The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine by James Landers (review)

James Landers’ intriguing volume offers a thorough and thoroughly enjoyable account of a family literary magazine that underwent several distinctive incarnations yet was always near the center of important cultural events. Cosmopolitan began in 1886 during a mania of magazine-making and survived bankruptcy just three years later by being rescued by entrepreneur John Brisben Walker. As Landers astutely recognizes, Walker is a significant figure in the annals of magazine editing. He brought to the magazine a unique blend of flair and progressivism. On one hand, he resorted to sensationalist ploys such as publishing dispatches of his associate editor Elizabeth Bisland as she embarked on a seventy-six day trip around the world in a race against Nellie Bly of the New York World. He also vigorously advocated for the eight-hour workday, defended strikers of every stripe, called for an income tax on the wealthy, commissioned articles that sought to alleviate racial tensions and urban poverty, and founded Cosmopolitan University, a free correspondence school open to all. In 1891, he brought in the eminent William Dean Howells to co-edit the magazine, an arrangement that lasted all of two months as Howells recoiled from Walker’s oversight and his insistence that he begin his eight-hour workday at 8 a.m. Under Walker’s helm, Cosmopolitan also published H.G. Wells’ celebrated War of the Worlds and began serialization of Tolstoy’s The Awakening, which was discontinued after the author stopped sending installments due to Walker’s bowdlerization of it.

In 1905, the magazine was bought by William Randolph Hearst, who essentially used it as a platform to further his personal political pursuits. A Democratic congressman with ambitions to become P resident at the time, Hearst sought support from the working and middle classes by publishing muckraking pieces that exposed the abuse of wealth in the Senate (“The Treason of the Senate”), the power of cartel families (“Owners of America”), municipal corruption (“What Are You Going to Do About It?”), and other abuses. When Hearst’s political interests folded in 1912, he brought in Ray Long as editor who successfully made the magazine fiction heavy. Long published leading writers of the Jazz Age including Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, W. Somerset Maugham, Damon Runyon, and P.G. Wodehouse, among others. Preferring material that he viewed as suitable for affluent middle-class readers, Long, however, refused to publish Ernest Hemingway and notoriously rejected F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Cosmopolitan lost its vitality in the 1940s and 50s. By the mid-1960s, the magazine was all but dead when the bold and energetic Helen Gurley Brown took over as editor, a remarkable reign that lasted until 1996. Brown radically revamped the magazine, eventually making it a must read for millions of young women, who came to look forward to its topically relevant pages and proto-feminist positions. A moderate rather than a radical feminist, Brown published articles that sought to help women gain confidence, make money, and be independent. Her pioneering efforts remade Cosmopolitan into the centerpiece of the Hearst Corporation empire, even as her feminist vision for the magazine is now all but lost. In its present-day incarnation, Cosmopolitan is just another glossy fashion woman’s magazine, designed to sell copies and products rather than to educate and challenge its readers.

In examining the efforts of Walker, Hearst, and Brown to create a magazine that both reflected their personal interests and sought a wide array of new readers, Landers opens up windows in time that have been missed in traditional literary analyses. At the same time, the author could have allotted more space discussing the effects of writing for this particular magazine by, say, the notoriously anti-commercial author Theodore Dreiser or the prolific W. Somerset Maugham, who himself discusses the influence of writing for this magazine in a preface to his collected pieces called Cosmopolitans. Such minor quibbles aside, Landers’ book does an exquisite job conveying the important...