Adventure Magazine Cover

A cowboy astride a bucking horse dominates this cover for Adventure, the pulp magazine that published three times monthly at twenty-five cents. The rider, white-shirted and broad-brimmed, leans back against the animal's violent motion, rope in hand, against a lurid red sky touched with clouds. Adventure specialized in action across multiple genres—western, tropical adventure, crime, and exotic tales—serializing fiction by prolific contributors listed below the masthead. By the 1920s, wood-pulp magazines had become the primary vehicle for genre storytelling, their painted covers advertising thrills and danger to a mass readership hungry for escapism.