the issue includes work by such excellent authors as August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, and Henry Kuttner.

But from its peak in the mid- to late 1930's, Weird Tales suddenly went into a tailspin. The magazine remained in print through 1954 (and there have been several attempts to resurrect it since then), but Weird Tales never regained its form after the 1930's. The cause of the magazine's sudden decline was the untimely deaths of its editor and its two best writers. In 1936, depressed by his mother's illness, Robert E. Howard committed suicide at the age of only 30. H.P. Lovecraft died of cancer at 46 the next year, and Farnsworth Wright succumbed to Parkinson's disease in 1940. After their deaths, science fiction became the dominant form of fantastic literature, and fantasy and horror largely went into hibernation until J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King came along to resurrect the fields decades later. But how differently things might have gone if Howard and Lovecraft and Wright had lived.

Having surveyed the earliest science fiction and fantasy pulps, we will continue our history of the pulp magazines with some pulps outside of the SF/F genre. But first we'll take a break so I can boast of a couple recent book acquisitions.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Weird Tales December 1935

The Magazine of the Week is the December 1935 issue of Weird Tales, with cover art by Margaret Brundage.

First published in 1923, Weird Tales consisted mostly of fantasy and horror, along with a smattering of science fiction. By my reckoning, Weird Tales was thus the very first magazine of fantastic literature. Weird Tales struggled for its first two years, and was on the verge of collapse in 1924 when it printed a story called "The Loved Dead," involving necrophilia. Some outraged readers tried to get the magazine banned and ironically, this controversy is said to have boosted circulation enough to allow the magazine to survive its initial financial trouble. Farnsworth Wright then took over as editor in November 1924, and under his direction the magazine became a great success, printing remarkably high quality fiction. Tennessee Williams made his first sale to Weird Tales, and the magazine started the careers of many other authors who remain widely read to this day.

Among those authors was Robert E. Howard, one of the most successful of all the pulp writers and the creator of many popular characters, including Conan the Barbarian. The cover story of the Magazine of the Week is the first installment of The Hour of the Dragon, a novel-length Conan story (later retitled Conan the Conqueror). If you're thinking that this wimpy guy on the cover doesn't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, this is a rare instance where Hollywood's rendition is more faithful to the author's intentions -- the Governor is much closer to Howard's description of Conan as a swaggering muscleman. But then, as you can see from this cover, artist Margaret Brundage was always better with sexy women than men. Indeed, one of the secrets to the success of Weird Tales was Brundage's covers featuring half-naked women, or sometimes even fully naked women, as you will see in next week's Magazine of the Week.