H.L. Mencken and the Birth of Black Mask Magazine: A Pulp Empire He Didn’t Respect

One man's money-grab garbage is another's literary treasure

In the annals of American pulp fiction, few titles loom as large as Black Mask magazine. Launched in 1920, Black Mask became the breeding ground for some of the most legendary crime writers of the 20th century—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Paul Cain. But what many readers don’t realize is that Black Mask was created not by a lover of hardboiled fiction, but by a man who openly disdained popular taste: H.L. Mencken.

That’s right. The “Sage of Baltimore”—cultural critic, editor, curmudgeon—helped birth the most influential crime magazine in American history, almost by accident.

The Reluctant Godfather of Pulp

Henry Louis Mencken was already a towering literary figure when Black Mask was born. Co-editor of The Smart Set with George Jean Nathan, Mencken was known for his sharp wit, his unapologetic elitism, and his blistering critiques of American mediocrity. He championed writers like Theodore Dreiser and Joseph Conrad while skewering everything he saw as lowbrow, sentimental, or phony.

So why did Mencken launch Black Mask, a crime pulp aimed at the masses?

The answer, fittingly, was money.

After The Smart Set began losing steam, Mencken and Nathan founded Black Mask in 1920 as a way to fund their more literary pursuits. The plan was simple: create a cheap fiction magazine that would sell in huge quantities, then use the profits to subsidize "serious" literature.

Mencken never made a secret of his low opinion of the material. In his memoir Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, he referred to pulp fiction as “a mob of platitudes, puerilities and impossible situations.” His view of genre fiction was often scornful. Though he was fascinated by the American vernacular and delighted in the vigor of common speech, he considered most crime fiction formulaic junk.

He once wrote, “No one in his senses would be proud of writing a detective story.” That didn’t stop Black Mask from becoming a juggernaut.

The Rise of the Mask

Under its first editor, Florence Osborne (writing as F.M. Osborne), Black Mask was more of a general fiction magazine. But it wasn’t until Joseph T. Shaw took over in 1926 that the magazine truly hit its stride, sharpening its focus on crime fiction and giving rise to the hardboiled school.

This is when things got gritty.

Shaw gave early opportunities to Dashiell Hammett, whose Continental Op stories laid the groundwork for the private eye genre. Later, Raymond Chandler credited Black Mask with teaching him how to write action that mattered. “The art of writing pulp,” he said, “is the art of writing sentences that do more than one thing at a time.”

By the 1930s, Black Mask was selling up to 100,000 copies per issue—an enormous number for the time. Writers were paid anywhere from 1 to 2 cents per word, not lavish, but enough to survive during the Depression. To put this in perspective, consider that a 3,500 word Black Mask short story would have paid between $35 and $70 in 1932, which would be the same as between $785 and $1,570 in today’s dollars. Trying getting that type of payment from any professional short fiction market today.

All of this stemmed from a magazine that H.L. Mencken never really believed in.

The Irony of Influence

Mencken severed ties with Black Mask early on, selling it in 1922 after losing interest. He turned his attention back to his essays, political commentary, and later, his monumental The American Language. He died in 1956, remembered more as a social critic and linguistic scholar than as a publisher.

And yet, his accidental brainchild endured, influencing American storytelling for decades to come. The DNA of Black Mask can be seen in Dragnet, The Wire, Elmore Leonard novels, and Tarantino scripts. The terse prose, moral ambiguity, and masculine grit. All of it traces back to that one publication Mencken started for money and mocked in spirit.

Legacy in Contrast

The irony is delicious: a man who disdained popular crime fiction helped ignite its golden age. Black Mask became the proving ground for the very kind of “low” literature Mencken disdained, and it endures today not in literary anthologies but in battered reprints, film adaptations, and the hearts of readers who like their fiction hard, fast, and mean.

Sometimes, pulp comes from the pen of a snob. And sometimes, the greatest legacy is the one you never meant to leave.