Index of Modernist Magazines

The Southwest Review

Facts

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]

Description

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.

Manifesto

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.

Editors

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.

Contributors

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”

Bibliography

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)

The Southern Review

Facts

Title: 
The Southern Review

Date of Publication: 
July 1935 (1:1) – Apr. 1942 (7:4)
Continued 1965 (1:1) –

Place(s) of Publication: 
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Frequency of Publication: 
Quarterly

Circulation: 
1500, average

Publisher: 
Louisiana State University Press

Physical Description:
Approx. 200 pages. No illustrations.

Price:
Unknown

Editor(s): 
Charles W. Pipkin (July 1935 – Spring 1941)
Cleanth Brooks Jr. (Winter 1941 – Spring 1942)
Robert Penn Warren (Winter 1941 – Spring 1942)

Associate Editor(s):
Unknown

Libraries with Complete Original Issues: 
Louisiana State University; Getty Research Institute; Library of Congress; Smithsonian Institute; New York Public Library; Georgia State University; Northwestern University; Princeton University; University of Pennsylvania

Reprint Editions: 
New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1965
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI [microfilm]
Johnson Associates, Inc. [microfiche]

Description

The Southern Review began with a casual conversation between the Louisiana State University President and poet Robert Penn Warren. Less than six months later, the university’s quarterly of literature and criticism debuted. The first issue appeared in July, 1935, with Charles W. Pipkin as the magazine’s editor and Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks Jr. as managing editors.

From its beginning The Southern Review balanced political, social, and economic essays with works of fiction, criticism, and poetry. The editors reflected this interests: Pipkin was a political scientist and Warren and Brooks worked in the university’s English department. During its seven years of publication, the magazine was known for its excellent criticism of books and poetry (Hoffman 398). More importantly, however, were the number of significant fiction submission published from aspiring Southern authors: although the editors never explicitly expressed any favoritism to the South, over fifty percent of its contributors were Southern (Cutrer 88). Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter are a few of the distinguished authors who were featured in the Review.

Although it remained a well-respected publication throughout its existence, World War II suspended the magazine’s publication; feeling it should spend its money elsewhere, the administration cut its funds after The Southern Review’s April 1942 issue (Brooks and Warren xv). In only seven years of existence, however, the magazine left a remarkable impression on the literary world. Scholars and critics agree that The Southern Review stands as a significant little magazine because of its fair treatment of relevant social discourse, its quality literary criticism, and the lasting literature it published (Cutrer 79).

Manifesto

In a letter to e. e. cummings on March 25, 1935, editor Cleanth Brooks described the goals of his new magazine, The Southern Review:

“Despite its title, this quarterly does not aim, especially in its literary aspect, at a sectional program, nor will it have an academic bias. We hope to provide a large quarterly which will be a ready index to the most vital contemporary activities in fiction, poetry, criticism, and social-political thought, with an adequate representation in each of the departments. In each issue there will be a large display of poetry” (qtd. in Cutrer 52).

Fellow editor Charles Pipkin echoed Brooks’ sentiments regarding who the magazine would appeal to:

“The Southern Review is reaching a wider group with each issue, and we are hopeful that our editorial policy will make a contribution that is useful to clearer thinking on the American scene” (qtd. in Cutrer 74).

Editors

Charles W. Pipkin (1899 – 1941)
Editor: July 1935 – Spring 1941

The son of a Methodist minister, Charles Pipkin grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. A Rhodes Scholar, he received his undergraduate degree from Henderson-Brown College and his M.A. from Vanderbilt, and in 1925, he received his doctorate degree from Oxford University (Cutrer 29). He became the Dean of Louisiana State University’s graduate School where he taught government and served as editor to The Southern Review from 1936-1941. Pipkin died in the summer of 1941 from a heart attack, several months before the magazine published its last issue (Brooks xii).

Cleanth Brooks, Jr. (Oct. 16, 1906 – May 10, 1994)
Co-Editor: Winter 1941 – Spring 1942

Cleanth Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky on October 16, 1906. Like Pipkin, his father was a Methodist minister. While working towards his Bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt University, he met Robert Penn Warren, who would become a friend and a long time professional partner. Brooks received his M.A. from Tulane University and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Once he earned his B.Litt in 1932 he came to teach at LSU where he joined the editorial staff of The Southern Review (Cutrer 26-29).

Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – Sept. 15, 1989)
Co-Editor: Winter 1941 – Spring 1942

Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, and enrolled in Vanderbilt University in 1921 where he became friends with classmates Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate. After he received a Master’s Degree from the University of California in 1927, he joined Brooks in earning his B.Litt. from Oxford. When he returned to the United States he taught English at Southwestern University in Memphis and then at Vanderbilt for three years. In 1934 Warren reconnected with Brooks as a fellow faculty member in the English department, and served as an editor for The Southern Review for over a year (Cutrer 34-39).

Contributors

Donald Davidson
“The Class Approach to Southern Problems”

T. S. Eliot
“The Poetry of W. B. Yeats”

Caroline Gordon
“The Women on the Battlefield”

Aldous Huxley
“Literature and Examinations”

Randell Jarell
“An Essay on the Human Will”
“The Machine Gun”

Andrew Lyttle
“Jericho Jericho Jericho”

Katherine Anne Porter
Old Morality
“Pale Horse Pale Rider”

Wallace Stevens
“The Glass of Water”

Robert Penn Warren
“Night Rider”

Eudora Welty
“Clytie”
“Curtain of Green”

Bibliography

Bongiorni, Sara. “Women, Administrators, Benefactors Recommended in Naming of East Campus Apartment Buildings.” LSU Today 1 (Oct. 1999).

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert P. Warren. Introduction. Anthology of Stories from the Southern Review. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1953. xi-xvi.

Cutrer, Thomas W. Parnassus on the Mississippi: The Southern Review and the Baton Rouge Literary Community, 1935-1942. New York: Louisiana State UP, 1984.

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

Kimbrel, William W. “Brooks, Cleanth.” American National Biography Online. Davidson College Library, Davidson, NC. 2 July 2009.

Simpson, Lewis P., James Olney, and Jo Gulledge, eds. The Southern Review and Modern Literature 1935-1985. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1988.

The Southern Review. 1935 – 1942. New York: Kraus Reprint Corp., 1965.

Tate, Allen. “The Present Function of the Critical Quarterly,” Southern Review 1 (Winter, 1935-1936): 552.

‘The Southern Review” compiled by Ryan Alexander (Class of ’09, Davidson College)

The Seven Arts

Facts

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]

Description

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.

Manifesto

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.

Editors

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.

Contributors

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”

Bibliography

“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)

Secession

Facts

Title: 
Secession

Date of Publication:  
Spring 1922 (1) – Spring 1924 (8)

Place(s) of Publication:
Vienna, Austria (no. 1)
Berlin, Germany (no. 2; 4)
Reutte, Austria (no. 3)
Florence, Italy (no. 5 – 6)
New York, NY (no. 7 – 8)

Frequency of Publication: 
Tri-yearly

Circulation: 
~500 copies per issue, of which ~350 issues were distributed free of charge. Each issue cost approximately $25 to print and distribute, according to an August 26, 1937 letter from Gorham B. Munson to Charles Allen.

Publisher:
Julius Lichtner in Vienna, Austria (no. 1 – 3)
Gustav Ascher G. m. b. H. in Berlin, Germany (no. 4)
John Brooks Wheelwright in Florence, Italy (no. 5 – 6)
Gorham B. Munson in New York, New York (no. 7 – 8)

Physical Description: 
Issues ran approx. 23 – 40 pages. One indication to Secession’s page size is noted in Hoffman et. al.’s The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography, when he writes that the first issues’ pages were “book-sized leaves.”

Price: 
20 cents / 2.50 francs / 1 shilling per issue
$1 / 12 francs / 5 shillings per subscription (six issues)
(no. 1 –2)
20 cents / 2.50 francs / 1 shilling / 50 marks per issue
$1 / 12 francs / 5 shillings / 400 marks per subscription
(no. 3)
20 cents / 3 francs / 1 shilling per issue
$1 / 15 francs / 5 shillings per subscription
(no. 4)
25 cents / 4 francs / 1 shilling / 5 lira per issue
$1 / 15 francs / 5 shillings / 25 lira per subscription
(no. 5 – 6)
Prices for no. 7 – 8 is not available.

Editor(s):
Gorham B. Munson (no. 1 – 2; 4 – 8)
Matthew Josephson (no. 3)
Kenneth Burke (no. 4 – 6)

Associate Editor(s):
Unknown

Library with Complete Original Issues: 
Princeton University; PDFs available online at Princeton University’s Blue Mountain Project

Reprint Editions:
Unknown

Description

In late 1921 Secession founder Gorham B. Munson met Matthew Josephson at a Paris cafe. Both were American expatriates in their mid-twenties, drawn to the bohemian scene in Paris as well as its growing experimentalism in art, including Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, and Surrealism. Drawing on these various movements, Munson and Josephson wanted to create a little magazine that would connect and promote European avant-garde literature to select American audiences. They were also partly responding to Malcolm Cowley’s call, as published as “The Youngest Generation” in the October 18, 1921 issue of the New York Evening Post, to bring together certain young, rebellious writers into a single magazine. In a dingy hotel room in Vienna on August 1922, Munson edited and published the first issue of Secession with a budget of 20 U.S. dollars. Munson was in charge of editing the magazine under the title of “Director”; Josephson was in charge of scouting potential contributors. They intended for the magazine to run for only two years, from 1922 to 1924, because “[b]eyond a two year span, observation shows, the vitality of most reviews is lowered and their contribution, accomplished, becomes repetitious and unnecessary. Secession will take care to avoid moribundity” (1).

The editorial office changed locations during the magazine’s two year run, and such locations included Vienna, Berlin, Reutte, Florence, and then finally, New York.  After Munson left for the United States, Josephson became editor of the third issue.  He included his own story, “Peep-Peep-Parish,” in the issue after Munson had rejected it, and this marked the beginning of conflict between the two men. Kenneth Burke was listed as co-editor starting with the fourth issue of the magazine to settle disagreements between Munson and Josephson with a vote. This plan, however, was foiled when Josephson disregarded Burke’s and Munson’s votes and reduced a 100-line Richard Ashton poem to 3 lines in Secession‘s fourth issue. It was also around this time that Josephson took an editorial job at Broom, another European little magazine and Secession’s rival. The conflict became bitter when Munson accused Josephson of sabotaging the printing of the fifth issue of the magazine; he claimed that Josephson had gotten the publisher, John Brooks Wheelwright, drunk in a cafe near Paris and convinced him to include a haphazard, damaged poem, “Faustus and Helen” by Hart Crane, into the pages. The conflict reached an all-time high in late 1923, as Munson and Josephson engaged in a physical and verbal brawl on the muddy grounds of Woodstock, New York. During the Woodstock brawl until Secession’s eighth and final issue, Munson and the magazine were experiencing financial difficulties. Munson quietly published the last issue of Secession in New York City, which featured only an essay by Ivor Winters.

The aim of the magazines – and the general aims of its various, and at times competing editors – were to print work, reviews, and criticisms of contemporary and experimental works that Munson and Josephson believed “would ordinarily experience a great difficulty in finding a hearing among the established periodicals of America and Europe” (3). Despite its limited 500 print circulation, Secession reached and stirred controversy with a select American audience: every number was reviewed and criticized in other periodicals, including The Nation, The Dial, The Double Dealer, The Little Review, The Nation and Athenaeum, The New York Times, and T.S. Eliot’s Criterion.

In criticizing The Little Review and Broom as “Horrible Examples of perils between which Secession is to steer,” Munson expands further this notion of “steer[ing from]” or “secession” that has provided inspiration for the magazine’s title:

“There is emphatically something from which to secede: the American literary milieu of the past decade, a milieu which believed that literature was social dynamics and that its social significances were paramount.  There are, in addition, bitter necessities inherent in this milieu which demand secession. One of them is precisely the lack of opportunity for development by others which the valuable work of Brooks and Mencken exemplifies. And there is, at least, a small group of writers able by reason of the different direction of their work to organize a secession.

“For secession is not a revolt. It is rather a resignation from a milieu whose objects are other than ours. It is an unemotional sloughing-off by writers who profit by the gains of that milieu, but have never been bound to it. It is, in essence, a prompt deviation into immediate esthetic concerns. Our warfare is not denying, but tangential” (4).

Manifesto

While not an explicitly stated manifesto, Gorham B. Munson’s “A Bow to the Adventurous” in Issue No. 1 details the aims of Secession. Below is the last paragraph of Munson’s essay: 

“‘Secession’ exists for those writers who are preoccupied with researches for new forms.  It hopes that there is ready for it an American public which has advanced beyond the fiction and poetry of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson and the criticism of Paul Rosenfeld and Louis Untermeyer.

“Interested readers may look up an important origin and a general program for ‘Secession’ in an essay by Malcolm Cowley entitled ‘This Youngest Generation’ N.Y. Evening Post ‘Literary Review,’ Oct. 18, 1921.” (1)

Editors

Gorham B. Munson (May 26, 1896 – Aug. 15, 1969)
Editor: 1922 – 1924

Shortly after his graduation from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Gorham Bockhaven Munson became involved with the Greenwich Village scene of avant-garde writers in the late 1910s, where he developed his ideas on contemporary literature. He later settled in Paris, where he met colleague – and eventually bitter rival – Matthew Josephson. Both were co-founders of the magazine, first published in Vienna. Differences between Munson and Josephson contributed to Josephson’s departure the more widely circulating Broom. After the closing of Secession in 1924, Munson was also assistant editor of s4N, another transatlantic little magazine devoted to experimental literature. Munson’s works also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Review, and Yale Review. He spent his remaining years in New York as an academic and professor at The New School, a private university located in Greenwich Village. Munson passed away in Hartford, Connecticut on August 15, 1969.

Matthew Josephson (Feb. 15, 1899 – Mar. 13, 1978)
Editor: Aug. 1922 – Jan. 1923

Josephson’s varied interests ranged from poetry to nineteenth-century French literature to twentieth-century American economics. Josephson was also the associate editor of another little magazine, Broom, during the same years as Secession. He resigned as director and contributor to Secession after the fourth issue due to managerial and literary differences, as claimed by Munson in Issue 7.  These differences culminated in a physical and verbal brawl between Munson and Josephson in late 1923 in Woodstock, New York. Munson saw Josephson’s departure to Broom as evidence of being “an intellectual fakir” and an opportunist.  After Broom‘s closing in 1924 due to financial difficulties, Josephson took a position on Wall Street which sparked his interest in American capitalism, as evidenced in his 1934 publication of The Robber Barons, a probing look into the post-Civil War rise of great American capitalist giants, including Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt. He is credited with coining the term “robber baron.”  Josephson was also the editor of transition, a quarterly little magazine that featured Expressionist, Surrealist, and Dadaist works.  In his late years Josephson was a renowned biographer, publishing works on Emilie Zola and Jean-Jacques Rosseau. He passed away on March 13, 1978 in Santa Cruz, California.

Kenneth Burke (May 5, 1897 – Nov. 19, 1993)
Editor: Jan. – Sept. 1923

After dropping out of Ohio University and later Columbia University, Kenneth Burke met Gorham B. Munson in the late 1910s, at the height of the Greenwich Village avant-garde scene. His friendship with both Munson and Josephson resulted in his co-editorship of Secession in 1923. After the closing of Secession, Burke worked for The Dial as an editor in 1923 and later as the music critic from 1927 – 1929. He was also the music critic for The Nation from 1934 – 1936, and he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935. Burke is perhaps most well-known as a literary theorist, developing ideas on “dramatism,” “the dramatistic pentad,” and “the Terministic screen.” His principal work is a collection of essays known as Language as Symbolic Action, published in 1966, in which he fleshed out his ideas regarding the “definition of man,” which, according to Burke, is a symbol for animal, and that man interprets reality through a set of symbols. He was awarded the National Medal for Literature at the American Book Awards in 1981.  Burke passed away on November 19, 1993 in Andover, New Jersey.

Contributors

Richard Ashton:
“In the Copley Ballroom”
“The Jilted Moon”
“Moon-Garden”
“A Motorcycle, and Off to the Beach!”
“Searchlights”
“Star-Wind”

Slater Brown:
A Garden Party
“Plots for Penpushers”

Kenneth Burke:
The Book of Yul
First Pastoral
A Progression
In Quest of Olympus

Malcolm Cowley:
“Day Coach”
“Old Melodies: Love and Death”
“Play it for me again”
“Poem”
“Two Swans”

Hart Crane:
“For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”
“Poster”

e. e. cummings: 
“And I Imagine”
“Life Hurl My”
“A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves”
“On the Madam’s Best April”
“Poets Yeggs and Thirsties”
“The Season’ Tis, My Lovely Lambs”
“This Evangelist”
“Workingman with Hands So Hairy-Sturdy”

Waldo Frank:
“For a Declaration of War”
Hope

Matthew Josephson (pen name Will Bray):
Apollinaire: or Let us be Troubadours
“Cities II”
“In a Cafe”
“The Oblate”
Peep-Peep Parrish
“Peripatetics”
“Poem”

Marianne Moore:
“Bowls”

Wallace Stevens:
“Last Looks at the Lilacs”

Tristian Tzara
“Instant Note Brother”
Mr. AA the Antiphilosopher

William Carlos Williams:
“The Attempt”
“The Hothouse Plant”

Bibliography

Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, eds. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 1, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

–––. and Andrew Thacker, eds. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 2, North America 1894-1960.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

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

Images. “Secession.” Blue Mountain Project: Historic Avant-Garde Periodicals for Digital Research.  Princeton University.

Secession. 1922-1924. Princeton University Library: Blue Mountain Project: Historic Avant-Garde Periodicals for Digital Research. Web.

Secession, 1922-24 (dir. Gorham B. Munson).  Jacket2  Philadelphia, PA (August 31, 2011). Web.

“Secession” compiled by Ryan Emerick (Class of ’16, Davidson College)

Rogue

Facts

Title:
Rogue

Date of Publication:
Mar. 15, 1915 (1.1) – Dec. 1916 (2.3)

Place(s) of Publication:
New York City, NY

Frequency of Publication:
Though it claimed to be a semimonthly magazine, it published erratically

Circulation:
Vol. 1, no. 1 claims a 15,000 copy print run (almost certainly ironic). If similar to comparable magazines, probably 500 per run.

Publisher:
New York : Rogue, Inc., 1915-1916. 

Physical Description:
26cm; Approximately 15-20 pages

Price:
5 cents per issue / $1 per year (1915)
10 cents per issue / $2 per year (1916)

Editor(s):
Allen Norton

Associate Editor(s):
Unknown

Libraries with Complete Original Issues:
Many more libraries have only the first volume

New York Public Library (NYPL); Beinecke, Yale University Library; Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Reprint Editions: 
None

Description

Fashioning itself as a play on Vogue, Rogue was magazine of extraordinary wit, consisting of poetry, short drama, short fiction, and articles on fashion, art and current events—as Jay Bochner puts it, “a sort of downtown version of Vanity Fair, mock[ing] the whole body of Victorian culture from within…” (49). It was supported by Conrad Arensberg’s patronage and edited by Allen and Louise Norton. Allen Norton was chief editor of the magazine for its entire run, though Louise Norton arguably played an equal or greater role in the magazine’s publication. Though it only lasted a year and a half (Mar. 1915 – Dec. 1916) and published at inconsistent intervals, the magazine can claim poetry and artwork of Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Clara Tice and others.

As Jessica Burnstein points out in Cold Modernism, “Rogue was all about fashion” (160). Its pages were strewn with trousers, corsets and tuxedos. For each issue Louise Norton wrote a section entitled “Philosophic Fashions” under the pseudonym Dame Rogue. It discussed shoes, buttons, skirts and the modern woman’s relation to each (celebrating, for example, a new corset design as a symbol for liberation). The magazine was also was playful, the second page of the first issue saying, “Advertise in ROGUE – It doesn’t pay” (the second issue exchanged “doesn’t” for “does”). The aphorism—the pithy, astute, witty, acerbic observation—may be the representative genre of Rogue.

Rogue subverted gender conventions and appealed to both men and women on its pages—as long as you (whether woman or man) felt comfortable stepping into modernity with this “Cigarette of Literature.” The fashion references highlighted tuxedos as well as corsets, though the advertisements were often more masculine in emphasis: “Rogue trusts everyone but himself,” and the perpetual “He wears the Dartmouth” suit advertisement.

Its short, haphazard life and brilliant contributors make it a seeming synecdoche of modernist little magazine’s elite playfulness.

Manifesto

Though Rogue never published an explicit manifesto, it published a great deal of sayings about itself. Here is a sampling:

“Advertise in ROGUE — It doesn’t pay” (Vol. 1., No. 1: 2)

“A magazine that believes in the people, and that the people express genius even more than genius itself.” (Vol. 1., No. 1: 3)

“Rogue Trusts Everyone But Himself… Rogue Sells the Truth And The Untruth for 5 cents $1.00 a Year” (Vol. 1, No. 1: 6)

“A magazine that does not believe in the people, or that the people express genius even more than genius itself.” (Vol. 1, No. 1: 3)

Editors

Allen Norton
Editor: Mar. 1915 – Dec. 1916

In addition to editing Rogue, Allen Norton wrote his own poetry, collected in a volume entitled Saloon sonnets: with Sunday flutings (which received a rather unfortunate review on page 41 of the Fifth volume of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse). He was married to Louise Norton, who contributed a great deal to Rogue. They divorced in 1916.

Louise Norton (remarried as Varèse) (1891 – 1989)
Co-founder and Editor: Mar. 1915 – Dec. 1916

After writing and editing for Rogue, Louise grew to critical acclaim as a translator of French poetry and fiction. She was married to French composer, Edgard Varèse, writing his biography, “Varese: A Looking-Glass Diary.” Her forward begins with the lines, “I feel that I am in honor bound to warn musicians and musicologists that they will find nothing musical about the music of Varèse in this book by his nonmusical wife.” (9). Her wit and intelligence characterized her writing all through her life.

Contributors

Walter Conrad Arensberg:
Falling Asleep
Human
The Inner Significance of the Statues Seated Outside the Boston Public Library
To A Poet

Djuna Barnes:
The Awkward Age
The Flute Player

Homer Croy:
Yes, Trousers Are Handy

Charles Demuth:
Filling a Page (A Pantomime With Words)

Alfred Kreymborg:
Asleep
Bally-Boo
Overhead in an Asylum
To a Canary

Robert Locher:
The Corset Coach
One, One, One, There Are Many of Them
Watch Your Step!

Mina Loy:
Sketch of a Man on a Platform
Three Moments in Paris
Two Plays
Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots

Allen Norton:
Allen Plants Roses
Arrows
The Idiot in the Lion’s Garret
Spring Days in Fall
Verse
The Wind Was Singing Songs to Me
With Me Without You

Gertrude Stein:
Aux Galeries Lafayette

Wallace Stevens:
Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame STE. Ursule, Et Les Unze Mille Vierges
Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
Tea

Clara Tice:
Piety
Falling Asleep
ROGUE’S Booklovers’ Contest
Virgin Minus Verse

Carl Van Vechten:
An Interrupted Conversation
The Nightingale and the Peahen
How Donald Dedicated His Poem

Bibliography

Bochner, Jay. “The Marriage of Rogue and The Soil.” Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. 49–66. Print.

Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. WorldCat Discovery Service. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

Churchill, Suzanne. The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006. Print.

Churchill, Suzanne W., and Adam McKible. Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches. Aldershot, England ; Ashgate Pub., 2007. WorldCat Discovery Service. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

Longworth, Deborah. “The Avant-Garde in the Village: Rogue.” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960. OUP Oxford, 2012. Print.

Varèse, Louise. Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1972. Print.

Watson, Steven. Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde. 1st ed. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. Print.

White, Eric. Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print.

“Rogue” Compiled by Andrew Rikard (Class of 2017, Davidson College)