Foreword

FOREWORD This gathering of essays concerns the broad subject oflittle magazines. Everyone knows something about the importance of the little magazine in modern literary history—that Ulysses was first published in a little magazine, that William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and many others were little magazine editors, and that virtually every important twentieth-century poet has depended on the medium for publication. It is well known that many of the best literary essays in our century have been published in little magazines (much of Loren Eisley's important work was published in Prairie Schooner, for example), and that the contemporary short story would now be an endangered species, as poetry would have been before World War I, if it weren't for the nourishment offered the genre through little magazines. But how well known is the fact that the literary magazine in America goes well back into the nineteenth century, and that its history is intricately related to the equally fascinating history of commercial magazines? This is discussed in Eric Staley's piece on the history and present direction of the little magazine. Staley points out that probably the most studied periodical from America in the nineteenth century was The Dial, a tiny magazine that had a circulation of about three hundred. The name of The Dial was taken on by several other magazines, its incarnation during the 1920's becoming, with Poetry, the mainstay of an entire genre of literature. Taffy Martin's essay on Marianne Moore discusses the work of one of the best editors of The Dial of the twenties. In his freewheeling interview, Jack Conroy, author of the depression classic The Disinherited, discusses some of the vicissitudes of the most influential literary magazine of the thirties, The Partisan Review. For a feeling of what it is like to run a little magazine, read Jarvis Thurston's funny dialogue between the struggling editor and the outsider/idealist, and Liz Rosenberg's description of John Gardner and her—and now she alone—editing MSS. Reg Gibbons, editor of TriQuarterly, talks about some of the hard facts of small magazine publication—what it is like to take over one of the best literary magazines in the country, plagued (as they frequently are) by financial problems, and what he thinks an editor must do, above and beyond the mundane problems, for his magazine to maintain excellence. What are some of the best magazines around today? How do people in the field go about making that judgment? For three answers to that question, read the taster's reviews of contemporary little magazines by Bill Katz, the small-magazine reviewer for Library Journal, Marc Manganaro, editor of Carolina Quarterly, and Robert Fogarty, editor of Antioch Review. The sampling of covers of classic literary magazines show the simplicity of some—sometimes artful and sometimes not—and the decorativeness of others. Thanks to Tom Zigal and the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas for selecting and providing those. SM >.r '«S89!«W-««M ^r '.-S VtSfM": je/m*» '£WM I .....SaSSSST mar !¡sa —Zf 3^L ...