Mercer’s Frank Munsey

by Charles Francis

The king of pulp fiction

In the gay 90s one of the most popular magazines in America was Munsey’s Magazine, the creation of Frank Munsey, the Mercer, Maine native who did more to revolutionize the magazine industry in the country than any other person. Munsey’s Magazine, along with some of Munsey’s other publications like The Argosy, introduced Americans to the world of pulp fiction. And it was a world like no other which had gone before it.

Munsey magazines were peopled by larger-than-life heroines and heroes. Heroines engaged in romances that the feminine reader of the day considered just spicy enough to be risqué. In fact, readers of today’s Harlequin romances would find Munsey’s 1900s era love stories just as satisfying as their 21st century counterparts. Then, of course, there were westerns as well as adventure stories and science fiction. In the pages of a Munsey publication one could enter into the imaginative mind of Edgar Rice Bourroughs and swing through the trees with Tarzan of The Apes or walk the sands of the Red Planet with John Carter of Mars.

Frank Andrew Munsey was born in Mercer in 1854. Today Mercer is a quiet community of just over two hundred whose major claim to fame is that the largest elm tree in New England once graced the lawn of the town’s little church ― and that Frank Munsey, the father of pulp fiction, was born there. However, at the time Frank Munsey was growing up there, Mercer was a prosperous lumbering community of

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some 400, and the Munsey family was one of the more prosperous in the community.

Frank Munsey grew up reading everything he could get his hands on. What he loved best, however, were adventure stories by Sir Walter Scott and dime novels of the west like those of Ned Buntline. It is easy, in fact, to picture Munsey as a young boy sitting under that old Mercer elm and dreaming of becoming a writer himself.

Frank Munsey began his career in writing and publishing by trying to write for the already dying dime novel market of the late 1870s and 1880s. Having little success, however, he decided to launch his own publication which would feature adventure stories in an entirely different format. This was The Argosy which began publication in 1883 and was the first really successful pulp magazine.

The Argosy, which Munsey edited and published, started as a magazine for juveniles. Within a short time Munsey changed its format to appeal to adults by printing adventure and love stories and finally just adventure stories. As the content in The Argosy changed so did the covers, which came to emphasis heroes with exaggerated muscles who almost invariably were about to rescue a damsel in distress. The Argosy helped to introduce Edgar Rice Bourroughs to America and served as the prototype for other pulp magazines which featured characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage.

In 1889 Munsey founded Munsey’s Weekly. It was a thirty-six page quarto printed on the cheapest material available, the highly acidic paper known simply as pulp. Munsey would later say of his various magazines’ stories “This story is worth more than the paper it is printed on.”

The editor of Munsey’s Weekly was John Kendrick Bangs, an 1883 graduate of Columbia, who was in charge of the humor department of Harper & Brothers Magazine. Bangs, who would go on to rank with Mark Twain as a humorist and be compared with Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a descendent of a long line of Mainers including Commodore Edward Preble. Under Bangs’ management Munsey’s Weekly quickly attained a circulation of 40,000. In 1893 Munsey decided to make the magazine a monthly and rename it Munsey’s Magazine. He also began pricing it at ten cents an issue. By 1895 the circulation was 500,000 a month. However, when it began printing illustrations of “half dressed women and undressed statuary” it began to attract criticism and some news dealers refused to carry it. Nevertheless, by 1897 the circulation reached 700,000 a month.

One of the reasons Munsey had decided to hire an editor for his second (cont. on page 36)

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(cont. from page 35) magazine was that he was writing a series of Horatio Alger style novels, each of which was more successful than its predecessor. Moreover, he was in the process of entering the cutthroat world of newspaper publishing, competing with the likes of Pulitzer and Hearst.

In 1887 Munsey wrote the highly popular Afloat in the Great City. This was followed by The Boy Broker in 1888, A Tragedy of Errors in 1889 and Under Fire in 1890. While he would write the extremely popular Derringforth in 1894, Munsey’s writing dropped off in 1890 as he devoted more and more time to his burgeoning newspaper empire.

Among the newspapers Munsey owned or controlled were the Washington Times, the Baltimore News and a score of New York papers including the New York Sun, Herald, Globe, Mail

Frank Munsey, ca. 1919

and Telegram. One of his editors on the Sun was another Mainer by the name of James Otis Kaler. Kaler would later become famous as the creator of the highly popular Toby Tyler series.

By the time Frank Munsey died in 1925, the circulation of Munsey’s Magazine had declined to about 60,000 and was losing money. Munsey had continued to publish it and a series of Argosy related magazines in memory of his start in publishing. Munsey, however, was a very wealthy man living in a $2,000,000 estate on Long Island.

Today Frank Munsey, the boy who read dime novels in Mercer, Maine, and perhaps dreamed of becoming a writer in the shade of the town’s great elm, is best remembered as the father of pulp fiction and as one of the chief benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to which he left the bulk of his fortune.

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