Memoir depicts life as pulp fiction writer


Picture of popular Pulp Fiction Writer

Since its introduction in 2005, the Livermore Public Library’s Authors and Arts Program Series, underwritten by the Friends of the Livermore Library, has been received with a great deal of interest and enthusiasm. “We’ve had a lot of exciting events, focusing on authors and the arts,” says librarian Joyce Nevins.

The next event in the series will highlight the engrossing and informative memoir titled: Pulp Writer, Twenty Years in the American Grub Street by Paul S. Powers. The book is edited, and includes biographical essays by his granddaughter Laurie Powers.

“I found her story very fascinating,” says Nevins, “especially the Livermore connection.” Indeed, Laurie Powers lived with her family in Livermore in the 1960s. (It was around the same time that her grandfather lived in Berkeley,Ca) “I have a lot of memories of Livermore,” says Laurie Powers who currently lives and works in southern California. “It is probably the closest thing I have to a hometown.” She later worked as a technical writer for the Lawrence Livermore Labs and still has many friends in Livermore.

Laurie Powers is looking forward to presenting Pulp Writer at the January 30th event at the Livermore Public Library. “It will be a kind of homecoming,” she says. “It has been really gratifying. This book has gotten good reviews, but the better part is that people get real enjoyment from it.”

The book, which was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2007, evolved from Laurie Power’s decision almost a decade ago to choose her grandfather’s novel Doc Dillahay (published by the Macmillan Company in1949) as the subject for an American Studies class paper. She was then working toward a bachelor’s degree at Smith College, MA.

Picture of Pulp Fiction book cover

Her biographical essays in the book chronicle her journey of discovery, as she researched her grandfather’s life and writings in the years that followed. In the process, she re-connected with the fragmented family she had barely known existed.

When her aunt Patricia Binkley invited her to review two boxes of her grandfather’s papers, Laurie approached the task with cautious optimism. As we read along, we can sense the rising tide of excitement as they uncovered a wealth of information including personal correspondence, fan letters, articles, ledgers, etc…as well as the manuscript of the memoirs Paul Powers had written more than a half century ago!

Though the manuscript was complete and Laurie was eager to get it finally published, she says, “I still felt I needed to fill in the gaps.” The result is a very comprehensive, refreshingly honest look at the personal life and work of a prolific writer who, as we learn from Laurie Power’s essay, wrote more than 440 stories for the Wild West Weekly alone, between 1928 and 1943.

Paul S. Powers used several pseudonyms like Ward M. Stevens and also wrote under his own name. The characters he created, among them Kid Wolf, Johnny Forty-five and the charismatic Sonny Tabor were very successful and popular with readers of Western pulp fiction at that time.

The strength of the book Pulp Writer, however, lies in its multi-layered appeal. As Laurie Powers puts it, “People connect to it in different ways.” For fans of this under-appreciated American art form, it is a valuable look at the business of writing and publishing pulp fiction.

The book tells us that pulp fiction was a publishing phenomenon that created thousands of characters and involved hundreds of different magazine titles during the first half of the 20th century. Named for the cheap, rough pulp paper they were printed on, pulp fiction stories covered the gamut from courtroom, prison and spy stories to supernatural and weird tales, frontier and science fiction…and the wildly popular westerns. We read that ‘between 1920 and 1945, at least 162 different Western magazines hit the newsstands at one point or another, resulting in the depression era being called the Western’s golden age.’ It’s not hard to imagine the escapist appeal of the bright, colorful, illustrated covers that held within them the promise of gripping suspense, drama and excitement.

Juxtaposed with the historical perspective of Laurie Power’s essays, her grandfather’s memoirs take on an even more poignant appeal. His writer’s thirst for new experiences and sheer wanderlust take the reader on an exhilarating journey between Kansas, the ghost towns in Central City and Blackhawk, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and California. We share his excitement when, after a multitude of rejection slips, he sold a short story to a nationally circulated magazine for the princely sum of $21.75. Though Powers accepted that pulp fiction had no pretensions to literary greatness, he enjoyed spinning his tales with their larger-than-life characters… and his loyal readers were always asking for more. His stories had finally brought him a good measure of financial success…even in the midst of the Great Depression!

In her closing essay, Laurie Powers takes up her grandfather’s story from where the memoir ended, approximately in 1943. Aided by the discovery of another of her grandfather’s journals, she tries to piece it all together in her characteristic, forthright style. Giving the reader a sense of closure...a drawing down of the curtains on his life.

But the Powers story goes on…Laurie Powers is moving into the next phase of her life. She is still touring libraries, book stores, and museums, promoting the book and giving presentations about her grandfather’s career as a pulp fiction writer and the history of Wild West Weekly, the magazine in which most of his stories appeared. You can also follow her travels and progress on her blog, lauriepowerswildwest@blogspot.com

Read about Laurie’s visits to places like Tuscan and Bisbee AZ, as she follows in the footsteps of her grandfather, Paul. We can probably look forward to another Powers memoir, given Laurie’s love of history and the writer’s gene that she undoubtedly carries! 

Philippa Coelho

To view an scanned version of the original story, click here