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)

Title: 
The Seven Arts

Date of Publication: 
Nov. 1916 (1:1) – Oct. 1917 (2:12)
Absorbed by The Dial in 1917

Place of Publication: 
New York, NY

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly

Circulation: 
Approx. 5000

Publisher: 
The Seven Arts Publishing Co., New York

Physical Description: 
Approximately twelve to twenty works per issue. Beginning in April 1917 “The Seven Arts Chronicle” was printed with every issue. The magazine embodied a simple, scholarly aesthetic comprised of a table of contents followed immediately by criticism, poems, short plays, essays, brief editorials, and stories. The first issue contained 95 well printed pages but was somewhat smaller than the later average of 125 book-size leaves. The April 1917 edition included a supplement, “American independence and the war.”

Editor(s): 
James Oppenheim

Associate Editor(s): 
Waldo Frank
Van Wyck Brooks
Louis Untermeyer
Robert Frost
David Mannes
Robert Edmond Jones

Libraries with Complete Original Issues: 
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Duke University; Getty Research Institute; Stanford University; Northwestern University; Amherst College; Dartmouth College; Columbia University; Ohio State University; Dickinson College; Brown University

Reprint Editions: 
New York: AMS Reprint Co.
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2004. (Little Magazines, American 1910 – 1919). [microform]

Editor James Oppenheim considered the establishment of The Seven Arts to be the “high point of his literary career” (Pennell). The Seven Arts set out with the hope of establishing a national art, and refused to align itself with any one style of writing. Because the magazine didn’t adhere to a specific “ism” it attracted a medley of writers – even the most anti-“ism” of them all, Robert Frost. Barry Benefield’s “Simply Suagarpie,” a short fiction piece about Southern blacks, appeared on the first page of the first issue, and exemplified the magazine’s desire to embody America in the work it printed.

In 1917 Oppenheim’s opposition to the United States’ participation in World War I became more and more obvious in his magazine’s pages, which caused his financial backers to pull out. The Seven Arts folded in October 1917. Although short-lived, the magazine published fiction, poetry, and criticism from such authors as Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos, Vachel Lindsay, and Amy Lowell.

The editors offered an editorial midway through the first issue that better explained their reasons for publishing The Seven Arts. Of utmost importance to the editors was building a community of artists.

“During the summer months, we sent out the following statment to American authors:

‘It is our faith, and the faith of many, that we are living in the first days of a renascent period, a time which means for America the coming of that national self-consciousness which is the beginning of greatness. In all such epochs the arts cease to be private matters; they become not only the expression of the national life but a means to its enhancement.

Our arts shown signs of this change. It is the aim of The Seven Arts to become a channel for the flow of these new tendencies: an expression of American arts which shall be fundamentally an expression of our American life.

We have no tradition to continue; we have no school of style to build up. What we ask of the writer is simply self-expression without regard to current magazine standards. We should prefer that portion of his work which is done through a joyous necessity of the writer himself.

The Seven Arts will publish stories, short plays, poems, essays and brief editorials. Such arts as cannot be directly set forth in a magazine will receive expression through critical writing, which, it is hoped, will be no less creative than the fiction and poetry. In this field the aim will be to give vistas and meanings rather than a monthly survey or review; to interpret rather than to catalogue. We hope that creative workers themselves will also set forth their vision and their inspiration.

In short, The Seven Arts is not a magazine for artists, but an expression of artists for the community.’

Some of the response to this may be seen in this number. But we are only at a beginning. Such a magazine cannot be created by either work or wishing. It must create itself, by continuing to exist. Its presence then becomes a challenge to the artist to surpass himself. He reads his contemporaries, and a sportsmanlike rivalry springs up which evokes his best efforts. So a community spirit arises: and out of this once again, as it has before, among the Cathedral builders, among the Elizabethans, a genuine and great art may spring.”

“Editorial.” 1:1 (Nov. 1926) 52-3.

James Oppenheim (May 24, 1882 – Aug. 4, 1932)
Editor: Nov. 1916 – Oct. 1917

The primary editor of The Seven Arts was James Oppenheim, the son of wealthy Jewish parents in Minnesota. His father’s death, when Oppenheim was only six years old, left the family in “straitened circumstances,” but Oppenheim found a father figure in Fedix Adler (Hoffman 88). After attending public school in New York, Oppenheim worked his way through Columbia University. His poetry, which embraced the influences of imagism and Walt Whitman, appeared in American Magazine and Century, while his short stories appeared on the pages of Harper’s, Colliers, and Ladies Home Journal (Pennell). Oppenheim’s novel Idle Wives (1914), which was “part of the emerging body of labor fiction that laid the groundwork for the significant labor and protest novels of the 1930s,” led his wife of ten years to file for divorce (Pennell). Left alone to work, Oppenheim cofounded his proudest literary achievement, The Seven Arts, with Waldo Frank and Paul Rosenfeld. When Oppenheim’s pacifism seeped into the magazine’s pages in his objections to U.S. involvement in World War I, the financial backers pulled out and The Seven Arts collapsed. The downtrodden Oppenheim turned to the study of Carl Jung and psychology for the remainder of his career.

Sherwood Anderson
“Queer”
“The Untold Lie”
“Mother”
“Mid-American Prayer”
“The Thinker”

Van Wyck Brooks
“Our Awakeners”
“Enterprise”
“Young America”
“The Splinter of Ice”
“The Culture of Industrialism”
“Toward a National Culture

Max Eastman
“Science and Free Verse”

Waldo Frank
“Concerning a Little Theater”
“Vicarious Fiction”
“A Prophet in France”
“Valedictory to a Theatrical Season”
“Rudd”
“Emerging Greatness”

Robert Frost
“The Bonfire”
“A Way Out”

D. H. Lawrence
“The Mortal Coil”
“The Thimble”

Vachel Lindsay
“The Broncho That Would Not be Broken of Dancing”

Amy Lowell
“Flotsam”
“Lacquer Prints”
“Orange of Midsummer”

“Van Wyck Brooks.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. 13 July 2009.

Chielens, Edward, ed. American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

Pennell, Melissa McFarland. “Oppenheim, James.” American National Biographies Online. 2000. American Council of Learned Societies. 7 July 2009.

The Seven Arts. Ed. James Oppenheim. 1916 – 1917. Little Magazines, American, 1910 -1919. Microfilm. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2004.

The Seven Arts. Ed. James Oppenheim. 1916 – 1917. New York: AMS Reprints.

“The Seven Arts” compiled by Ruthie Hill (Class of ’07, Davidson College)