Adventure (magazine) - Later Years

Later Years

After Hoffman's departure, his successors usually followed the template for the magazine that he had set down. In 1934, Adventure was bought by Popular Publications. Throughout the 1930s, Adventure included fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner, Donald Barr Chidsey, Raymond S. Spears, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Luke Short, and Major George Fielding Eliot. Adventure continued to publish factual pieces by noted figures, including future film producer Val Lewton and Venezuelan military writer Rafael de Nogales. During Adventure's 25th anniversary in 1935, TIME Magazine praised Adventure as being "the No. 1 "pulp"". and Newsweek lauded Adventure as "Dean of the pulps".

During the 1940s, the magazine carried numerous fiction and articles concerned with the ongoing Second World War; writers who contributed to Adventure in this period included E. Hoffmann Price, DeWitt Newbury, Jim Kjelgaard and Fredric Brown. Artists on the publication during the 1930s and 1940s included Walter M. Baumhofer, Hubert Rogers, Rafael De Soto, Lawrence Sterne Stevens and Norman Saunders. The magazine's main editor in the 1940s was Kenneth S. White, the son of the magazine's first editor Trumbull White. In April 1953, the pulp changed its format to that of a men's adventure magazine that lasted until the magazine folded in 1971. This final incarnation of Adventure tends not to be highly regarded among magazine historians, with Robert Weinberg referring to it as "a rather mundane slick magazine" and Richard Bleiler stating that by 1960 Adventure had become ''...a dying embarrassment, printing grainy black and white photos of semi-nude women". Nevertheless, this version of Adventure did sometimes publish fiction by noted authors, including a story by Norman Mailer, "The Paper House" in the December 1958 issue.