Featured Article Summary #233

The All-Story Magazine was a pulp magazine started in 1905 by Frank Munsey, with Robert H. Davis as editor and Thomas Newell Metcalf helping as managing editor. It first came out monthly until March 1914, then became a weekly publication. In May 1914, Munsey merged it with another of his magazines, The Cavalier, and changed the name to All-Story Cavalier Weekly for about a year. In 1920, it was merged again with Munsey’s Argosy, becoming Argosy All-Story Weekly. The magazine featured many famous writers, including Mary Roberts Rinehart, Max Brand, and especially Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had early hits like Under the Moons of Mars and later published stories that helped launch series such as Barsoom and Tarzan. Later, some of its stories were reused in other magazines starting in 1939, including Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fantastic Novels. In 1882, Frank Munsey started The Golden Argosy, a children’s weekly, later changing the name and turning to cheap pulp paper and fiction-only printing in 1896—creating the first pulp magazine. As competitors like Street & Smith and Story-Press entered, Munsey launched The All-Story Magazine in January 1905, initially monthly with Robert H. Davis as editor and Thomas Newell Metcalf as managing editor. In 1914 it became weekly and was briefly merged with The Cavalier, then dropped that name, and ultimately merged into a combined Argosy title in 1920, keeping the “Argosy All-Story Weekly” name until 1929. The magazine’s early issues published the first parts of several novels and many short science-fiction stories, including works by W. Bert Foster, Howard R. Garis, and Margaret Prescott Montague. It also helped launch or boost major authors’ careers, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, Max Brand, Ray Cummings, and others, while featuring a mix of genres including mystery, horror, poetry, and Westerns. Covers started with bold slogans and changing artwork, without always matching the stories, and later All-Story and Argosy were described by critic John Clute as among the most important pulp magazines of their time. Edgar Rice Burroughs became the most important author for All-Story after he quietly wrote his first major hit in 1911 and sold it to editor Frank Munsey? (Metcalf), later serializing it as Under the Moons of Mars in 1912; it launched his influential “Barsoom” (Mars) adventures. He followed with Tarzan of the Apes and many more series stories, which grew in popularity and pay, helping spark a wave of imitations and other popular science fiction romances. By the early 1920s his work had filled nearly two dozen stories in the magazine, and decades later an early All-Story issue featuring Tarzan sold for a very high price at auction. The magazine was first called The All-Story Magazine, then shortened to The All-Story in June 1911. When it became weekly on March 7, 1914, it was renamed All-Story Weekly, later changing to All-Story Cavalier Weekly after a merger from May 16, 1914, to May 8, 1915, and returning to All-Story Weekly until July 17, 1920. In 1929, Munsey’s reorganized its magazines, making the new love story magazine All-Story (later retitled All-Story Love Stories), which ran until 1955.