Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 11, 2022

The Shadow was an American pulp magazine published by Street & Smith from 1931 to 1949. Each issue contained a novel about The Shadow, a mysterious crime-fighting figure who spoke the line "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows" in radio broadcasts of stories from Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. For the first issue, dated April 1931, Walter Gibson wrote the lead novel, The Living Shadow. Sales were strong, and Street & Smith soon changed it from quarterly to monthly publication, and then to twice-monthly, with the lead novels written by Gibson. From 1946 to 1948, the novels were by Bruce Elliott, who made The Shadow mostly a background figure. Gibson returned to Street & Smith and resumed writing in 1948, but in 1949 the firm ended its remaining pulp titles, including The Shadow. The success of The Shadow made it very influential, and many other single-character pulps soon appeared, featuring a lead novel in every issue about the magazine's main character.