Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
May 10, 1919 places this issue of People's Favorite Magazine at one of the most consequential transitional moments in modern American history. The First World War had ended just six months earlier, and the country was navigating the complicated emotional and social terrain of the postwar period — the relief of armistice tangled with grief over losses, economic uncertainty, labor unrest, and the beginning of the cultural upheavals that would define the 1920s. Popular fiction was both a reflection of and an escape from that turbulence, and the pulp magazines that served as the primary delivery mechanism for mass-market American storytelling in this period were in the middle of their own golden age. The pulps — named for the cheap wood-pulp paper on which they were printed — had been growing in commercial scale and editorial ambition since the late nineteenth century, and by 1919 they represented the most widely read fiction publishing format in the United States, reaching millions of readers who had no access to, or interest in, the more expensive and socially prestigious slick magazines. For collectors researching American magazines from 1919, this issue arrives at the precise pivot point between the wartime culture that had shaped the preceding years and the modernist explosion that was about to reshape everything — a transitional document of considerable historical texture.
The lead story, "For the Glory of the Prophet" by Thomas S. Miller, reflects the adventure fiction sensibility that dominated popular storytelling in this period — tales of exotic settings, physical courage, and moral clarity that provided American readers with narrative frameworks for understanding a world that had just demonstrated its capacity for industrialized carnage on an unprecedented scale. The supporting contributors documented in the listing represent a genuine cross-section of the working pulp fiction ecosystem of 1919. George Allan England was by this point an established figure in American popular fiction, known for his science fiction and adventure writing and regularly appearing in the major pulp titles of the era. J. Allan Dunn was a prolific contributor to multiple pulp publications whose output across the teens and twenties constitutes a significant body of popular fiction history. Harry Kemp, whose verse "When Thrann Was King" appears here, was a genuinely interesting figure — known as the "Hobo Poet," he moved between the bohemian literary world of Greenwich Village and the popular press with an ease that made him a distinctive presence in both. Albert Edward Ullman's "The Great God Jazz" is particularly notable as a title: in May 1919 the word "jazz" was still relatively new in mainstream American usage, and a story engaging it directly places this issue at a documented early moment in the cultural conversation about a musical form that would come to define the decade that followed.
The cover design by P. J. Monahan is itself a collectible artifact of early twentieth-century American commercial illustration. Monahan was an active and skilled magazine cover artist whose work appeared on multiple pulp and popular magazine titles through this period, and his covers for People's Favorite are sought by collectors interested in the visual history of pulp publishing as much as by those focused on the fiction itself. The table of contents preserved in the listing is an unusually complete documentary record for an issue of this age — it allows researchers and collectors to identify specific contributors, cross-reference their work across other publications of the period, and situate this individual issue within the broader literary and commercial landscape of late-1910s popular fiction publishing. That specificity is rare for pulp magazines from this era, where survival rates are low and complete bibliographic documentation is often fragmentary at best.
About the Publication
People's Favorite Magazine was an American pulp fiction publication active in the late 1910s and early 1920s, positioned within the broad and commercially competitive popular fiction magazine market that flourished in the decades before radio and cinema fully displaced print as the dominant mass entertainment medium. Like most pulps of its era, it published a mix of adventure, mystery, romance, and genre fiction alongside verse and editorial commentary, drawing on a pool of professional fiction writers who moved fluidly between multiple publications and developed the craft of short-form popular storytelling into one of the most economically productive literary ecosystems in American publishing history. Its readership was broadly working and middle class — Americans who wanted entertainment, escapism, and narrative craft at an accessible price point, served by a publishing format that prioritized content volume and variety over the production values and social cachet of the slick monthlies. People's Favorite occupied its niche in that market during one of the pulp industry's most fertile periods, and surviving issues from its run are now genuinely scarce primary sources for the study of early twentieth-century American popular fiction and magazine publishing history.
Key Highlights Inside
- Lead story "For the Glory of the Prophet" by Thomas S. Miller — the headline adventure fiction that defined the issue's identity and cover presentation, representative of the exotic adventure genre that was among the most commercially reliable categories in pulp publishing during the post-WWI period.
- "The Great God Jazz" by Albert Edward Ullman — a story whose title alone constitutes a historically significant document, engaging the word "jazz" in mainstream popular fiction in May 1919 at a moment when the term was still new enough in general American usage to carry the charge of the contemporary and the culturally transgressive.
- Contributions from George Allan England and J. Allan Dunn — two of the most prolific and recognizable names in early twentieth-century American pulp fiction, whose simultaneous presence in a single issue reflects the editorial ambition of People's Favorite to attract established professional talent rather than relying exclusively on newer or less prominent contributors.
- Verse by Harry Kemp — the "Hobo Poet" whose movement between Greenwich Village bohemianism and popular magazine publishing made him an unusual and culturally interesting figure in the literary landscape of 1919, and whose presence here reflects the pulps' consistent inclusion of poetry alongside prose fiction as part of their editorial mix.
- Cover design by P. J. Monahan — an original work of early twentieth-century American commercial illustration representing the visual aesthetic of pulp magazine cover art during one of its most formative periods, by an artist whose work across multiple publications constitutes a significant body of popular visual culture from this era.
- "Heard in the Army and Navy" and "Let's Talk It Over — The Editor" sections — documentary content that places the issue explicitly in the immediate post-armistice moment, engaging a readership that included veterans and their families navigating the transition from wartime to peacetime in the spring of 1919, and providing primary source material for researchers studying how popular media addressed that transition.
Condition & Rarity
Pulp magazines from 1919 are among the most fragile and survival-challenged artifacts in the American periodical collector market. The wood-pulp paper on which they were printed was inherently acidic and unstable — designed for low-cost mass production rather than any form of longevity — and the result is that copies surviving more than a century typically show significant cover wear, tanning, and brittleness that reflect the paper's chemical degradation over time rather than any particular negligence in storage. A copy graded acceptable condition with a good interior, cover rips and creases, and fully intact and readable pages is an honest and meaningful assessment for a 106-year-old pulp publication — it describes a copy that has survived against considerable odds with its most important attribute, the legibility and completeness of its interior fiction content, fully preserved. Cover condition on pulps of this era is almost universally compromised in surviving examples; the paper stock used for covers, while slightly heavier than interior pages, was equally acidic and equally vulnerable to the mechanical stresses of handling, stacking, and long-term storage. A copy whose pages remain intact and readable despite a worn cover has preserved exactly what makes it valuable as both a reading document and a research artifact. The plastic protective sleeve provides archival-standard protection going forward, which for a publication of this age and paper chemistry is an important safeguard against the continued degradation that unprotected storage accelerates. Collectors evaluating surviving examples of this issue should prioritize interior page integrity and legibility as the primary condition criteria — cover condition on century-old pulps is a secondary consideration, and the completeness of the fiction content is the irreplaceable asset.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
A readable, intact copy of People's Favorite Magazine from May 1919 with a fully documented table of contents is a genuinely uncommon find — pulp magazines from the late 1910s have an extremely low survival rate relative to later decades, and issues with confirmed contributor documentation surface infrequently in any condition. If this issue is no longer available, the 1919 magazine collection at OriginalMagazines.com is the best place to continue searching for surviving publications from the immediate post-WWI period, spanning the full range of popular fiction, general interest, and news publications that documented American life during this pivotal transitional year.