SPRING 1967
Latin American Left Wings Wallace Stevens: The Ironic Eye .
Ballistic Missile Defense The Tragedy of Justice in Billy Budd . Moscow’s New Look in Western Europe HCE’s Chaste Ecstasy ....
Four Summers. A Story
Verse .......
. John J. Johnson Frank Lentricchm, Jr. . Bruce M. Russett . Charles A. Reich . John H. Hedley J. Mitchell Morse Joyce Carol Oates Ramona Weeks,
Jay Wright, Myron Turner, Jean Valentine, John Unterecker, Cynthia D. Logan
New Books in Review .... Laurence B. Holland, Marie Borroff, C. Vann Woodward, Angus Fletcher, A. Dwight Culler, Georges May, Daniel X. Freedman
New Records in Review
Letters and Comment:
Notes from a Flood Journal
Reader’s Guide .
B. H. Haggin
. Peter W. Denzer . Contributors
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
—AND AFTER THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY
The Yale Review for Spring 1967, not greatly changed in outward appearance. The subtitle “A National Quarterly” began to appear on the cover in January 1920.
especially during the periods of the two world wars. During and after the first of the great conflicts, much appeared about life and attitudes and problems in Europe. There was some notable discussion of the literature produced by the war. In the thirties domestic problems seemed to predominate, though Cross turned more than ever to foreign writers for his contributions. From England he brought in John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, W. R. Inge, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Harold J. Laski, and others. Edith Wharton acted as literary scout for the Yale Review in France, and wrote much about French matters herself. Perhaps Andre Maurois was the journal’s most faithful French contributor, and Thomas Mann the most assiduous of the Germans. Then when another world war threatened, the Review became concerned more and more with affairs overseas. Out of nine nonfiction pieces in the number for Winter 1940, seven dealt with foreign matters. The journal continued during the war and for a number of years thereafter to give more than half its space to the consideration of the problems of foreign states and our relations with them. “Are We Doing Our Home Work in Foreign Affairs?” asked an article by John W. Gardner in the number for Spring 1948; the author urges readers and schools to study such matters, and he also admonishes government to find men educated in this field for the state department.
The Yale Review had an important influence on contemporary verse. Many of Robert Frost’s poems appeared in its pages, including “The Hill Wife” (April 1916). The number for January 1917 contained work by Frost, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Louis Untermeyer—a good quartet. Stephen Vincent Benet’s “American Names” was in the number for October 1927. Edwin Arlington Robinson, John Gould Fletcher, Sara Teasdale, Conrad Aiken, John Crowe Ransom, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Witter Bynner, and Leonard Bacon were among the better known poets who contributed to the Review. From England came work by John Masefield, John Drinkwater, Walter de la Mare, and Alfred Noyes. Two or three poems usually appeared in each issue.
From the beginning, the New Series was accustomed to
tuck into each number, just ahead of the book review section, a light essay, or a scene from American folklore, or a bit of interesting reminiscence. Essayists often seen in its pages were Arthur Colton, Charles S. Brooks, and Agnes Repplier. Though some of these sketches were virtually short stories, it was not until about 1930 that the Review began the practice of printing a piece of short fiction in that position each quarter. These stories were commonly of high quality. Two that Cross picked out as masterpieces he had been proud to publish were de la Mare’s “Broomsticks” (October 1925) and Ivan Bunin’s “On the Great Road” (Summer 1934). Kay Boyle, Dorothy Canfield, Evelyn Scott, William Saroyan, Paul Hor- gan, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark were among leading American contributors of short stories; while from England came work by Hugh Walpole, John Galsworthy, and L. A. G. Strong.
Book reviews continued to be important; there were usually some fifty pages of them. One can almost never generalize about any set of reviews by separate hands; but on the whole, those that Cross got together for his quarterly were keen, astute, and often authoritative. Though often about half of the reviewers were drawn from the Yale faculty, many other institutions and diverse walks of life were represented. Literary criticism was found outside this department, of course. Thomas Mann wrote on “Goethe” for the Summer 1932 number; and from time to time William Lyon Phelps, Henry Seidel Canby, Henry A. Beers, Chauncey B. Tinker, Robert Herrick, and John Erskine wrote literary articles. For some years Robert Littell wrote a quarterly review of “Outstanding Novels” that was published in the front advertising section.
From the foregoing informal analysis of content, it will be noted that the Yale Review has not lacked for famous names. Perhaps it may be instructive if, Jack Horner-like, we stick in a thumb and pick out a plum here and there from the numbers of the early thirties. Thornton Wilder’s Queens of France (Autumn 1931) was the only play the Review ever published. In Leon Trotsky’s “Hitler’s National Socialism” (Winter 1934) the author prophesied war in a few years. Carl L. Becker’s “When Democratic Virtues Disintegrate” (Summer
1939) was a brilliant article by a favorite contributor. A notable trio were John Dewey’s “The Liberation of Modern Religion” (Summer 1934), H. L. Mencken’s “American Language” (Spring 1936), and Robert M. Hutchins’ “University Education” (Summer 1936).
Most of the tables of contents in the twenties and thirties were studded with famous names. Let us take one number (January 1921) at random. Here we have, among those already mentioned, Frost, Inge, Drinkwater, Low, Repplier, and Cross; and besides them, Israel Zangwill, Brander Matthews, Archibald MacLeish, and Franz Boas. Among the book reviewers in this number were James Harvey Robinson, Vida D. Scudder, Dallas Lore Sharp, and John Gould Fletcher. 11
When Cross took over the management of the Yale Review, its ownership was transferred from Farnam (who had employed Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, of New Haven, as publishers) to the Yale Publishing Association. This organization, of which Edwin Oviatt was president, was already issuing the Yale Alumni Weekly. Oviatt became business manager of the Review. Farnam donated “a generous subvention to the business management for a period of three years,” 12 which enabled the new publication to get off to a flying start.
The New Series was greeted with plaudits from many readers, and the editors were heartened by such remarks as the one by a great newspaper that a star of the first magnitude had “swum into the constellation of our magazines.” 13 The circulation, which long had been quoted at eight hundred, quadrupled in the first year of the New Series, and went on steadily to ten thousand at the end of World War I, and then to eighteen thousand shortly before the 1929 crash. This cir-
11 The following ought also to be mentioned as frequent contributors to the Review: Marquis Childs, who began with articles based on his research in the life and economics of Sweden, and later wrote political articles; H. A. De Weerd, who wrote on military operations; James Truslow Adams, a Yale-man who wrote much on American society and history; Gamaliel Bradford, who did biographical studies; Sir Arthur Salter, who wrote on economic questions; William Henry Chamberlin, who contributed discussions of foreign trade and politics; William Ernest Hocking, who discussed philosophy, society, and the universe.
12 Cross, Connecticut Yankee, p. 188.
13 Ibid., p. 191.
ciilation growth was aided by the reduction in price during the war years from the old $3.00 to $2.50 a year. The price was raised again to $3.00 in 1920 and to $4.00 in 1921 without injury to circulation growth; but when circulation dropped in the depression thirties, lowering the price once again to $3.00 apparently did little good. It was set at $3.50 in 1949. 14 The size declined in the forties to 190 pages, and in the fifties to 160. Moderate prices—a few hundred dollars per article— were paid to contributors. In 1928 “a friend of the University Press” established a yearly award of $2,000 for the best article in the Review on national or international affairs.
At the crest of its prosperity, the journal was taken over by the Yale University Press, which was then (1926) in its own eighteenth year. It was a suitable union. President Hadley had observed, upon his retirement several years earlier: “The thing on which I look back with most satisfaction in my whole administration is the developing of the publishing work of the University and the recognition it has obtained throughout the world. I regard the Yale Review and the Yale University Press as our best products in the last twenty years.” 15
Cross continued as editor-in-chief throughout his incumbency as governor of Connecticut. Henry Seidel Canby and Edward Bliss Reed were helpful assistants in the early years of his editorship; but the former went to New York in 1920 to edit the Saturday Review of Literature, and the latter resigned a few years later to become educational director of the Commonwealth Fund. Miss Helen MacAfee had joined the staff in 1914; she had then just returned from teaching in the American College for Girls in Constantinople, and her wide interests and literary sense made her an able managing assistant, and from 1935 until 1949 she was de facto editor-in- chief; 16 in the latter year she retired, with the title of editor emeritus. She was followed in the editorial chair by David
14 The above figures are derived from the reports in N. W. Ayer & Son’s annual Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals. [The price was $5.00 a year in 1966; circulation was around 7,000.]
15 Quoted in an eight-page brochure issued by Yale University Press in 1929, entitled “A University Press Comes of Age.” The quotation is found in slightly different form in Cross, Connecticut Yankee, p. 199.
16 See obituary note, Yale Review, N.S., v. 45, Summer 1956, pp. 496-97.
Morris Potter, professor of American Listory, who had the assistance of an able advisory board and of Paul Pickrel, of the English department, as managing editor. In 1954 J. E. Palmer brought to the editorship of the, Yale Review a rich experience as a teacher of English in southern universities and editor of the Southern Review through 1940-1942, and the Sewanee Review through 1946-1950. 17
The Yale Review at its best realized with adequacy the dream of its editor, which he once expressed thus:
I thought of it ... as a quarterly addressed to the “general reader,” and devoted to all the many-sided interests of the mature mind—public affairs and social questions, literature and art, science and philosophy. That is, it would be cultural and educative in the broadest meaning of these words, and yet good reading. Keeping abreast of the times, this quarterly review of my imagination would show behind its material a rich background of knowledge of the past. Above all, it would give scope and leeway for the free play of the creative intelligence over the whole configuration of the contemporary scene. 18
The table of contents in the fifties was not so bright with illustrious names as it had once been, but there was still that “free play of the creative intelligence” which has long distinguished the Yale Review *
17 See Mott, American Magazines, v. 4 (1957), pp. 739-40.
18 Ulmann, Portrait Gallery, p. 34.
* This historical sketch was written about 1960. Footnotes 1 and 14 have been updated.
Here is Frank Luther Mott’s own account of his History of American Magazines. He wrote it at a time when he was partway through volume V and still hoped to complete the projected six-volume work. “Unfinished Story” was a chapter in his Time Enough: Essays in Autobiography, which was published in 1962, approximately two years before his death. The University of North Carolina Press, publisher of that book, has permitted the reprinting of “Unfinished Story” here.
UNFINISHED STORY; OR, THE MAN IN THE CARREL
HIS is the story of a project. It is the unfinished story
of something that began in a boyish enthusiasm, de¬
veloped over a term of years into what may be fairly
called “a large undertaking,” and eventually became a lifetime work. This is how it all came about.
Country editors in the 1890’s could receive all the magazines they wanted free, provided they inserted in their weekly papers little excerpts from the current issues, usually with taglines telling about how interesting Harper’s or McClure’s was that month. These were attractive “fillers” and also good advertising for the magazines.
Throughout his long career as editor of weekly papers, my father took advantage of this exchange arrangement with many good magazines. Since we never threw any of them away, they accumulated in piles and dusty heaps. Thus the roomy closet of the upstairs room assigned to my brother and me came to be filled with old copies of Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century, Atlantic, Review of Reviews, McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, Chautauquan, St. Nicholas, and so on. These old magazines were a source of endless pleasure to me on Sunday afternoons, rainy days, and many long evenings. Am I wrong in thinking that the stories, essays, and poems in those old pages were really ambrosial fare? Or have they been transformed from something very ordinary by the magic of my fond recollection? No; as I have thumbed through them in recent years, looking at pictures by the “high society” Charles Dana Gibson, the romantic Howard Pyle, the humorous A. B. Frost,
and others, including the matchless engravings of old masters by Timothy Cole, and rereading Kipling and Hardy, Howells and Garland, and T. R. and Carnegie and Tarbell—I still find that the nineties seem to me a golden age in our periodical literature.
Certainly those magazines were precious to me when I pored over them in my boyhood. Moreover, it seemed shameful to allow them to lie in their sterile stacks there in our closet. So I arranged them in proper files and then set out to index them. I had never heard of Poole’s Index, or of the newer Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature; I was thinking only of making the treasures I had at hand more accessible for a rather indeterminate use in a vague future. My father had discarded a big ledger after brief use of it in one of his less successful side-ventures in business, and its empty pages were just what I needed. Mine was an author-title index. I worked on it pretty faithfully in my spare hours for the better part of a year, as I recall—until other activities diverted my attention. Occasionally thereafter I came back to it to index a few numbers of the beautiful and superior Scribner’s of the nineties, or the old John Brisben Walker Cosmopolitan, with the broad red band up and down the left side of its cover.
My parents did not quite approve of this too sedentary, ink- horn occupation of mine, but they did not forbid it. I stuck to it through a kind of compulsion that I am not psychologist enough to explain. Boyhood is always subject to brief zealotries and manias, which sometimes have important effects on later life. My indexing experience tended to systematize my liking for old magazines—to put it on paper, as it were, and give it a kind of permanence. The names of the great magazin- ists were like a chime of bells in my memory—Brownell, Boyesen, Garland, Hardy, Howells, Kipling, Stevenson, Stock- ton. . . .
And so, years later, when Professor Trent, at Columbia University, asked me what topic I wished to explore in a doctoral dissertation, I suggested a historical essay on the Galaxy, and he warmly approved. The Galaxy was a New York magazine distinguished by the contributions of Henry James, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman. Begun in 1866, it was merged
twelve years later with the Atlantic Monthly. But I soon found that the story of the Galaxy and its editors and contributors was only part of the closely-woven pattern of the history of American periodicals in the decade or two following the Civil War; and before I realized it, my plan had broadened and I was writing about the whole output of magazines and journals and their various trends and phases during that active and yeasty post-bellum period.
Long before this study was finished, however, I had become disturbingly conscious of the fact that the roots of the publishing and editorial movements of the period I was examining were deep in the preceding years, and also what I saw developing in the seventies was to continue with greater momentum and clearer meaning in the eighties and nineties. In the concluding paragraph of my dissertation, I declared that the years I had been studying comprised a transition period; but I have since learned that all historical “periods” are transitional, each of them not only displaying the effects of causes discernible in times that have gone before but also containing the seeds of things that may flower in times to come. As an idea, this may seem obvious and unexciting; but as a practical, working situation, based on an array of facts, it was dynamic and revolutionary in my own plans for study and writing.
What I then resolved to do was to write a comprehensive history of American magazines from the beginnings by Franklin and Bradford down to the present—and to include in the term “magazines” the journals, reviews, periodicals, and all the salmagundi of serials that were not actually newspapers. I have often thought that a more suitable title for my work would be “A History of American Periodicals.” But when I took the project to academic advisers and publishers, it was “A History of American Magazines,” and the title stuck, and so it is, for better or worse.
I must say that not all of those academic advisers looked with favor on my project. One very great scholar shook his grey head gravely and told me that two lifetimes would not be enough to do what I contemplated. Others here and there (and I canvassed opinions widely) were also skeptical. But
when I took these discouraging verdicts to Thomas A. Knott, himself as great a scholar as any of them, he removed the corncob pipe from between his teeth and asked, “You really want to do this, don’t you?”
“That I do,” I replied.
Knott took one of those big kitchen matches that he carried about with him from his pocket and lit his pipe; and when he had taken a puff or two, took the pipe out of his mouth, blew out a cloud of smoke, grinned, and said: “Go ahead!”
With men like Craig and Knott at Iowa and Trent and Van Doren at Columbia believing in me, it was easier to buckle down to work. And support soon came from another quarter. Francis G. Wickware was a Canadian-born mining engineer who had early turned to academic and literary pursuits and was, when I knew him, the suave and scholarly editor for D. Appleton and Company. He became interested in my project, and in due time I had a contract for the publication of the first volume of my history.
Perhaps the very great scholar who was once my adviser had a clearer understanding of the difficulties of the task I had set myself than I did. I have sometimes thought he was right about his “two lifetimes.” I had a full academic load of teaching and administration, and my writing and research had to be done at night and on week ends and holidays. The “I Led Three Lives” chap on television had nothing on me: I led one life in classroom and office, one in libraries and at my typewriter, and a third as a family man and a social being of sorts. I am not complaining; I loved it.
My family never failed in sympathy and helpfulness. When the time came to make an index for the first volume, my wife and our daughter Mildred and I locked the doors of our house, answered no telephone calls, and lived on canned soup, sandwiches, and coffee until the job was done. My wife and daughter accompanied me on visits to great libraries: we once made a family junket of a tour of eastern repositories, moving into a Worcester apartment while I was at work in the American Antiquarian Society collection, and living for a while in Concord while I commuted to Boston to dig in the Boston Public Library and that of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Later,
when Mildred was a graduate student in archeology at the University of Chicago, we made trips to the Newberry and Crerar occasions for family reunions.
When the second volume was ready for the press, I had publisher trouble. Appleton had been impatient for it; but it was not finished until the years of the great depression were upon us, bringing with them embarrassments for that publishing house. The first volume had done well enough in sales; but quick-moving titles were now considered imperative by the bankers of the D. Appleton-Century Company, which was soon to become D. Appleton-Century-Crofts. They might be able to take mv book in a vear or two, but if I did not want to wait . . . I did not, and soon had the manuscript back on my hands. I queried other publishers; but I was now in the position of trying to place the second volume of a series that the publishers of the first volume had rejected, and all were wary. They were more than wary; they were unanimously uninterested. Eventually the Modern Language Association set up a committee to read my manuscript and report on its acceptability for issue by means of the organization’s Revolving Book Publication Fund. But when the three scholars had waded through the two thousand typed pages and had agreed to recommend publication, it was discovered that the Revolving Fund had no funds in it to set it revolving any more—or at least not for some time. Then it was that the incisive, ever- helpful Howard Mumford Jones, who had just joined the Harvard faculty and who had been a member of the M.L.A. committee that had read my manuscript, wrote me that this thing must be published and that he was taking the matter up with Dumas Malone, the new director of a rejuvenated Harvard University Press. This made the beginning of a happy connection with a publishing house that has been as tolerant and forbearing as any author could wish. In 1938 it brought out under its own imprint the first three hefty volumes of my history.
There were some protests (rather amused and mild ones, I think) over the publication of a work carrying some very rude and raucous material by this decorous press. They were apparently called forth largely by Malone’s impish insertion in
the fall announcement of the press of an illustration from my second volume showing a scandalous cover page from the Police Gazette. Out in St. Louis the Post-Dispatch carried an editorial entitled “An Eyebrow-Raiser,” which I have since learned was written by Irving Dilliard, and which is amusing enough to reprint here:
Things must be in a pretty way in old Cambridge as the brown leaves float down through these October afternoons from the arching elms in Harvard Yard. It is the “Autumn Announcement” of the Harvard University Press, 38 Quincy St., hard by President Con- ant’s house, which gives cause for the alarm.
For the Harvard University Press is a dignified adjunct of our oldest institution of learning, presided over by the scholarly Dr. Dumas Malone, lately editor of the monumental “Dictionary of American Biography.” Its publications are sizable tomes on such things as prehistoric remains, Indo-Iranian languages, early Greek elegists, boundary conflicts in South America, Chinese historiography, time budgets of human behavior, the physiocratic doctrine of judicial control, and the old Frisian Skeltana-Riucht.
And yet the first illustration in the current catalogue to fall beneath our eye was of deepest saffron. Two buxom dames of the hourglass school of feminine charms are presented as entertaining two heavily-mustached, silk-hatted gentlemen in a lavish chamber. The blonde is reclining on a royal couch, while the brunette perches on the knee of the other guest, an endearing arm about his neck. Champagne bottles are in evidence and tell-tale goblets in air. The caption: “A masher mashed—How a Chicago youth of the ‘too awfully sweet for anything’ variety, while essaying the role of a lady killer, was taken in and done for, like the veriest countryman, by a brace of sharp damsels and their male accomplice. See page 7.”
And then we found that we were looking at the cover of the Police Gazette for July 26, 1876, reproduced as an illustration from Frank Luther Mott’s three-volume “History of American Magazines,” which the Harvard Press is issuing this fall!
Let the editor and his cohorts defend their illustration on the score of historical scholarship if they will. Just wait until they hear from the teacups that tinkle across the blue Charles in prim and proper Back Bay!
The Harvard Alumni Bulletin further reported that some private letters to the press had commented on the fact that “this reprehensible illustration from the naughty Seventies”
appeared on the verso of a reproduction of a portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes which was being used as the frontispiece of Felix Frankfurter’s Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court, also announced for publication that fall. “To pained protestors against the indignity to the revered Justice,” observed the editor of the Bulletin, “the reply has been made that he himself would undoubtedly be tickled to find the Police Gazette on his august back.”
Such publicity, I assume, did not injure the sale of the books. Deeply aware of the faults and shortcomings of my work, I awaited the reviews with trepidation. I have always envied those authors who say they never read reviews of their books, and have wondered why, when they do not read the criticisms, they rail so fiercely at the critics. But the reviewers—both those who have really read the books and those who have only thumbed through them—have nearly always been more than kind to me. Thus publishing troubles, crowded schedules, the expense of travel to distant repositories, and the occasional laborious searching, enumerating, and recording of the contents of the great directories and catalogs—all of this at last began to seem like a tale of harrowing adventure turning out well in the end. Then came the satisfaction of a Pulitzer Prize for the second and third volumes, and later a Bancroft Prize, even more rewarding both in sentimental value and in cash, awarded by Columbia University to the fourth volume. Nor was I unappreciative of recognition by Sigma Delta Chi and Kappa Tau Alpha. And so I have been heartened to go on in my later years with the fifth and sixth volumes.
I do not wish to imply that I have found my labor on these big books generally irksome. Quite the contrary. A great deal of it has been tedious and tiresome, indeed; but on the whole, the essential fascination of the task has remained fresh and strong enough throughout the years to make the work continuously enjoyable.
A great library has always been to me a kind of minor heaven, and its librarians angels in disguise. Sometimes a very dusty, ill-ventilated and ill-lighted heaven, to be sure, with its angels carefully concealing their wings. There may seem to be
no end of monkey-like climbing of winding iron stairs, ramps, and runways in the great bookstacks; of lifting heavy volumes from high shelves and blowing the dust off them; of hunting comfortable, lighted desks and* table on which to work—but there is nevertheless a feeling of romantic adventure about it all and, more than that, a kind of satisfaction and contentment in the midst of such rich treasures.
Yet I see a certain irony in the figure of a lone researcher working in the stacks of a great library. I remember one of those “fillers” with which Mencken and Nathan used to stop up chinks in pages of the old Smart Set . I cannot find it now, but it ran somewhat like this:
A man sits at a small desk in a carrel in the midst of the book- stacks of a great library. All about him tower the high shelves— mountains of books with little iron paths running high up along their sides. Thousands, millions of books, bound in cracked calfskin, faded cloth, stout buckram. Serried row on row of books in battalions and armies—ancient, medieval, modern—fat and thin, tall and short. Multitudes of dusty books towering above and about the man in the carrel. What is the man doing? He is writing a book.
They may laugh at the men in the carrels, and we may laugh at ourselves; but we continue to dig away, and to enjoy it, and to hope that the results may, in some strange way, justify our activities. I have spent many happy hours among the treasures that lie behind the small green door of the library of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. For months and years I had a passing acquaintance with the stone lions that guard the great edifice at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street in New York. I have invaded many of the cloistered repositories of books held by the older historical societies in the East, as well as less formally guarded collections in the Midwest. The AP-2 stacks of the Library of Congress have been a second home to me through sweltering summer months as well as weeks of winter cold. I knew the L.C. when its Rare Book Room was a littered, airless attic, and when many magazine files were shelved along dark corridors; now the Rare Book Room is a place of light and joy, with controlled temperature and humidity, and the class periodicals are also to be found in the great air-conditioned annex.
I have spent long days and evenings in Chicago’s Newberry Library, where I found the shelves richly laden and the staff helpful; and when its doors closed at night I would hurry down North Clark Street’s “skid row,” illuminated mainly by bursts of light from cheap nightclubs, on the half-hour walk to my hotel. In the John Crerar Library, then in the Chicago Loop but now soon to be moved, I found exciting files of rare technical journals. The Iowa State Library in Des Moines formerly possessed a surprising abundance of files of old magazines, and the officials there would allow me to work in its stacks all alone at nights and on Sundays when I would run away from Iowa City over week ends and holidays. Perhaps I owe most of all to the great university libraries at Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Western Reserve, Northwestern, and Harper Memorial at Chicago. I have worked, too, from time to time in some of the great city libraries; New York’s I have mentioned, but I have vivid memories too of those in Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis. All these I list out of sheer gratitude and could name many more. Few libraries have seemed to me unfriendly; few librarians have seemed reluctant to afford all the help that could reasonably be asked by the man in the carrel.
Long ago I set up a time-and-work program that called for finishing my magazine project in 1950. What has chiefly prevented such a consummation has been the interruption of my schedule by other writing tasks that have forced themselves (or so it seemed) upon me from time to time—a history of American newspapers, a history of best sellers in the United States, an expository and descriptive book on news and how it is handled in the United States for the “Library of Congress Series in American Civilization,” a study of Jefferson and his relations with the press, annual collections of best news stories in the thirties, and other books I have wanted to write or, in some cases, to edit. Then there were extensive contributions to the Britannica and some to several other encyclopedias, many book reviews, some work for USIS, occasional more or less scholarly papers, and even some short stories. Many of these books and articles have been rather closely connected with my magazine undertaking; but, after all, they were diversionary. A
more single-minded dedication to a fixed goal would have brought my chief work to completion on schedule. Yet I have always returned faithfully—after other “pursuits and excursions’’—to the magazine study, as I shall return to it again after this little book is finished. As the errant lover in Ernest Dowson’s poem protested, “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”
I should be unhappy if, by devoting as much space as I have here given to one man’s experience in a big research-and- writing project, I should leave any reader with the thought that I consider these books of mine to be history on the grand scale. There are many kinds of historical writing. There is, for example, what I am wont to think of as “grand history,” which deals with epic movements of peoples or elucidates the meaning of a series of great events. But, among the various types, there is also a humble kind of history that Moses Hadas recently called “ancilla,” and Justin Winsor once referred to (in describing his own work) as “shreds-and-patches history.” This is the category in which my work belongs—though I am encouraged to think that I have, here and there, helped to define patterns of thought (and sometimes lack of thought) in the American past.
And I do hope yet to see all six fat volumes of my History of American Magazines, in their handsome Belknap Press bindings, on my shelves. If not, however, I shall never complain that I have not found time enough but I shall confess frankly that my dereliction has been due to finding, through the years of my life, too many allurements in too many projects, all of them tempting me from the straiter path.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FRANK LUTHER MOTT’S WRITINGS ON AMERICAN MAGAZINES
1928 American Magazines, 1865-1880. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph. D., Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University. Iowa City: The Midland Press.
1928 “The Galaxy: An Important American Magazine,” Sewanee Review, v. 36 (Jan.-March), pp. 86-103.
1928 “A Brief History of Graham’s Magazine,” Studies in Philology, v. 25 (July), pp. 362-74.
1928 “The Christian Disciple and the Christian Examiner,” New England Quarterly, v. 1 (April), pp. 197-207.
1930 A History of American Magazines, vol. I, 1741-1850. New York: D. Appleton and Co.
2nd printing, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939.
3rd printing, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957.
4th printing, 1966.
1935 “One Hundred and Twenty Years,” North American Review, v. 240 (June), pp. 144-74.
1938 A History of American Magazines, vol. II, 1850-1865. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
2nd printing, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957.
3rd printing, 1967.
1938 A History of American Magazines, vol. Ill, 1865-1885. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
2nd printing, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957.
3rd printing, 1967.
1944 “Evidences of Reliability in Newspapers and Periodicals in Historical Studies,” Journalism Quarterly, v. 21 (December), pp. 304-10
1948 “Fifty Years of Life: The Story of a Satirical Weekly,” Journalism Quarterly, v. 25 (September), pp. 224-32.
1951 “Periodicals,” Collier’s Encyclopedia.
1954 “The Magazine Revolution and Popular Ideas in the Nineties,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, v. 64, Part 1 (April), pp. 195-214.
1955 “Magazines and Books, 1975: A Merging of Two Fields,” Journalism Quarterly, v. 32 (Winter), pp. 21- 26.
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1967 “The American Mercury,” Menckeniana, no. 22, Summer, pp. 9-10.
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