Munsey's Magazine, May 1927

Munsey's Magazine, one of the oldest American periodicals, shifted toward pulp fiction in the 1920s, featuring adventure stories, mysteries, and romance alongside its literary content. This issue leads with "Borrowed Reputations," a complete novelette by Harry Sinclair Drago about Erica Duane, heir to the eccentric Duane family of Concord, New England. The story plays on old-money dysfunction and social pretension—themes that pulp fiction mined from contemporary anxieties about class and inheritance. Munsey's occupied a middle ground between literary magazines and dime pulps, using typography-heavy covers and serialized narratives to attract readers seeking both respectability and entertainment. By the late 1920s, such magazines were the primary vehicle for the genre fiction that would populate comic books.