Title:
The Texas Review (1915 – 1924)
The Southwest Review (1924 – present)
Date of Publication:
June 1915 (vol. 1) – June 1924 (vol. 9) (The Texas Review)
Oct. 1924 (10:1) – present (The Southwest Review)
Place(s) of Publication:
Austin, Texas: 1915-1924 (The Texas Review)
Dallas, Texas: 1924-Present (The Southwest Review)
Frequency of Publication:
Quarterly
Circulation:
16, at inception
Approx. 750 – 1000, from 1926 – 27 (Hubbell 17; Bond qtd in Hubbell 18)
Publisher:
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas (1924 – present) (The Southwest Review)
The University of Texas, Austin, Texas (1915 – 1924) (The Texas Review)
Physical Description:
Bound in a dark red cover. While editors had “wanted the university’s colors, red and blue, on the cover […] the printer was not able to find a suitable blue ink” (Hubbell 7). The first page featured a logo of a cowboy mounted on a mustang, designed by Anne Toomey. In the early years length fluctuated due to financial considerations, with Volumes XI and XII, according to editor Jay Hubbell, looking particularly slim (19). Published mostly essays, with some book reviews, poems, and short stories. Occasional illustrations, often as frontispieces or as inserts.
Price:
50 cents per issue / $2 per year
Editor(s):
Stark Young (1915 – 1917)
Robert Adger Law (1917 – 1924)
Jay Hubbell (1924 – 1927)
John H. McGinnis (1927)
Associate Editor(s):
George Bond
Herbert Gambrell
Libraries with Complete Original Issues:
Southern Methodist University; The University of Texas, Austin
Reprint Editions:
Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms [microform]
The city of Dallas was hardly immune to the little magazine fever; in the 1920s, nine periodicals popped up in the blooming metropolis. Most prominent among them was The Southwest Review, which began in 1915 at the University of Texas and moved to Southern Methodist University in 1924. Southwesterners in the early 1920s “felt somewhat jealous as they noted that every region but their own had at one time or other figured prominently in the literary scene,” and the magazine sought to dig out the “rich, unmined literary materials in the region” that had previously gone untapped (Hubbell 12).
Unlike stuffier publications, The Southwest Review did not publish serious literary criticism and instead favored works that celebrated life “in its finer and quieter moments” (Young qtd in Hubbell 4). Most important to editors, however, was that the “magazine reek of the soil,” and that it reflect the Southwest region in its pages (Young qtd in Hubbell 4). The magazine featured the works of Maxim Gorky, Mary Austin, Quentin Bell, Horton Foote, Larry McMurtry, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Arthur Miller, Naguib Mahfouz, as well as Southern Review editors Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. True to its purported mission, this quarterly addressed the concerns of academics and laymen alike, and offered works with both regional and national focuses. After a brief hiatus in 1924, the magazine resumed publication and has continued to hold literary clout into the new millennium.
The first issue of The Texas Review offered a manifesto for the magazine that would come to define The Southern Review nine years later.
“The Texas Review comes into the world with no mission, nothing so flamboyant or remonstrant or overt. It has in mind the law of thought and life and letters only; neither to upset nor convert the world, but only to speak with it in its finer and quieter moments. And this review does not dream–it cannot–of great popularity, with subscribers and revolutions, or of pleasing the general, for what begins on nothing but the wish to please the general, ends in being pleased by them.
“For the birth of such a venture no small amount of advice was asked, and sometimes taken: to include poetry in respectable proportion to other matter; to combine articles of varied interest; to eschew book reviews that are perfunctory and done on a formulary; to open on occasion the doors to our pages without the key of Phi Beta Kappa. The strongest advice, however, and the most assured, was to let your magazine reek of the soil.”
Stark Young, “On Reeking of the Soil.” The Texas Review, 1:1 (June 1915).
When the magazine changed its title to The Southwest Review in 1924, its new editor issued an addendum to The Texas Review‘s philosophy:
“[The Southwest Review] will now and then print articles that make a substantial contribution to scholarship even at the risk of occasionally boring a desultory reader; but it will not be a repository for professorial articles that no one wants to read.”
Jay Hubbell, “The New Southwest.” The Southwest Review 10:1 (Oct. 1924): 1.
Jay Hubbell (May 8, 1885 – Feb. 13, 1979)
Editor: Oct. 1924 – 1927
The founding editor of the Southwest Review, Jay Hubbell came to Southern Methodist University in 1915. In 1927 he moved to Duke University where he taught until 1954. The Southwest Review was not Hubbell’s only claim to periodical fame; in 1929, he founded the groundbreaking journal, American Literature. His esteemed bibliographic record includes some twelve books of literary criticism, ten chapters in books, and over forty journal articles.
Witter Bynner (Aug. 10, 1881 – June 1, 1968)
Editorial Contributor
Perhaps the most famous member of the Southwest Review‘s editorial board, Harold Witter Bynner settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1922. Bynner enjoyed a rollicking youth writing for McClure‘s Magazine, traveling to China and Japan with pal Arthur Davison Ficke, and perpetrating the elaborate Spectra Hoax. His later work was drenched with the spirit and landscape of the American Southwest, which made his voice and editorial contributions perfect for The Southwest Review‘s style.
Cleanth Brooks
“Sonnet”
Witter Bynner
“Having Been an Exile”
Willard Johnson
“DHL in Mexico” (published pseudonymously as B. Villiers)
D. H. Lawrence
“Pan America”
Henry Miller
“The Apocalyptic Lawrence”
Joyce Carol Oates
“And God Saw That It Was Good”
Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
Hubbell, Jay Broadus. South and Southwest: Literary Reminiscences. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1965.
The Southwest Review. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1924 – 1975.
“The Southwest Review” compiled by Elizabeth Burkhead (Class of ’07, Davidson College)