Arthur Friel Works in the Pulps

In the world of pulp magazines, many writers found success in connecting their adventure stories with a waiting group of fans. For writer Arthur Friel, the majority of his success came from a series of short stories that he wrote for Adventure Magazine. Beginning in 1919 at the onset of the pulps generation, Friel introduced two characters that would continue to appear for several years. The two characters were Lourenco and Pedro, two men that lived and worked in the Amazon jungle. Most of the story ideas came from the personal experiences of Arthur Friel as he had spent a reasonable amount of time in South America as an editor with the Associated Press.

After some success with the pulps, Arthur Friel decided that he would rather live the life of adventure rather than write about it. In the year 1922, Friel decided to travel for half a year on two of the major rivers of Venezuela. Two years later, the writer published a book called The River of Seven Stars, which was a document of his previous travels. At the same time, Arthur Friel started looking away from the short stories format and trying his hand with longer works. Adventure Magazine backed the project and started publishing installments of the continuing stories. The works featured three explorers and their exploits were documented over the course of four novels.

Collections of the writings of Arthur Friel have been completed and a person can find them at bookstores and online repositories. One of the short stories that has been controversial is a piece that was titled In the Year 2000. This story from 1928 is largely omitted from most collections due to the accusation that it was written in a racist manner. The later serialized works from Adventure Magazine have also been printed in book form.