Orrie Hitt

Prince of the Pulps, Orrie Edwin Hitt, was a franchise unto himself. He did not complete his first novel until he was almost forty and wrote his last a mere fourteen years later, in 1968, but in between he racked up an impressive catalog, mostly paperback originals, classic pulps from the 50s and 60s, detailing the seedier side of life, the poor, wanton, or depraved. Hitt wrote about desperate people—men and women—people in need who would do things that most of us would never dare. And yet, somehow, his characters were precisely those people that you couldn’t get enough of and couldn’t help but root for. A lifelong resident of Upstate New York, Orrie Hitt died at the age of fifty-nine, on December 7, 1975. He left a wife and four children. And a legacy of memorable books and char-acters that will be read and remembered for a long time to come, for not only their style and mood but for what they say about the human condition.