About the Laughing Wallflower and Breezy Stories

It happened a long time ago and there wasn’t much in the way of source material available to me. In the end, I had some questions that I really could not answer. I hope I sign posted my conjectures adequately. For the most part, I relied on newspapers. It should be noted that pulp magazines have an active fandom dating back to the mid 1960s. Breezy and most of the women’s pulps simply haven’t been a target of much fan interest.

You can’t blame the remaining fans for who they are—or rather what demographic they fit in. Guys want to talk about guy pulps. Not that Breezy wasn’t a guy pulp—it just mostly wasn’t. Pulps tried to play to both sexes.

I found it fairly amazing that there was no archive whatsoever for the National Advance. Post Birmingham, it seems to have been Phil Painter’s little thing. Think magazines, such as National Review, Mother Jones and the New Republic often have very small readership bases. Although the American Mercury was very influential, it seems only 15,000 people read it at its height.

There is a saying that circulation isn’t everything. But it is something. What intrigued me about Breezy was its longevity and consistency. Also that it had been fairly much dismissed despite this. It must have been doing something right. A recent history of the pulps stated that the entire girly pulp category vanished into thin air without anything of note ever having amounted from it. And then, in an aside, there was a reference that several of them, Breezy noted, had launched the careers of many influential writers. Oh, and yeah, there were tons of them.

For the majority of pulp writers, the girls smut pulps were their bread and butter. Even Howard, Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs contributed to them. Ditto Max Brand, in one of his many guises. To say that they amounted to nothing is to ignore the direction in which popular fiction has taken.

Once it had been demonstrated as a viable form, the girls fantasy smut genre was glommed up by regular publishers. I mentioned Peyton Place, which had it appeared a few years earlier, very well might have appeared in pulp form. You could almost say the same thing about Gone With The Wind. By the time that was published the more mainstream operators already had their antennas up for the trend. The pulps lost their domination of the romance category rather early on. Effectively the pulps began acting as their minor leagues. Even today, the majority of the paperback fiction issued is romance—which is by far the most broad of the genres.

But it is yucky girls crud and who the heck wants to talk about it.

Besides launching the careers of several novelists, Breezy is rather noteworthy for giving space to many aspiring playwrights. While sniffing around chorus girls, it seems C.H. Young also rubbed shoulders with others in the Broadway crowd. Painter certainly played up the Broadway connection, even going so far as to move his offices there. They kept a lot of aspiring writers and poster painters fed.

Although Breezy was targeted at the lower classes, its presentation had a snotty air to it. Like Playboy, Breezy had a pretense to classy-ness. Some of this was an accident, caused by the weird contraction of several magazines into Breezy. In the end, it was sleaze in a mink—but at least it had a mink. And whatever the heck they did worked and worked often over a long haul. That’s more than you can say for most magazines.

That was my starting point. To be honest, I had no idea what can of worms I would find until I started my research. I am not in love with any of the conjectures I made and will revise this if I can obtain any further information.

In any case, I hope you find it at least a fraction as interesting as I did.