Sport Story Magazine debuted in August 1923, with its first issue dated September 8. Selling for 15¢, the general interest sports pulp featured stories and articles about baseball, basketball, boxing, football, hockey, horse racing, polo, rowing, skiing, tennis, track, wrestling, and just about every other sport under the sun.
Published by Street & Smith, Sport Story Magazine was the first specialized sports pulp magazine, following the publisher’s Detective Story Magazine, Western Story Magazine, Love Story Magazine, and Sea Stories Magazine into the specialty market.
By 1923, thanks to the feats of All-American halfback Red Grange, the “Sultan of Swat” Babe Ruth, heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, tennis star “Big Bill” Tilden, and Man o’ War, the greatest racehorse of them all, interest in organized sports was growing. Subsequently, Sport Story Magazine hit the ground running, publishing two issues each and every month for the next sixteen years. Writing in The Fiction Factory: From Pulp Row to Quality Street, Quentin Reynolds reported that circulation quickly grew to 150,000 copies, with very few returns.
A mix of fiction and fact, for almost five years, Sport Story Magazine had the sports fiction field all to itself. It wasn’t until the introduction of Fight Stories in mid-1928 that another sports pulp emerged. Over the next 25 years, dozens of sports fiction magazines appeared on the market: Ace Sports, All-American Football Magazine, All-American Sports Magazine, All Sport, Baseball Stories, Best Sports, Complete Sports, Dime Sports Magazine, Exciting Sports, Fifteen Sports Stories, Football Action, Football Stories, New Sports Magazine, Popular Sports Magazine, Sports Action, Sports Fiction, Sports Novels Magazine, Sports Winners, Super Sports, Thrilling Sports, 12 Sports Aces, and about thirty other titles.
We hope you’ll join PulpFest 2023 on Saturday, August 5, at 7 pm for “Sport Story Magazine and Its Pulp Offspring,” featuring sports and love pulp expert Michelle Nolan, with a slideshow prepared by Bob Carter. It’s part of our salute to the centennial of Sport Story Magazine and the sports pulp genre.
A mainstream journalist for over fifty years, Michelle Nolan has also covered the history of genre fiction in pulps, comics, books, and films in more than 1,000 magazine, newspaper, and book articles. She is the author of Archie’s Rivals in Teen Comics of the 1940s – 1970s; Ball Tales: A Study of Baseball, Basketball and Football Fiction of the 1930s through 1960s; Baseball and Football Pulp Fiction: Six Publishers; and Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics. In 2014, Michelle received an Inkpot Award from Comic-Con International for her contributions to the worlds of comics, science fiction, fantasy, film, television, and animation.
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Our featured image is excerpted from H. Winfield Scott’s cover for the April 1940 issue of Sport Story Magazine. Remembered most for his Wild West Weekly covers, Scott was also one of the leading artists for the sports pulps.
Our lead image was adapted by PulpFest advertising director William Lampkin from Chester Bloom’s cover art for the August 1947 issue of Sports Action, published by Martin Goodman’s Manvis Publishing. Sports Action was one of many pulps inspired by the success of Street & Smith’s Sport Story Magazine.
Norman Saunders contributed the cover art for the first number of Sport Story Magazine for May 1938-05, while Sam Cherry painted the Dime Sports Magazine cover for April 1943.
For more on Sport Story Magazine, please visit our YouTube Channel to view “Sport Story Magazine Celebrates Its 100th Birthday,” a video created by PulpFest‘s Craig McDonald. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to the PulpFest Channel.
