A History of American Literature

Founded by Benjamin Franklin. Its chief feature was its inclusion in the reading matter of the proverbial sayings, the best of which were combined in “The Way to Wealth.” It was characterized by a French critic of the day as “the first popular almanac which spoke the language of reason.” It was conducted by Franklin until 1748.

Port Folio, The, 1806–1827. A Philadelphia weekly and monthly.

Founded by Joseph Dennie as a weekly newspaper. From 1806 to 1809, though continuing as a weekly, it assumed the character of a literary magazine, and in the latter year became a monthly. Its most distinctive period was in the first eleven years before the death of Dennie. While he was editor the Port Folio was a vehicle of “polite letters.” It was imitative in style and reminiscent in point of view, but it was wholesome in its honesty about American matters and manners and exerted a strong and healthy influence. The best-known contributors were the editor, “Oliver Oldschool,” John Quincy Adams, and Charles Brockden Brown.

Putnam’s, 1853–1858, 1868–1870, 1906–1910. A New York monthly.

Publishers, G. P. Putnam and Co., New York. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American literature, science, and art. Established by George P. Putnam with the assistance of George William Curtis and others. In 1857 merged into Emerson’s United States Magazine, which was continued as Emerson’s Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly. Discontinued November, 1858. January, 1868-November, 1870, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. Original papers on literature, science, art, and national interests. Merged into Scribner’s Monthly, December, 1870. October, 1906-March, 1910, reëstablished and merged with the Critic, founded in 1881; issued by Messrs. Putnam since 1898. An illustrated monthly of literature, art, and life. Absorbed the Reader, March, 1908. Titles vary during this period. A large number of full-page and smaller illustrations. One serial running, small proportion of verse, special articles, comments, and criticisms on literature and the fine arts, science, travel, statesmanship. Alternating emphasis with successive issues on the different arts. Typical contributors and contributions, with illustrations concerning: Lafcadio Hearn, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Stedman, Stoddard, Henry James, Longfellow, Franklin, Margaret Deland, Maeterlinck, Thomas Edison, Binet, Corot, Helen Keller, Nazimova, Gladstone, the Bonapartes. Absorbed by the Atlantic Monthly, April, 1910.

Round Table, The, 1864–1869. A New York monthly.

A literary journal founded in New York in emulation of Boston’s Atlantic and supported with great interest by Aldrich, Stedman, Bayard Taylor, and their circle. It was suspended during parts of 1864–1865 and discontinued in July, 1869, in spite of the efforts to secure a subsidy for it from the wealthy men of New York.

Russell’s Magazine, 1857–1860. A Charleston monthly.

Founded by John Russell, Charleston bookseller, with Paul Hamilton Hayne as editor. A monthly periodical for the literary group centering around William Gilmore Simms. Contained fiction, sketches, addresses, reviews, and essays on various topics – political, historical, literary, artistic, scientific. These were mainly unsigned, but the leading contributors were Simms, Hayne, Timrod, James L. Petigru, John D. Bruns, and Basil Gildersleeve. With the approach of the Civil War it was discontinued March, 1860. (Lives of P. H. Hayne and W. G. Simms. Three Notable Ante-Bellum Magazines of South Carolina, Sidney J. Cohen, University of South Carolina, Bulletin 42.) Saturday Evening Post, The, 1821 – . A Philadelphia weekly.

A lineal descendant of Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette(see p. 496). It was given its present name in 1821 when Samuel C. Atkinson and Charles Alexander took control, Atkinson being the surviving partner of David Hall, grandson and namesake of Franklin’s partner to whom the Gazette was sold in 1765. In one hundred and eighty years the only interruption to consecutive issues was during the British occupation of Philadelphia. The Post of recent years has been one of the American weeklies of largest circulation. It contains fiction, up-to-date personalia, and brisk articles on the affairs of the moment. Its attitude toward thrift, industry, and the way to wealth is completely consistent with the ethics of Franklin. It is conducted by the Curtis Publishing Company and edited by George H. Lorimer.

Saturday Press, The, 1858–1860. A New York weekly.

The special organ of the “Bohemians” – a group of New Yorkers who acknowledged Henry M. Clapp as their leader. Other contributors were Fitz-James O’Brien, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, R. H. Stoddard, William Winter, and E. C. Stedman, The Press was brilliant but short-lived, announcing in its last number in early 1860 that it was “discontinued for lack of funds which [was], by a coincidence, precisely the reason for which it was started.” (See H. M. Clapp in Winter’s “Other Days,” and “The Life of Stedman,” by Stedman and Gould.)

Scribner’s Magazine, 1886 – . A New York monthly.

Founded December, 1886, by Messrs. Scribner (entirely distinct from old Scribner’s Monthly), with E. L. Burlingame as editor. Illustrated. Typical contributors, in the early years: H. C. Bunner, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, Barrett Wendell, E. H. Blashford, Richard Henry Stoddard, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, T. W. Higginson, W. C. Brownell, Charles Edwin Markham, Robert Louis Stevenson; in recent years: Winston Churchill, J. L. Laughlin, W. C. Brownell, Meredith Nicholson, John Galsworthy, etc. Articles of popular interest on art, music, nature, travel, and since 1914 a section given to the World War. Aim and policy unchanged.

Scribner’s Monthly, 1870–1881. A New York monthly.

Founded by Roswell Smith, manager, and J. G. Holland, editor, and published as Scribner’s, but not like Harper’s as a publishing-house magazine. The design from the first was to deal with matters of social and religious opinion from the liberal viewpoint. At the outset it absorbed Hours at Home and Putnam’s and in 1873 Edward Everett Hale’s Old and New. It was the first to undertake a series on the new South and to encourage Southern contributors, including Lanier, Thomas Nelson Page, George W. Cable, and Joel Chandler Harris. Most notable among its series were portions of Grant’s Memoirs and Hay and Nicolay’s “Life of Lincoln,” George Kennan’s Siberian papers, and Hay’s anonymous novel “The Breadwinners.” Scribner’s Monthly was a pioneer in the use of illustrations made by the new mechanical methods of reproduction. The magazine never printed or sold less than 40,000 copies, and when in 1881 it changed ownership and became the Century it had a circulation of 125,000. (See Tassin’s “The Magazine in America,” pp. 287–301.)

Southern Literary Messenger, 1834–1865. A Richmond monthly.

Founded at Richmond, Virginia, in August, 1834, by Thomas W. White, as a semimonthly, but changed to a monthly almost at once. Poe contributed to the seventh number and from then on in each number till he became assistant editor from July, 1835, to January, 1837. During this period the circulation increased from 700 to 5000. Well established by this time, it continued as the most substantial and longest lived of the Southern magazines. A vehicle for literature between the too heavy and the frivolous, and an honest review. Poe’s contributions outrank those of any other writer, but the list of contributors includes N. P. Willis, C. F. Hoffman, R. W. Griswold, J. G. Holland, R. H. Stoddard, W. M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, G. P. R. James, John Randolph, R. H. Bird, Philip P. Cooke, J. W. Legare, P. H. Hayne, Henry Timrod, John P. Kennedy, and Sidney Lanier. (See “The Southern Literary Messenger,” by B. B. Minor.)

Southern Magazine, The, 1871–1875. A Baltimore monthly.

The most distinguished of the several short-lived Southern magazines established in the Civil War reconstruction period. It was a continuation of the New Eclectic, but included, in addition to the English reprints, original work by many Southern authors. These were, among others, Margaret Preston, Malcolm Johnson, Sidney Lanier, Paul Hamilton Hayne, and Professors Gildersleeve and Price. It could pay nothing for manuscript, however, and the new interest in Southern writing awakened by Scribner’s in 1873, and responded to by Harper’s, the Atlantic, Lippincott’s, the Independent, and others, furnished support as well as stimulation to its best contributors and hastened its death at the end of five years.

Western Messenger, The (Cincinnati), 1835–1841.

Begun by Reverend Ephraim Peabody. Published by Western Unitarian Society aided by American Unitarian Association. Purposed to make it a vehicle for clear, rational discussion of important and interesting topics. Discussed reform movements, religious questions and creeds, and encouraged expression of all cultural ideas, – literary articles, poetry, book reviews, etc. Contributors: Mann Butler, W. D. Gallagher, James H. Perkins, R. W. Emerson, J. S. Dwight, Elizabeth P. Peabody, Jones Very, James Freeman Clarke, Dr. Lyman Beecher, Professor Calvin E. Stowe, Margaret Fuller, C. P. Cranch. Sought to make it Western in spirit with many Western contributors and articles on history of the West. 1836–1839 in Louisville, under J. F. Clarke, then back to Cincinnati, under William H. Channing, till April, 1841.

Western Monthly Magazine, The (Cincinnati), 1833–1836.

Edited for two and one-half years by James Hall and for six months by Joseph R. Foy. Thirty-seven contributors, of whom six were women and only three from east of the Alleghenies. Harriet Beecher won “the prize tale” in April, 1834, and contributed another story in July. The contents made up largely of expository articles on art, history, biology, travel, education, economics, and modern sociology. The book notices were independent and discriminating.

Yale Review, The, 1892–1911, 1911 – . Issued quarterly.

Continued New Englander and Yale Review. G. P. Fisher and others, editors. In 1900 changed from a “journal of history and political science” to a “Journal for the Scientific Discussion of Economic, Political, and Social Questions”; 1911 – “a quarterly magazine devoted to Literature, Science, History, and Public Opinion.” Yale Publishing Association, Inc., Wilbur D. Cross, chief editor. Not an official publication of Yale University. Made up of serious articles and essays, some light essays and verse, and literary criticism. Leading contributors, prose: W. H. Taft, Norman Angell, Walter Lippman, Simeon Strunsky, Vida D. Scudder; verse: Witter Bynner, Louis Untermeyer, Sara Teasdale, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, John Masefield. Thus its place as a literary periodical has been assumed only within the last decade. The old New Englander (1843–1892) was a substantial and dignified journal but included the work of no writer of even minor literary achievement.

notes

1

Rev. ii, 17.

2

This same discipline was enjoyed – among later American authors – by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Walt Whitman, all of whom were scrupulously careful writers.

3

Also in Representative American Plays (edited by A. H. Quinn). 1917.

4

Lines addressed to Messrs. Dwight and Barlow.

5

Fitzgreene Halleck, “Fanny,” stanza lviii.

6

Mason and Slidell, ll. 155–165.

7

“Fanny,” stanzas cxxi, cxxii.

8

“Wyoming,” stanza iv.

9

“Among the Hills” (Prelude, 71 ff.).

10

Lowell, “Fable for Critics.”

11

An interesting tribute is paid this poem by Ezra Pound in a footnote to “L’Homme Moyen Sensuel,” in “Pavannes and Divisions,” p. 33. “I would give these rhymes now with dedication ‘To the Anonymous Compatriot Who Produced the Poem “Fanny” Somewhere About 1820,’ if this form of centennial homage be permitted me. It was no small thing to have written, in America, at that distant date, a poem of over forty pages which one can still read without labor.”

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