Scholars perpetuate the high-low modernist split by continuing to ignore the literary aspirations of Weird Tales’ publishers, as well as the quality of the authors that the magazine introduced.
Because of its genre niche and physical resemblance to other pulp magazines, Weird Tales suffered financial failure and automatic rejection by the literary establishment, both during its own era and today. Weird Tales was started during a major cultural shift in aesthetic criticism, when “high” art was shifting to an elitist, intellectual minority and distinguishing itself against “lowbrow” popular literature and mass culture. These high-brow aspirations clashed with the popular belief that the cheaply printed pulps “cater to an unsophisticated and unsubtle class” of “blue collars” with fiction that simple and not particularly literary.
Weird Tales emerged in 1923 as a pulp magazine devoted to representing “the best weird and fantastic stories obtainable.” Just a few years into its publication history, Weird Tales came to define the weird fantasy genre with its mixture of “horror, science fiction, swords and sorcery, occult, dream fantasies, supernatural, black humour, psychology, and even some bizarre crime thrillers.” The magazine’s innovative blending of the detective, Gothic and science fiction genres attracted marginalized groups of readers that differed from the accepted societal norms, forming what Lauren Berlant calls an “intimate public.” As an alternative to the commercially popular yet raunchy and poorly written “shudder pulps,” the editors, writers and readers of Weird Tales were determined to distinguish their fantasy magazine as an esteemed publication devoted to printing sophisticated literature for their intimate public to read.
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