Munsey's Magazine, April 1920

Munsey's Magazine advertised "Barber John's Boy," a Hardiston novel by Ben Ames Williams, illustrated by Lee Conrey. The cover presents a realistic portrait layout typical of pulp fiction's serial installments. By 1920, Munsey's—founded in 1889—had shifted from general interest toward adventure and genre fiction, competing with newer pulp titles. The magazine's accessible pricing and illustrated serials made it a mass-market gateway to adventure narratives. Hardiston stories represented the "lost world" and frontier adventure subgenres that proliferated through the 1910s-20s, before pulp magazines fully bifurcated into specialized categories like Amazing Stories (science fiction, 1926) and Black Mask (crime, 1920).