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lessons that others would say were irrational and even bizarre. Habitually, and perhaps
unconsciously, Hubbard would ll this gap—between reality and his interpretation of it
—with mythology. This was the source of what some call his genius, and others call his
insanity.
WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-THREE, Hubbard married Margaret Louise Grubb, an aspiring aviator
four years his senior, whom he called Polly. Amelia Earhart had just become the rst
female to y solo across the Atlantic, inspiring many daring young women who wanted
to follow her example. Although Polly never gained a pilot’s license, it wasn’t surprising
that she would respond to Ron’s swashbuckling personality and his tales of far-ung
adventures. They settled in a small town in Maryland, near her family farm. Ron was
trying to make it as a professional magazine writer, but by that point—at the end of
1933—he had only half a dozen articles in print. Soon, Polly was pregnant, and Ron
had to find a way to make a living quickly.
Pulp ction derives its name from the cheap paper stock used in printing the garish
magazines—Weird Tales, Black Mask, Argosy, Magic Carpet—that became popular in
Depression-era America. The pay for contributors was miserable—the standard rate was
a penny a word. To ll the usual 128 pages, each pulp magazine required 65,000 words,
so that the yearly quota to ll the 150 pulp weeklies, biweeklies, and monthlies that
crowded the newsstands in 1934 amounted to about 195,000,000 words. Many wellknown
writers began their careers by feeding this gigantic maw, including Dashiell
Hammett, H. P. Lovecraft, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, and
Edgar Rice Burroughs. The pulps nurtured genres that were perhaps not new but until
then had never been so blatantly and abundantly expressed.
Hubbard’s actual life experiences seemed wonderfully suited for such literature. His
rst pulp story, “The Green God,” published in Thrilling Adventures in 1934, is about a
naval intelligence ocer (possibly based on Snake Thompson) who is tortured and
buried alive in China. “Maybe Because—!,” published in Cowboy Stories, was the rst of
Hubbard’s forty-seven westerns, which must have drawn upon his childhood in
Montana. Soon, however, there were stories about submarines and zombies, tales set in
Russia or Morocco. Plot was all that really mattered, and Hubbard’s amazing capacity
for invention readily colored the canvas. Success in the pulps depended on speed and
imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between
1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of ction a month. He
was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a
story was nished, he would tear o the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the
publisher. Because the magazines didn’t want an author to appear more than once in
the same issue, Hubbard adopted pen names—Mr. Spectator, Capt. Humbert Reynolds,
Rene Lafayette, Winchester Remington Colt, et cetera—accumulating about twenty
aliases over the years. He said that when he was writing stories he would simply “roll
the pictures” in his mind and write down what he saw as quickly as possible. It was a
physical act: he would actually perspire when he wrote. His philosophy was “First draft,