Pulp fiction is a kind of literature. It gets its name from the cheap, wood pulp paper it was printed on. Pulp fiction covered several genres: romance, western, science fiction, horror, detective, adventure, etc. It was most popular in the United States during the 1920s–1940s. Publication then decreased, perhaps because television took over the evening hours for readers and magazines were not read as often. Pulp fiction was published in a cheap magazine format often with gaudy covers. Stories were sometimes serialized, meaning the reader had to buy each monthly issue over a period of time to complete a particular story.