Pulp Empire

"Pulp Empire" presents the first transnational study of Macfadden Publications, Inc., a prolific producer of mass-market magazines that boasted the "Largest Newsstand Sale in the World" during the interwar period. Founded by the American health reformer Bernarr Macfadden in New York and London in 1899, Macfadden Publications became known for its cheap periodicals devoted to physical culture, "confession," film, pulp fiction, and sensationalized news. Well before Henry Luce's 1941 declaration of an "American Century," Macfadden's magazines reached diverse audiences in the United States and around the world, where they brokered compelling models of modern embodiment, self-fashioning, and mass consumption. In reconstructing the global history of a company that left behind no corporate archive, "Pulp Empire" models a methodology for studying cultural-economic networks that flowed between and beyond national boundaries. Based on multi-archival research conducted in three countries, extensive textual analysis, and biography, it highlights the important yet little studied role played by non-elite print circulations in the expansion of the U.S. culture industry in the first half of the twentieth century. The analytic of "pulp empire" introduces a framework useful not only for understanding Macfadden Publications, but also for theorizing the simultaneously integrative and disintegrative effects of Transnational America's influence on the global popular.