Giving 'Em Hell

From the 1940s to the mid-1960s, America's 'true adventure' pulp magazines offered a cocktail of action, adventure and lurid sleaze. Titles such as Male, Man's Life, Men Today, Stag and True Men brimmed with stories and features dealing with combat, crime, hunting, exploration and sport, alongside an array of pinups and prurient exposés. This article chronicles the history of the 'true adventure' genre, and relates its development and characteristic form to broad shifts in gendered identities in America after the Second World War. Beneath these magazines' elaboration of an exaggerated form of robust and virile manhood, it is argued, there lurked a sense of unease and anxiety rooted in broader concerns about the trajectory of social and cultural change.