As part of his Redpath's Books for the Camp Fire, a cheaply printed series to be read by Union soldiers to combat the dreariness of Civil War camps, James Redpath issued pulp editions of William Wells Brown's Clotel. The Colored American Magazine used seductive images, titillating headlines, all the tricks of sensationalist pulp marketing to sell its serialized and published versions of Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood. In the late 1940s, Ann Petry's The Street and Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go were given lurid covers to facilitate their mass-marketing. Later, all these works would find themselves on college course reading lists and discussed in academic journals. Their histories indicate the fluidity of novels as their cultures situate them and the porosity between the categories pulp, popular, and serious fiction. Classification of black novels has been intricately tied to class dynamics and questions of representation, and the continuum of pulp to popular to serious reveals more about publishing and readers than literary works.

Generally, pulp fiction referred to works written quickly and printed on cheap paper, the dime novels of the nineteenth century or the crime, mystery, and adventure tales of the 1930s, for instance. By the time the term gains currency as a referent for black writing, it designates 1960s novels about pimps, hustlers, drug dealers, whores, and life on the street, the more sexually prurient the content the better. But characterizing pulp through content and form alone can be unreliable. A “ghetto” setting, marginalized characters, profanity, and sexual explicitness, the presumed hallmarks of black pulp, are also present in novels deemed classics. What makes a novel pulp is determined as much by its separateness from the academy, mainstream presses, and distribution, as it is by its style (and even this situation is constantly in flux). Black pulp is a folk form circulated through corner stores, barbershops, newsstands, liquor stores, via mail order, and passed from hand to hand. Like many folk forms it enjoys increasing study within the academy because it personifies predominating ideals at a moment in time and reflects the values of its participatory groups.