Take Sanctum Books, currently republishing the entire Shadow series written by Walter B. Gibson, in addition to Lester Dent’s legendary Doc Savage novels. Galaxy Press has reprints of L. Ron Hubbard’s astonishing output encompassing multiple genres. This ongoing project reprinted 153 of Hubbard’s tales in a total of 80 volumes accompanied by state-of-the-art audiobooks that emulate the Golden Age of Radio for both CD and digital audio downloads.

Black Dog Books and Adventure House are enjoying success reprinting westerns, crime thrillers and science fiction tales from the ’30s and ’40s.

Thanks to these publishers, the works of Gibson, Hubbard and Dent and so many others are finding a new audience.

These stories—and these authors—don’t simply represent yesteryear’s action stories, but they constitute a slice of American cultural history. These are the stories that entertained a nation on the brink of the second World War and the ushering in of the Atomic Age. It was an era of great uncertainty, massive global conflict, and political upheaval. Perhaps its similarity to our era is part of the allure, but no matter the reason, the preservation of these pulp stories is being hailed with widespread acclaim, extraordinary fan interest, and positive scholarly evaluation.

Hard-boiled writing has never really gone out of style, and each generation reinvents the genres of the past, but those originals—those legions of pulp writers who hacked out stories at a breakneck speed to make a living—possessed a quality of talent that arguably remains unsurpassed in contemporary American literature.

With the original pulp magazines crumbling into brown dust, these modern editions ensure that future generations will enjoy the best of the pulps for many years to come.