Men's adventure

Men's adventure is a genre of magazines that had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Catering to a male audience, these magazines featured pinup photography and lurid tales of adventure that typically featured wartime feats of daring, exotic travel, or conflict with wild animals.

These magazines are generally considered the last of the true pulp magazines; they reached their circulation peaks long after the genre-fiction pulps had begun to fade. These magazines were also colloquially called men's sweat magazines or the sweats, especially by people in the magazine publishing or distribution trades.

Notable men's adventure magazines included Argosy, the longest-running and best-regarded among them, as well as Real, True, Saga, Stag, Swank, and For Men Only. During their peak in the late 1950s, approximately 130 men's-adventure magazines were being published simultaneously.

The tales they contained usually were written in a realistic style and claimed to be true stories. Damsels in distress, usually in various states of deshabille, were often featured in the painted cover or interior art. These often scantily clad women were notoriously depicted being menaced or tortured by Nazis or, in later years, Communists. Artist Norman Saunders was the dean of illustrators for these magazines, occupying a position similar to that enjoyed by Margaret Brundage for the classic pulps. Many illustrations, however, are credited to corporations or are anonymous. Historical artist Mort Künstler also painted many covers and illustrations for these magazines, and Playboy photographer Mario Casilli started out shooting pinups for this market. At publisher Martin Goodman's Magazine Management Company, future best-selling humorist and author Bruce Jay Friedman was a men's-sweat writer and editor, and future hit novelist Mario Puzo a writer.