The Author-Agent-Editor Relation: American Pulps in the Interwar Period

ABSTRACT Virtually no research treats exchanges between authors and agents and their relations with editors in the pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties. Through unpublished archival correspondence and other contemporaneous sources (memoirs, trade journals), this article demonstrates how, despite socioeconomic differences and significant distinctions between the pulp world and that of book publishing several decades later, many of the same author, agent, and editor relations documented in more recent criticism were present in the interwar period. As with modern publishing, the literary agent exercised a discernible impact on the content of American pulp magazines of that era.