Tag Archives: Peter Doyle

The counter culture and protest politics of the late sixties and early seventies resulted in some fascinating pulp fiction.

A good example is What Now My Love by Floyd Salas, published by Grove Press in 1969.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how one defines ‘pulp fiction’. As a general rule, pulp is understood to be anything that involves fast writing and that was not meant to last. The transitory nature of pulp can be seen in a literary sense, books not deemed part of our literary heritage, as well as the physical nature of the product, the cheap paper it was printed on, the often poor binding, etc.

I have a number of problems with this definition, not least of which is a suspicion of how ‘literature’ is defined by mainstream critics.

But that’s for another post.

The ‘what is pulp’ discussion is particularly interesting in the context of the sixties and early seventies. It was a time when publishers embraced subjects relating to the counter cultural and radical politics, and the distinction between high and low brow culture began to fragment.

Most obvious pulp books about the counter culture were produced by writers trying to cash in on the salacious headlines and mainstream angst generated by bikers, beats, hippies, drug use, ‘free love’, etc.… Read more