Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics, and Radio: How Technology Changed Popular Fiction in America

Rating:
Summary: A Fun Romp through the History of Popular Storytelling
Review: "Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics, and Radio" is an easy-reading, fun romp through the history of popular storytelling in America. You can feel DeForest's enthusiasm for his subject on every page-he has obviously read everything he writes about and has no qualms about expressing his critical feelings about what he has read. While reading I found myself wanting to hunt down copies of the stories under discussion to see if I felt they were as great or as rotten as the author believed they were. Did I hunt them down? Well, that's another story.

"Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics, and Radio" is an excellent survey of how storytelling has thrived in America through the various media that were popular at different times in our history. DeForest believes everybody loves a good story whatever its form of delivery, be it written, oral, or visual. Coverage includes dime novels, adventure stories, crime and detective stories, science fiction and strange stories, radio drama, and story based comics. An emphasis is placed on the role that changes in technology and economics played in the survival or demise of particular media. Particularly interesting is how many of America's greatest writers were involved, and how many, if not most, of America's favorite TV and movie heroes and heroines were born in the pulps, comics and radio shows of decades ago.

This book is probably best for those with little to average knowledge of the subject. Diehard pulp, comics and radio story fans, like DeForest, would probably not learn much here. They know it all already.

The only faults I find with this book are the high price tag (get your local library to buy a copy) and that DeForest blatantly omits the romance genre of his subject. So all of you women out there who might be interested in the history of the romance pulps and comics, you won't find it here. Deforest is too busy swashbuckling to swish you off your feet.

I have to admit that I actually did read this book and that I know the author and that I am one of the uncultured Philistines of Friday Snack Time mentioned on the frontispiece of the book. Therefore you can believe that I wrote this favorable review under threat of an ugly alien monster's death ray (which I didn't) or that it is all absolutely true (which it is).

It's a crying shame that this book was not priced at 10 cents so that everyone could afford to buy a copy.

Allen Novak, Librarian
Ringling School of Art and Design