Street and Smith

One of America's oldest publishing houses, Street and Smith helped to ensure the spread of mass literacy in the United States. Producing inexpensive books and periodicals, Street and Smith was long known for its dime novels, pulp fiction, popular magazines, and comic books. Featured prominently were the tales of Jesse James, Buffalo Bill, Nick Carter, Frank Merriwell, and the Shadow. Noteworthy authors included Edward Z. C. Judson, Horatio Alger Jr., Gilbert M. Patten, and Eugene T. Sawyer, while reprints of Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Victor Hugo abounded. In the 1850s, Street and Smith began producing dime novels, soon becoming the most successful publisher in the field, surpassing even Beadle and Adams, Munro, and Tousey. As one commentator quipped, "Munros to the left of them, Tousey to right of them, Street and Smith behind them, Onward they blood-and-thundered." Beginning in 1859, many of Street and Smith's serialized novels appeared in the New York Weekly, recently purchased by Francis S. Street and Francis S. Smith.

From the mid nineteenth century onward, Street and Smith helped to shape the image of the American hero, while moving from dime novels—which frequently sold for a nickel—to pulp fiction. Real-life individuals with anti-heroic qualities, such as the outlaw Jesse James and the Western adventurer Buffalo Bill, were presented in a glorified light. Alger's Ragged Dick, whose protagonist was a former bootblack turned bank clerk, helped to reinforce a belief in self-reliance and individualism as America entered an era of rapid modernization. Detective Nick Carter, who first appeared in the New York Weekly in 1886, was a more cerebral figure: "He was a master of disguise, and could so transform himself that even old Sim (his father) could not recognize him. And his intellect, naturally keen as a razor blade, had been incredibly sharpened by the judicious cultivation of the astute old man." In 1896, Patten offered Frank Merriwell, a genius of an athletic stripe who invariably bested his competitors—but always did so honorably—in the pages of Tip-Top Weekly. Thus, the Street and Smith heroes included men of the Wild West, city lads and slickers, and athletes, in a period when urbanization and industrialization were transforming the national landscape.

Street and Smith was known for its pulp fiction, which was initiated by Frank Munsey's Argosy at the close of the nineteenth century, supplanting dime novels and story papers. Street and Smith contributed gaudy, three-colored covers. Russell Nye contends that Street and Smith's New Buffalo Bill Weekly, published in 1912, was "the last genuine dime novel." Pulp magazines, most of the general adventure variety, thrived, while Street and Smith contributed Detective Story (1915), Western Story (1919), and Love Story (1921). Created by a young woman, Amita Fairgrieve, Love Story began as a quarterly but ended up as a weekly. By 1938, Love Story produced a score of imitators, including True Love Stories, Pocket Love, Romantic Range, and Real Love. Selling as many as 10 million copies by the 1930s, the pulps suffered from heightened production charges during the following decade. The death-knell of pulp magazines was ushered in by radio, television, and 25 cent paperback books. Along with other publishers, Street and Smith began emphasizing publications that garnered large advertising budgets.

Street and Smith was known for far more than its pulp, producing periodicals like Popular Magazine, which began in 1903 as a quarterly intended "for boys and 'Old Boys'," but soon became an action, adventure, and outdoors semimonthly. With a circulation of nearly a quarter of a million, Popular Magazine was published until 1928. Upton Sinclair contributed to the publication, as did top pulp authors suck as B. M. Bower, H. H. Knibbs, and Rex Beach. Appearing in 1937, Pic began printing risque photographs of young women, while posing questions such as, "Do White Men Go Berserk in the Tropics?" With World War II coming to a close, Pic became a more respectable men's magazine, with its circulation surpassing the 600,000 mark; mounting costs, however, doomed it.

By the late 1940s, Street and Smith closed its last pulp and a series of comic books, opting to highlight slick periodicals like Charm, Mademoiselle, and Living for Young Homemakers. Made-moiselle, which targeted women from 17-30, had been introduced in 1935. Quentin Reynolds referred to Street and Smith as "a fiction factory," while contending that the company had long thrived because of its diversity and readiness to discard increasingly unpopular publications. Family control of Street and Smith terminated in 1959, when the company was purchased by Condé Nast Publications, reportedly for $4 million and stock options. Among the magazines acquired were Charm, Living for Young Homemakers, Astounding Science Fiction, Air Progress, and Hobbies for Young Men.

—Robert C. Cottrell

Further Reading:

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines 1865-1885. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967.

——. A History of American Magazines 1885-1905. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1957.

Noel, Mary. Villains Galore -The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly. New York, MacMillan Company, 1954.

Nye, Russell. The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America. New York, Dial Press, 1973.

Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1964.

Reynolds, Quentin. The Fiction Factory, or from Pulp Row to Quality Street. New York, Random House, 1995.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1970.

Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America 1741-1990. New York, Oxford University Press, 1991.