Harold Hersey

Born in 1893, Harold Brainerd Hersey built a career as an editor, publisher, short-story writer, and poet during the great age of American pulp magazines. He worked across several corners of popular fiction and became especially associated with the fast-moving, sensational magazine world that reached huge audiences in the early 1900s.

Hersey is remembered for editing and publishing pulp magazines, including titles connected with science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and crime. He has also been credited as an important figure in the rise of the gangster pulp. Alongside his magazine work, he published volumes of poetry, showing a range that went beyond the hard-driving commercial fiction he is best known for.

For many readers today, his most interesting legacy may be Pulpwood Editor (1937), a memoir-like look at the magazine trade from someone who knew it from the inside. He died in 1956, but his name still comes up in histories of pulp publishing because he helped define the tone, speed, and ambition of that colorful era.