Letters to the Editor as a Serial Form

This article considers modernist-era letters pages as a serial form that enables readers to debate pressing political and cultural topics and to negotiate their relationship to a magazine and other readers. The authors examine two case studies of letters columns: those in the genre-specific pulps Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction and in the radical weekly The New Age. They show that the seriality of letters pages makes them dynamic sites for understanding how readers used modern print forms to fashion themselves as public, political actors and to influence the social, political, and cultural debates of their era.