"Defilers of Everything That Was Holy"

"Because of the speed at which the stories were written, much of what appeared in the pulps was laughably bad. ('What came about after that is a secret of the jungle …') Also, frequently racist, homophobic, misogynous, and worthy of nearly every other epithet. But a tiny percentage of the pulp stories were astonishing. From the fingers of those who later became genre masters—Ray Bradbury, say, who cut his teeth in Weird Tales—you find writing that feels utterly spontaneous, that grips you with the urgency that is the true claim of pulp over literary fiction."

Bryan Curtis heads up Slate's retrospective of pulp fiction.