What Pulp Fiction Covers Can Tell Us About Literary Classics
The Pulp Behind The Prestige, And How It Should Guide Literature Today
When we were writing a recent list of literary classics with pulp fiction covers, it was almost an embarrassment of riches. Farewell To Arms, The Great Gatsby, Brave New World—they’d all been repackaged in pulp versions. It was amazing to see prestige books branded as potboilers. And, in a way, it said something about the books themselves.
Great Stories Get Great Covers
The motivation behind pulping these books was economic, not aesthetic. Publishers like Bantam and Signet wanted to make money by printing copies on cheap paper and selling them at mass-market prices.
But it’s not as if they were indiscriminate in their redrafts—while we were able to find pulp covers for All Quiet On The Western Front and Brighton Rock, we didn’t see any for Ulysses or The Sound And The Fury. Only accessible books got the pulp treatment, because only those books would really fly off the shelves. And that reveals something we’ve forgotten about these classics.
They’re great stories. When we read A Farewell To Arms, we’re trained to analyze sentence structure, lost generation morals, and the aesthetics of war (I could go on, but I’ll spare you). But a pulp fiction cover provides better analysis: it’s a tragedy about two people in love. The rest is just gravy.
When you see a pulp cover of Augie March, you forget all those claims about “The Great American Novel” or Saul Bellow’s place in history. You remember that it’s a great read. The rest follows.
Classics Have An Emotional Core
The classics were never just prestige plays. They’re great stories with real emotions. And that’s what’s made them endure.
We laugh when we see pulp literary classics because it subverts our expectations. We’re so used to seeing these books branded one way that any other version seems cheap and fake. But in a way, these pulp covers show the real reason we still read all these books today: the stories.
Do our modern classics still have that pulp legacy? Could you see a recent “literary” hit deserving a cover like one of these? If not, isn’t that a problem? We deserve art with characters who are searching for something just like we are. So let’s keep looking…just like Holden.
