Adventure magazine debuted in November 1910 from The Ridgway Company (a Butterick subsidiary); the imprint changed to Butterick Publishing Company in October 1926, then to Popular Publications in July 1934, and the magazine continued—through several format shifts—until 1971.
What made Adventure special wasn’t only longevity but ambition: under editor Arthur S. Hoffman (1912–1927) it became a rigorously fact-minded market for historically and geographically “correct” tales, ran innovative reader departments (“The Camp-Fire,” “Ask Adventure”), went to a three-times-a-month schedule at its peak, and built an international audience that included Theodore Roosevelt. In October 1935, Time famously saluted it as “The No. 1 Pulp.”
Beyond sheer thrills, Adventure was a proving ground for writers who treated far-flung settings with reportorial care—Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, H. Bedford-Jones, Rafael Sabatini, Georges Surdez, Gordon MacCreagh, Arthur O. Friel, and many more.
The magazine’s pages mixed robust serials with standalone novellas, nurtured ongoing cycles like Lamb’s Cossacks and Mundy’s historical epics, and cultivated unusually engaged reader participation through classifieds like “Wanted-Men and Adventurers” and the “Lost Trails” column. The result was a pulp with a reputation for quality and authenticity that outlasted most rivals.
Here are five standout tales from Adventure magazine:
1. "Tros of Samothrace” — Talbot Mundy, Adventure, February 10, 1925.
Launches Mundy’s anti-Caesar epic—historical adventure at its boldest, and a signature demonstration of the magazine’s appetite for big, meticulously researched serials.
2. "Khlit” — Harold Lamb, Adventure, November 1, 1917.
The first story of Lamb’s gray-bearded Cossack sets the tone for a cycle whose lean prose, cultural breadth, and on-the-ground detail influenced generations of adventure and fantasy writers.
3. "The Pathless Trail” — Arthur O. Friel, Adventure, serialized from October 10, 1921 to November 10, 1921.
A landmark Amazon-jungle saga whose field-experience feel epitomizes Adventure’s “you-are-there” realism and helped cement Friel’s reputation as the pulp’s premier explorer-story hand.
4. "The Green Splotches” — T. S. Stribling, Adventure, January 3, 1920.
A much-reprinted early science-fiction classic about an alien outpost in South America—evidence that Adventurecould stretch beyond pure swashbuckling into idea-driven speculative fiction.
5. "Don Diego Valdez” — Rafael Sabatini, Adventure, June 18, 1921.
An early Captain Blood tale; its presence in Adventure showcases the magazine’s ability to attract top-tier historical romancers and feed material into later landmark novels.
