Argosy began in the final decades of the nineteenth century as a bold experiment in mass-market fiction and became, over the next several generations, one of the most influential incubators of American popular storytelling. Its roots go back to the 1880s, when publisher Frank Munsey sought to create inexpensive reading for a growing audience of young readers and adults hungry for narrative entertainment.
What began as The Golden Argosy in 1882, a children’s weekly, evolved rapidly as Munsey recognized that older readers were just as eager for serialized adventure. By the 1890s he had transformed the magazine into The Argosy, aimed at a broader audience and printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, making it one of the first major “pulp magazines” in American publishing.
This shift inaugurated a new model for commercial fiction periodicals, characterized by low costs, lurid covers, and an emphasis on cliffhangers and action-heavy storytelling that readers consumed with near-addictive enthusiasm. Its contents varied over the decades but always reflected the cultural appetite of the moment. In its early years, Argosy blended serialized novels, short adventure tales, and occasional essays or features,
but by the early twentieth century it had become almost entirely a fiction magazine. Writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Johnston McCulley, Talbot Mundy, and George Allan England provided stories that ranged from planetary romance and jungle adventure to frontier drama, crime, and the emerging genre of science fiction. Readers embraced its combination of exotic escapism and machine-paced narrative drive, and critics of the day often recognized that while its prose did not aspire to
literary prestige, it had become a proving ground for the narrative techniques that would fuel twentieth-century American popular culture. Argosy’s circulation climbed sharply during this period, and its reputation as the first and longest-lived of the pulps made it something of a flagship, imitated by countless imitators seeking to reproduce its formula. The pulp era in the strict sense began around the turn of the century and lasted into the 1930s,
the magazine’s period of greatest creative influence. It published the first Barsoom stories1 by Burroughs, introduced fantastical worlds to millions of readers, and helped cement the archetypes of the action hero, the scientific adventurer, and the masked avenger long before these figures migrated to comic books, radio serials, and film. Argosy was known for relatively high editorial standards compared to its competitors, particularly under editors such as Matthew White, Jr.,
and later Robert H. Davis, who favored fast-paced plots but insisted on professionalism from contributors. Through two world wars and deep economic cycles, the magazine endured because it delivered constant novelty at a price nearly anyone could afford, and its pulp-era covers—with their bold colors, dramatic poses, and breathless taglines—became icons of the form. By the 1940s, however, pulp fiction was changing, and Argosy changed with it. As printing costs rose and readership tastes shifted toward
more realistic or hard-edged material, the magazine began moving gradually away from pure fiction. Competition from paperback books, comics, and new pulp genres narrowed its audience. When the pulp boom faded after World War II, Argosy reinvented itself in the 1950s and 1960s as a men’s magazine, a hybrid publication mixing adventure journalism, travel pieces, survival stories, pictorials, and occasional fiction. This transformation, influenced by the success of magazines like True and the early Playboy,
sought to position Argosy as both rugged and urbane. Articles about hunting, exploration, treasure quests, and military exploits replaced the planetary romance and lost-world fantasies of earlier decades. While longtime readers sometimes lamented the shift, the men’s-magazine era had its own successes, particularly in long-form reportage and investigative features that offered a different form of storytelling without entirely abandoning the magazine’s
adventurous spirit. Assessment of Argosy across its long life reveals a publication that repeatedly reinvented itself while retaining a core identity built around narrative excitement and imaginative possibility. Its pulp era is now the most celebrated, viewed by historians as foundational to modern genre fiction. Many of the tropes pioneered or popularized in Argosy resurfaced decades later in movies, television, comics, and video games,
placing the magazine in the genealogy of American mass-culture storytelling. Even after it ceased publication in the 1970s, its brand lingered, revived briefly in various special issues or nostalgic experiments, though none matched its original scale or influence. Scholars often describe Argosy as a bellwether, a magazine whose shifts trace changing American tastes and whose legacy can be felt wherever serialized adventure still finds an audience.
Reprint magazines and anthologies helped preserve its memory, especially during the late twentieth century when collectors and fans of early fantasy, adventure, and science fiction rediscovered its significance. Several publishers reissued classic Argosy stories in facsimile editions or themed collections, introducing new generations to the work of Burroughs, Mundy, England, McCulley, and countless lesser-known but historically important pulp craftsmen.
These anthologies also highlighted the magazine’s staggering breadth, reminding readers that Argosy was never confined to a single genre but instead functioned as a broad playground where writers experimented freely. Collectors’ markets for original Argosy issues remain active today, and pulp scholarship often cites the magazine as essential for understanding how inexpensive
mass-market fiction shaped the imaginative vocabulary of the twentieth century. Trivia about Argosy’s long press run—its claim as the first true pulp magazine, its early adoption of all-fiction content, and its role in launching major genre writers—continues to circulate among enthusiasts who regard it not simply as a magazine, but as a cultural milestone whose influence echoes far beyond its final issue.
Footnotes
- The Barsoom stories are a series of early twentieth-century planetary romance novels and tales by Edgar Rice Burroughs set on a vividly imagined version of Mars, where the Earthborn protagonist John Carter finds himself amid warring city-states, ancient civilizations, strange fauna, airborne navies, and a complex social order shaped by honor, combat, and adventure; blending science-fictional speculation with swashbuckling fantasy, the series became foundational to the development of modern space adventure, influencing later writers, comics, and film through its depiction of heroism, exotic landscapes, and interplanetary romance, and remaining one of the most enduring creations of pulp-era imagination. ↩︎
Further Reading
Sources
- Wikipedia “Argosy (magazine)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argosy_(magazine)
- The Pulp Magazine Project “The Argosy” https://www.pulpmags.org/content/info/argosy.html
- The Online Books Page “The Argosy” https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=argosyus
- Argosy Magazine “The New Argosy” https://argosymagazine.co.uk/
- philsp “The Argosy & related magazines” http://www.philsp.com/mags/argosy.html
