Influence, Commerce, and the Literary Magazine

SPECIAL FEATURE THE LITERARY MAGAZINE IN AMERICA Mary Booth, first editor ofHarpers Bazaar. This and thefollowing original photos that illustrate this essay are from the Gary Vroegindewey Collection. INFLUENCE, COMMERCE, AND THE LITEFlARY MAGAZINE / Eric Staley TOWARD THE END of the nineteenth-century two very different and unrelated phenomena were occurring which gave birth to the generations of literary magazines that we have come to know today. The first phenomenon was quite literary. Simply put, the country had finally come to accept and identify its American authors, to recognize an American voice in letters, and to develop a taste for it. The short story came into its own as a "form," not simply as a tale that had been shortened for the magazine, but as an independent art form with its own internal rules and life. Consequently, practitioners such as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and, later, Stephen Crane had an opportunity to satisfy a literary appetite left wanting by the deaths of poets such as Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, and Whitman, who had already helped establish an American poetry by the early 1890's. Earlier on, good writing, the creative essay, belles lettres, had been the desirable end of a serious magazine editor's search for contents, and by the 1860's the profession of magazinist was generally recognized as a possible, though in most cases meager, living. The second phenomenon was anything but literary. The major east coast businesses and the advertising agencies that represented them began in the late 1870's and 1880's to alter their marketing strategies from local to national. The principal early vehicle for advertising had been the newspaper; it now became as much the general magazines which, taken as a whole, were reaching millions of readers all over the country each month. Greater populations, completion of westward expansion, a generally higher level of literacy, increased leisure time, all contributed to the interest and popularity of magazines, swelling their individual circulations to 300,000 or considerably better in many cases, and providing a new and expanding market for products and services. It did not take Edison's new lightbulb long to shine over the advertiser's head and signify a new marketing strategy and the commercialization of American magazines. The first phenomenon had to do with taste and cultural identity and a new popularity for literature; the second provided large amounts of money to build magazine industries for those magazines with the broadest appeal and largest circulations. The study of American magazine history dates from 1741 when Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Bradford published the first real magazines in this country. They were called, respectively, General THE MISSOURI REVIEW ¦ 277 Magazine and American Magazine, and they appeared three days apart—Bradford's first, much to Franklin's chagrin. AU of the early general magazines carried some literature—usually pirated British works—while specializing in Addisonian essays aboutAmerican politics, social customs, and national goals. Magazines oriented toward literature arrived by the early 1800's, when Salmagundi came in on the tide and, like many others to follow, rode the crest for a short while, had its brilliant moment, and then became part of literary history. In this period of less than half a century there came to be more editors than poets and more magazines than the imagination could fathom. Monthlies and quarterlies broke upon the literary shores of America and returned to the sea of words only to be replaced by others. Dozens of magazines surfaced yearly, and a dozen more went under. Salmagundi; or the Whim-Whams and Opinions ofLauncelot Langstaff, Esq. was established by its "upstart" editors, William and Washington Irving and James Kirk Paulding in 1807. It was 1815 for the North American Review, 1819 for Red Book, 1824 for Atlantic Magazine, 1828 for the Southern Review, and 1840 for The Dial—all of which had little to do with the magazines of the twentieth century bearing the same names, save their shared interest in the literature of their times and an editorial dedication that sometimes defied reason. Of these magazines, only Southern Review and North American Review show a sense of series, of continuation, over both centuries. That their magazines...