During the pulp era, many famous writers appeared in Argosy, including O. Henry, James Branch Cabell, Albert Payson Terhune, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Erle Stanley Gardner, Zane Grey, Robert E. Howard, and Max Brand.

[1][2] Munsey resigned from Western Union, and moved to New York on September 23, 1882, bringing with him manuscripts he had bought for the magazine before leaving Augusta.

[4][5] His original plan for the magazine had been to make it a close copy of Golden Days, a weekly paper for children published in Philadelphia by James Elverson,[6] and to include lithographed covers and internal illustrations.

The first issue, titled The Golden Argosy, with Munsey as editor and manager, was dated December 9, 1882;[4][5] it was eight pages long and cost five cents ($1.58 in 2023).

Munsey wrote a short story that night: "Harry's Scheme, or Camping Among the Maples", about two boys in the Maine woods, and turned it in to Douglas the next morning.

It only lasted two months, from September 6 to November 8, 1884, but it helped Munsey by giving him an official-seeming presence in publishing that made it much easier for him to obtain credit for paper and other supplies.

Munsey owed $5,000 at this point, and went into debt by about another $10,000 to advertise the story, distributing 100,000 sample copies of the March 13, 1886 issue containing the first installment of the serial in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the surrounding areas.

[24] He wrote another story, The Boy Broker, for serialization, beginning in the February 5, 1887 issue,[24][29] and credited it with adding 20,000 to The Golden Argosy's circulation.

[24][30] Over five months the campaign gave away 11,500,000 sample issues: his debt ballooned to $95,000 ($3.22 million in 2023), but he was now clearing $1,500 ($51,000 in 2023) a week in profit, and circulation reached 115,000 in May 1887.

[35] Another advertising campaign was launched; it cost $20,000 ($678,000 in 2023) but produced no results, and Munsey began to experiment with the magazine, trying to find a profitable approach.

[35][36][15] He later commented that he had not realized the problems attendant on magazines for children—they grew up quickly and dropped their subscriptions, so circulation was very difficult to maintain, and because they had little spending power it was hard to interest advertisers.

[59] In 1936 Clayton was hired by Liberty, and Jack Byrne, who had been working at Fiction House, took over as editor for a year before being replaced by Chandler Whipple.

[89][15] When Munsey began to write serialized novels for the magazine, starting with Afloat in a Great City in 1886, he used the same basic plot that Alger had been successful with: rags to riches stories of boys succeeding against the odds.

[15][94] There was little science fiction in the early years; one exception was The Conquest of the Moon, by Andre Laurie, which began serialization in The Argosy in 1889;[34] another was William Murray Graydon's The River of Darkness; or, Under Africa (1890).

[12] In 1926, Albert William Stone, a fairly prolific pulp author, visited Manhattan to meet with the editors of the various magazines he had been selling to, and find out more about what their requirements were for submissions.

[97][12] White had sent Stone an encouraging note in reply to an early submission of his: "Two things I like about this story are its Western atmosphere, and its brevity—two thousand five hundred words ...

[101] In 1935 Clayton provided a list of hackneyed plots to be avoided, including escaping convicts, an underwater adventure in which the hero fights an octopus and a giant clam as well as the villain, and a legionnaire who "dies gloriously for Dear Old France".

[104][105] William Wallace Cook contributed numerous serials in the first decade of the 20th century, beginning with The Spur of Necessity in the September 1900 issue after half-a-dozen sales to other markets.

[111][112] Louis Joseph Vance, the creator of the character The Lone Wolf, published most of his fiction in The Popular Magazine, but his first two sales were to Munsey, including The Coil of Circumstance, a serial that began in the November 1903 Argosy.

[115][116] His first sale to The Argosy was "The Fugitive", a novella that began serialization in the August 1905 issue, and he sold a dozen more stories to the magazine over the next few years.

[34] Five science fiction adventure novels by William Wallace Cook appeared, starting in 1903 with A Round Trip to the Year 2000, or A Flight Through Time.

[120][121] Some more sophisticated science fiction also appeared, including "Finis", an end of the world story by Frank Lillie Pollock, in June 1906.

[129] Abraham Merritt's The Metal Monster began serialization in the August 7 issue, the third one after the merger,[12][130] and many more science fiction and fantasy stories followed in the next two decades by authors such as Ray Cummings, Ralph Milne Farley, Otis Adelbert Kline, Victor Rousseau, Eando Binder, Donald Wandrei, Manly Wade Wellman, Jack Williamson, Arthur Leo Zagat, and Henry Kuttner.

[34][131] In 1940 and 1941 Frederick C. Painton published a series of stories in Argosy about Joel Quaite, a time detective who travels into the past to solve mysteries.

[135][136] Max Brand, a very prolific Western writer, sold his first pulp stories to All-Story in 1917, but by the end of the year had begun selling to Argosy too.

[137][138] Clarence Mulford was the creator of the character Hopalong Cassidy; the first few stories in the series appeared in other magazines, but many were published in Argosy in the early 1920s.

[118][142] Bedford-Jones's series about adventurer John Solomon began with The Gate of Farewell, serialized in the January and February 1914 issues, and continued in The Argosy and elsewhere for over twenty years.

[159][160] In 1942, in an attempt to revive the magazine's fortunes, the all-fiction format was abandoned and articles about World War II and "sensationalized" news stories were added.

Argosy's citation from the Post Office listed stories considered to be obscene; the list included The G-String Murders, a serial by Rose Louise Hovick (better known as the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee) that began in May 1942, and "How Paris Apaches Terrorize Nazis in Girl Orgies" and "Sex Outrages by Jap Soldiers", articles in the July and August 1942 issues.

"[172] In the era before the Second World War, Argosy was regarded as one of the "Big Four" pulp magazines, along with Blue Book, Adventure and Short Stories.