A Night for Screaming by Harry Whittington

“Most Americans had been raised on a steady diet of reading pulps, so there was still a strong cultural appetite for popular fiction,” explains painter and pulp-art authority David Saunders in an essay for Ed Hulse’s outstanding 2021 study, The Art of Pulp Fiction, “but the handy format of a pocket-sized book was more appealing to the newsstand public than an old familiar pulp magazine.” The switch by readers to longer stories and slightly higher-quality paperbacks was really less a revolution than an evolution. A number of authors who’d made their bones penning short, punchy stories for the rough-paper monthlies (Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, and Erle Stanley Gardner among them) successfully made the leap into paperback publication, as did many pulp-practiced artists.