Before the pulp magazines even existed, there was the dime novel, and there was even some overlap between the two because some of the dime novel publishers converted over to the pulp magazine format.
Dime novels were cheap, melodramatic stories featuring wildly inaccurate adventure stories about Western gunmen and other adventure heroes. The Old West wasn't mythologized after the fact, it was mythologized as it was happening, by the dime novel writers. Outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid had dime novels written about them while they were still alive and active. It must have been an odd and uncomfortable experience, seeing your life become a legend in front of your eyes.
Between the dime novels and the pulp magazines, there was a period of nearly a hundred years where it was realistically possible to make a living as a writer of fiction. It may not always have been the most serious fiction, but that's still a lot better than the situation for fiction writers today. The pay rate for magazine fiction now is about what it was in the pulp era- only back then, it was enough money to buy something. These days the same amount of cash would probably best be described as “beer money.”
So what went wrong? It isn't that people don't love stories anymore, it's just that the radio, the TV and the comic book basically combined to kill the market for the pulps. So, as nostalgic as I am for that golden era, it's most likely never coming back.