The Irish and the Origins of American Popular Culture by Christopher Dowd

Author:Christopher Dowd [Dowd, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 19th Century, Modern, Social History, Social Science, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9781351767361
Google: 7z1MDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-15T05:04:53+00:00

Acknowledgments

Some portions of this chapter were published previously and are used with permission. These portions appeared as “The Weird Tales, Spicy Detectives, and Startling Stories of Irish America: Irish Characters in American Pulp Magazines” in Irish Studies Review 23, no. 2 (2015): 176–83 and “The Irish-American Identities of Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian” in New Hibernia Review 20, no. 2 (2016): 15–34.

Notes

1Don Hutchison, The Great Pulp Heroes (Oakville, ON: Mosaic, 1996), 1.

2David M. Earle notes that during the early twentieth century, the pulp readership included readers from all social classes, although it is thought to have been mostly working class. He also notes that the pulps appealed to minority groups and women, despite having a current reputation for having been predominantly masculine-focused. Nonetheless, he cautions about drawing too many conclusions about the specific typology of pulp magazine audiences because many designating factors (such as subscription lists, sales policies, and distribution data) do not exist or are unreliable. See David M. Earle, “Pulp Magazines and the Popular Press,” in Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines v2, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 201, 207, 199.

3Earle, “Pulp Magazines,” 197.

4Ibid., 203.

5Ibid.

6Ibid., 215.

7My focus here is specifically on Irish-American pulp writers, but it is worth noting two very famous non-American pulp writers of Irish heritage who were published in American pulps and were immensely popular with American readers. The first is Lord Dunsany (Edward Plunkett), member of the Irish peerage and pioneer of high fantasy and science fiction. Whereas he did not write specifically for the pulps, his stories were reprinted in pulp magazines and influenced many major pulp writers, including H. P. Lovecraft. The second is Sax Rohmer, who was born to working-class Irish immigrant parents in England. Rohmer is most famous for creating the pulp villain Fu Manchu.

8Despite the massive popularity of Zorro, Johnston McCulley himself remains a bit of a mystery, and little biographical information on him exists. Several sources seem to assume that he is of Irish Catholic descent. However, genealogical evidence actually points to his being of Scots-Irish descent. According to the 1820 Census, his earliest recorded American ancestor is Rolley McCullough from Rockingham County, Virginia—an area primarily settled by Presbyterians and Episcopalians. H. Bedford-Jones came from a family of Protestant ministers from Cork.

9Raymond Chandler, The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, 1909–1959, ed. Tom Hiney and Frank McShane (New York: Grove, 2000), 26.

10Ibid., 198.

11Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976), 6.

12Chandler, Raymond Chandler Papers, 49.

13MacShane, Life of Raymond Chandler, 12.

14Ibid., 25.

15Hutchison, Great Pulp Heroes, 2.

16“The Gentle Desperado,” Kirkus Reviews, accessed April 28, 2016, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/max-brand-17/the-gentle-desperado/.

171850 United States Federal Census. Digital images. Ancestry.com, accessed May 18, 2016. http://www.ancestry.com.

18Darrell C. Richardson, “The Life and Works of Max Brand,” in The Max Brand Companion, ed. John Tuska and Vicki Piekarski (Wesport: Greenwood, 1996), 438.

19John Schoolcraft, “Bohemian Days on Grub Street,” in The Max Brand Companion, ed. John Tuska and Vicki Piekarski (Wesport: Greenwood, 1996), 59.

20Jane Faust Easton, “My Father,” in The Max Brand Companion, ed.

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