Writers and Plotlines
The magazine ran for 48 issues, from April 1934 to November 1939. One final story was written but never published. Stories were credited to "Curtis Steele", which was a house name for writers Frederick C. Davis (#1-20), Emile C. Tepperman (#21-39), and Wayne Rogers (#40-48). Like other such pulps of the day, there were short backup stories by other authors.
Tepperman was responsible for the 13 interconnected novels (starting with #26) that make up The Purple Invasion, a series in which the Purple Empire (an unnamed European power which is a thinly veiled Germany) conquers the United States after conquering the rest of the world. Jimmy Christopher led the insurgency against them. The saga is often looked upon as the War and Peace of pulps. The entire Purple Invasion sequence was reprinted in the 1990s by Pulp Review/High Adventure.
In a rare bit of continuity for the pulp magazines, America did not find itself fully recovered in the first novel following the end of the Purple Invasion. Instead, America was still reeling from the bloody war, and found itself vulnerable to yet other would-be conquerors. A new serial dealt with the invasion of the US by an oriental power, obviously Japan, led by the "Yellow Vulture." This sequence started with issue #45, but was left unfinished with the magazine's cancellation.
Read more about this topic: Operator No. 5
Famous quotes containing the word writers:
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)