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  • Prairie Schooner's Traditions of Transport:Literary Publishing in the Academy
  • Hilda Raz (bio)

There is a compelling value to staying in print ... producing and circulating ... [books and journals] that maintain a monitory presence and therefore a psychic weight, a gravitas, in the subculture of serious readers.1

I'd like to talk about the venerable literary quarterly Prairie Schooner's history as a scholarly work-in-progress, then turn to some questions about the place of belletristic (or creative) writing in the academy, the role of journals in the mission of university presses, their value to academic departments, and our increasing interest in creative writing [End Page 184] in a time of shrinking student enrolments. I'll cite some statistics, make some conjectures, and close with my favourite joke. Today I speak as a professor, a past member of the board of the Associated Writing Programs and a past president, a past member of the executive committee of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska, a writer, and the Glenna Luschei endowed editor of Prairie Schooner.

Nothing much was said to me about Prairie Schooner's long history when I took over as the fifth editor. We were too busy to look back. I assembled staff, read manuscripts, called and attended meetings, read proof, wrote letters, and enjoyed most of academic life. The best part of each day was the mail. One day I opened a letter that began,

What might interest you is the fact that I was one of the founding fathers of your fine magazine. I worked my way through university as a reporter on the local paper and was a friend of Lowry Wimberly's [a professor of English]. He was not a dour man, but that is how he looked. One day in 1926, as I was crossing campus, he called out, 'Don't you think we ought to have a literary magazine?' I said, 'Of course. Good idea.' And Lowry said, 'Good. I'll put you on the committee.' Which he did. I can't remember that we ever did meet, but I suppose we did. I think there were five of us. Ed Morrow [Edward R. Murrow, the reporter] was probably another.2

The letter was signed 'Edward Stanley,' and the enclosed photo showed a white-haired man sitting by a swimming pool. Stanley's letter was a surprise. No one, to my knowledge, had heard his name. But when we looked, our files showed that the early committee of Prairie Schooner included the famous Loren Eiseley, as well as Weldon Kees and another less familiar name, a student named Volta Torry, who became editor of Popular Science magazine. The files also showed that Don Weldon, a friend of Torry's, who wrote for Prairie Schooner in the early days as Weldon D. Melick, later wrote 'Personality Pieces' for Popular Science, interviews with famous people - Jack Benny and George Burns, for example - that apparently made him famous. He went to Hollywood straight from university and became the youngest contract writer there, with fifty movie credits and a charter membership in the Writers' Guild of America.

Long before anyone here present was born, the editorial staff of Prairie Schooner, a magazine begun in 1926 with the support of the [End Page 185] land-grant University of Nebraska, was filled with young people who would become successful writers. Another was Jim Thompson. His twenty-nine novels have had a revival, and three of them - The Grifters, The Kill-Off, and The Getaway - were made into movies; it was Thompson who wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's powerful anti-war film Paths of Glory. In 1993, when Robert Polito called the office, we recovered another piece of our history. (Polito's biography of Thompson, Savage Art, won the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award.) From 1929 to 1931 Jim Thompson was a member of the committee, one of 'Wimberly's Boys,' as the group of talented kids he identified and encouraged came to be called. Another was pioneering folklorist Ben Botkin, later at Harvard and the Library of Congress. And Edward Stanley, the writer of the letter that started this...

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