The Shadow (magazine)

The Shadow

Cover of the July 15, 1939 issue; artwork by Graves Gladney[1]
Publisher	Street & Smith
First issue	1931
Final issue	1949

The Shadow was an American pulp magazine that was published by Street & Smith from 1931 to 1949. Each issue contained a novel about the Shadow, a mysterious crime-fighting figure who had been invented to narrate the introductions to radio broadcasts of stories from Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. A line from the introduction, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows", prompted listeners to ask at newsstands for the "Shadow magazine", which convinced the publisher that a magazine based around a single character could be successful. Walter Gibson persuaded the magazine's editor, Frank Blackwell, to let him write the first novel, The Living Shadow, which appeared in the first issue, dated April 1931.

Sales were strong, and Street & Smith quickly moved it from quarterly to monthly publication, and then to twice-monthly. John Nanovic was hired as editor in 1932, and the lead stories were outlined in meetings between Nanovic, Gibson, and Henry W. Ralston, Street & Smith's business manager. Gibson wrote every Shadow story for several years; from the mid-1930s he was assisted by Theodore Tinsley, who wrote almost thirty of the novels. Paper shortages during World War II forced Street & Smith to reduce the magazine's format from pulp to digest-sized. Pulp historians consider the quality of the fiction to have dropped after the 1930s. Gibson stopped writing the novels in 1946 over a contract dispute with Street & Smith, and the novels were written in his stead by Bruce Elliott; these stories, in which the Shadow is mostly a background figure, are held in low esteem by fans. Gibson returned to Street & Smith in 1948, but in 1949 Street & Smith ceased publication of their remaining pulp titles, including The Shadow. The final issue was dated Fall 1949.

The success of The Shadow made it very influential, and many other single-character pulps soon appeared, featuring a lead novel in every issue about the magazine's main character. Street & Smith quickly followed up with Doc Savage, and other publishers launched The Spider, The Phantom Detective, and titles in other genres such as Westerns and science fiction.