Title: 
Palms

Date of Publication: 
Spring 1923 – Mar./Apr. 1940 (suspended June 1930 – Oct. 1936)

Place of Publication: 
Guadalajara, Mexico

Frequency of Publication: 
Six issues per year

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher:
Idella Purnell
John M. Weathermax
Elmer Nicholas

Physical Description: 
Approximately 30 pages per issue. Issues were cut to 5×8, later enlarged to 6×9. Magazine title on cover page, often accompanied by circular wave and palm emblem.

Price: 
25 cents

Editor(s): 
Idella Purnell (Spring 1923 – May 1930)
Elmer Nicholas (Nov 1936? – Mar./Apr. 1940)

Associate Editor(s) 
Witter Bynner
Haniel Long
David Greenhood
Eda Lou Walton
Joseph Auslander
Hildegarde Flanner (Contributing Editor)
Rachel Lindsay (Contributing Editor)

Libraries with Original Issues: 
University of Colorado, Boulder; University of Miami; Purdue University; West Virginia University; Louisiana State University; Harvard University; State University of New York, Binghampton; State University of New York, Buffalo; Marquette University; University of Texas at Austin; Ohio State University.

Reprint Editions: 
Purnell, Idella. Palms. Nendeln, Liechtenstein, Kraus Reprint, 1900. Print.

In the Spring of 1923, when she was only 21 years old, Idella Purnell founded the poetry magazine Palms in Guadalajara, Mexico. An alumna of the University of California, Berkeley, Purnell was one of the youngest editors to create and oversee a literary magazine (Potter). In its 17 year run Palms garnered a respectable roster of mostly American authors. Notable contributors include Purnell’s teacher Witter Bynner, D.H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, and Hildegarde Flanner (Potter). Palms is especially remarkable for its October 1926 issue, guest edited by Countee Cullen and dedicated to the work of African American poets.  The special “Negro Issue” sold out soon after its publication and remains a collector’s item today (Johnson et al).

The fifth volume introduced a highly stylized cover bearing an enlarged palm and wave emblem, and the issues themselves were slightly enlarged to 6×9 inches from 5×8 (Lehman). In August 1927 Purnell moved to Aberdeen, Washington, where the fifth and sixth volumes were published, followed by the first issue of the seventh volume (Lehman). The remaining issues of the seventh volume were published from Purnell’s new home of New York City. Publication ceased in May 1930, then resumed in November 1936, still under the direction of Purnell but this time from the new home base of Grant, Michigan (Lehman). With the thickness and contributor quality of the publication dramatically reduced, Purnell handed editorship to Elmer Nicholas in March 1937. Nicholas failed to breathe much life into the magazine, and its last issue was published in April 1940.

No manifesto appears in the reprint edition of Palms used for this project, though Vilma Potter explains,

“The first issue of PALMS declared [Idella Purnell’s] editorial policy was ‘to have no policy of fixed rules, to patronize no school or form, to publish nothing on the strength of the reputation of the writer. If we find only one page of poetry, but that page is authentic, we shall publish one page. If we find sixty pages, our magazine will contain sixty pages.’”

The only other comparable content to a manifesto occasionally appeared on Palms’ index pages above the list of authors: a short line that reads “THE POEM’S THE THING.”

Idella Purnell (Apr. 1, 1901 – Dec. 1, 1982)
Editor: Spring 1923 – May 1930; Nov. 1936 – Mar. 1937

Idella Purnell was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she served as a primary school teacher before attending the University of California, Berkeley, as an undergraduate (Lehman). At Berkeley Purnell studied under the poet Witter Bynner, and may have been inspired by his unusual and experimental teaching methods to found Palms during the Spring of 1923 in her hometown. Purnell married John M. Weathermax on August 21, 1927 and later moved to his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, where Palms saw a redesigned format with Weathermax as publisher (Lehman). Following a divorce two years later, Purnell lived in New York City; Grant, Michigan; and Los Angeles, among other places. From 1935 to 1937 Purnell opened and operated a gold mine in Ameca, Mexico, which she left for a career as an aviation riveter during World War II. Purnell became a practitioner and director of the Dianetic Center for Dianetics and Scientology in the 1950s and 60s, and published children’s literature, science fiction anthologies, and cook books throughout her life (Contemporary Authors Online).

Witter Bynner
“Secret Cellars”
“Two Sonnets on Felicity”

Helen Hoyt
“O Do Not Fear Your Life”

Harold Vinal
“Colored Stones”

Willard Johnson
“Purple Medicine”
“Yellow”

Lynn Riggs
“Autumn Morning”
“The Singing Stars”
“Morning Walk in Santa Fe”

Oliver Jenkins
“Paganne”

Hildegarde Flanner
“Bough of Manna”
“The Poet’s Dilemna”

Ruth Lechlitner
“Warning”

Langston Hughes
“Young Sailor”
“Songs to a Dark Virgin”
“A House in Taos”

W.E.B. Du Bois
“The Song of America”

Countee Cullen
“Wisdom Cometh With the Years”
“A Song of Sour Grapes”

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

Johnson, Abby Arthur, and Ronald Maberry Johnson. Propaganda And Aesthetics : The Literary Politics Of African-American Magazines In The Twentieth Century. n.p.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Lehman, Anthony L. D.H. Lawrence, Idella Purnell, and Palms. Los Angeles: George Houle, 1986. Print.

Potter, Vilma. “Idella Purnell’s PALMS And Godfather Witter Bynner.” American Periodicals: A Journal Of History, Criticism, And Bibliography 4. (1994): 47-64.

Purnell, Idella. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007.  Word Count: 754. From Literature Resource Center.

Sigler, Danielle. “Countée Cullen and ‘The Negro Number’ of Palms.” Harry Ransom Center. 22 Feb 2016. Web. 17 Jun 2016.

Stone, Idella P, and Elmer Nicholas. Palms. Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico: Palms, 1923. Print.

“Palms” compiled by Robert Abare (Class of ’13, Davidson College)

Title: 
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse

Date of Publication: 
July 1915 – July 1919

Place(s) of Publication: 
Grantwood, New Jersey (July 1915 – Dec. 1915)
New York, New York (Jan. 1916 – Apr. 1917)
Chicago, Illinois (June 1917 – Feb. 1918)
New York, New York (Dec. 1918 – July 1919)

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly: July 1915 – Sept. 1916
Irregular: Dec. 1916 – Feb. 1918 (six issues)
Monthly: Dec. 1918 – July 1919

Circulation: 
Approx. 250 – 300 (Munson 35; Kreymborg “Early Impression” 12)

Publisher: 
Alfred Kreymborg: Grantwood, New Jersey
Various locations and publishers, New York (Jan. 1916 – Apr. 1917).
Washington Square Bookshop, New York (Dec. 1918 – Jul. 1919)

Physical Description: 
5″ x 7″; plain yellow cover, simple block print, no illustrations, logo, manifesto, editorial, or advertising; list of authors; poems. Size, format, and color consistent through run. Occasional editorials, reviews, plays, and art appear after first year.
April 1916 (2:4): advertising on inside covers.
May-June 1916 (2:5-6): editorial (editorials appear irregularly thereafter).
Jan. 1919 – Feb. 1919 (5:2-3): abstract cover design with motto; art cuts.
Mar. 1919 – Apr.-May 1919 (5:4-5): title and motto, no cover art.
July 1919 (5:6): title only, no art or motto.

Price:
15 cents per issue / $1.50 per year (July 1915 – Nov. 1918)
20 cents per issue / $2 per year (After Dec. 1918)

Editor(s): 
Alfred Kreymborg

Associate Editor(s):
Unknown

Libraries with Original Issues: 
University of Connecticut; University of Miami; Loyola University of Chicago; Colby College; Western Michigan University; University of Missouri, Columbia; Mississippi State University; Hamilton College; Skidmore College; SUNY Buffalo; Kent State University; Ohio State University; Oklahoma State University; University of Pittsburgh; Brown University; East Tennessee State University; University of Vermont; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Reprint Editions: 
New York: Kraus Reprint Corp. 1967.
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2004. (Little Magazines. American 1910 – 1919) [Microform]

Others: A Magazine of the New Verse was founded by Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 in an effort to give poets freedom to experiment with new forms. Publishing free verse on topics ranging from sex to Ming vases to blackbirds, Others quickly acquired the reputation as the most radical and permissive venue for modern poetry. The uproar was aroused less by the content of the poems than by their formal liberties; as Kreymborg said of the public reaction to Mina Loy’s “Love Songs”: “To reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure, punctuation, even more offensive” (History 489). Thriving on the public outrage, Others secured a small yet intelligent and reactive audience.

Others’ contributors were more involved with the magazine than just publishing their work: many gathered weekly to discuss their writings, first at the Grantwood art colony in New Jersey and later in Greenwich Village, New York. At these gatherings the writers exchanged ideas, discussed modern art and literature, and explored new ways of writing. Others published a variety of new poems, opening its pages to all the latest “isms” without committing itself to any group or school. The magazine illustrates the diversity of modernist poetic practice, as well as the fashionable trends and formal innovations of the free verse movement in America. It helped launch the careers of major American poets such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Loy, situating them on equal footing with now forgotten figures such as Jeanne D’Orge, Orrick Johns, and Adolf Wolff.

Although Alfred Kreymborg published no distinct manifesto, the first extra-poetic commentary appears in the front material of November 1915 (1:5). Its inclusion suggests Kreymborg’s concurrence with the article about his magazine, written by J. B. Kerfoot for a recent issue of Life:

“‘OTHERS’ is the name of a new little monthly ‘magazine of new verse,’ published by Alfred Kreymborg at Grantwood, New Jersey ($1.50 per year). Three numbers have appeared at this writing–July, August and September. They are among the live things being done in American just now. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with this ‘new poetry’ that is called ‘revolutionary.’ Perhaps you’ve heard that it is queer and have let it go at that. Perhaps if you tried it you’d find that a side of you that has been sleeping would come awake again. It is worth the price of a Wednesday matinée to find out. By the way, the new poetry is revolutionary. It is the expression of a democracy of feeling rebelling against a aristocracy of form.”

The March 1916 issue (2:3) added subscription information opposite the title page, along with the statement: “OTHERS makes its appeal to every person who is interested in poetry, and especially in the work of young Americans.” The motto, “The old expressions are with us always, and there are always others,” was first published in December 1918 (5:1) and appeared on the cover of the next four issues.

Alfred Kreymborg (Dec. 10, 1883 – Aug. 14, 1966)
Editor: July 1915 – July 1919

Alfred Kreymborg grew up in a working class family in New York City. While living in Greenwich Village, he became interested in modern art, photography, and writing. He founded The Glebe in 1913, which was “one of the first periodicals to sponsor experimental writing” (Hoffman 46). With a donation of $276 from Walter Conrad Arensberg, Kreymborg went on to found Others, a magazine dedicated to experimental poetry. Editor of Broom and American Caravan and contributor to little magazines well into the 1950s, Kreymborg achieved popular acclaim touring America with his puppet plays (1920-1) and a radio play he produced (1938). When he died in 1966 he had published forty books and served as president of the Poetry Society of America and as judge for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Conrad Aiken
“Meretrix: Ironic”

Djuna Barnes
Passion Play

Maxwell Bodenheim
“An Old Negro Asleep”
“Talk”
“Factory-Girl”

H. D.
“Pear Tree”
“Evening”

Jeanne D’Orge
The Meat Press
The Microscope

T. S. Eliot
“Portrait of a Lady”

Helen Hoyt
“Homage”
“Escape”
“For You a Transient Joy”

Fenton Johnson
“Tired”
“Aunt Jane Allen”
“The Drunkard”

Alfred Kreymborg
“Variations”
“To W.C.W.M.D.”
“New York”

Vachel Lindsay
“The Daniel Jazz”

Amy Lowell
“Trees”
“Chinoiseries”

Mina Loy
“Songs to Joannes”

Marianne Moore
“Critics and Connoisseurs”
“Poetry”

Ezra Pound
“The Tea Shop”
“From the Chinese”

Man Ray
Three Dimensions

Carl Sandburg
“Becker”
“Others”

Wallace Stevens
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

William Carlos Williams
“Pastoral”
“Tract”
“The Young Housewife”

Bochner, Jay. “Others.” American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century. Ed. Edward E. Chielens. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. 231-236.

Churchill, Suzanne W. The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Aldershot, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006.

——– . “Making Space for Others: A History of a Modernist Little Magazine.” Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (Fall 1998): 47-67.

——– . “Williams and the Poetics of Ending Others.” Sagetrieb. 18: 2 & 3. Also in William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry. Ed. Burton Hatlen and Demetres Tryphonopoulos. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2002.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. 34-51.

Kreymborg, Alfred. “An Early Impression of Wallace Stevens.” Trinity Review 8 (1954): 12.

——– . Ed. Others: An Anthology of the New Verse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1916.

——– . Ed. Others: An Anthology of the New Verse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917.

——– . Ed. Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse. New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920.

——– . Troubadour: An American Autobiography. New York: Sagamore Press Inc., 1957. First published in New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925.

Munson, Gorham. The Awakening Twenties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985. 35.

Murphy, Russell. “Alfred Kreymborg.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 54: American Poets, 1880-1945. 3rd Series. Ann Arbor, MI: Gale Research Co., 1987. 192-201.

Newcomb, John Timberman. “Others, Poetry, and Wallace Stevens: Little Magazines as Agents of Reputation.” Essays in Literature 16.2 (Fall 1989): 256-270.

“Others” compiled by Emily Smith (Class of ’06) and Suzanne W. Churchill (Professor of English, Davidson College)

Title:
Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life

Date of Publication:
Jan. 1923 (1:1) – Winter 1949 (27:1)

Place of Publication:
New York, NY

Frequency of Publication:
Monthly (Jan. 1923 – Dec. 1944)
Quarterly (Jan. 1945 – Summer 1948)
Special Issue (Winter 1949)

Circulation:
11,000 subscribers in 1928

Publisher:
National Urban League, New York.

Physical Description:
28 cm in length

Price:
15 cents

Editor(s):
Charles Spurgeon Johnson (Jan. 1923 – Sept. 1928)
Elmer Anderson Carter (Oct. 1928 – Jan. 1945)
Madeline L. Aldridge (Jan. 1945 – Jun. 1947)
Dutton Ferguson (July 1947 – Jan. 1949)

Associate Editor(s):
Unknown

Libraries with Complete Original Issues:
University of Florida; University of Alabama, Birmingham; Northern Illinois University; Mississippi State University

Reprint Editions:
New York: International Microfilm Press, 1970 (microfilm).

Opportunity was founded in 1922 by the National Urban League, and Charles S. Johnson, a researcher for the NUL, served as editor from its inception to 1928. Its name was taken from the League’s slogan, “Not alms, but opportunity.” The periodical’s primary purpose was the dissemination of information about the NUL’s activities and research. The opening editorial of the January 1923 issue articulated the journal’s hope to be a powerful “new effort” in “[t]he weary struggle of the Negro population for status thru self-improvement and recognition, aided by their friends” (I.1, 1). Under Johnson’s editorial control, however, Opportunity broadened its scope to include artistic and literary works. The journal contributed to the literary activity of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement by issuing writing competitions, the first of which appeared in the August 1924 issue.

Despite its literary focus Opportunity was not a frontrunner of publishing black authors; writers like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen had made their voices public long before they were published in the pages of Opportunity. Scholar Chidi Ikonne points out, “the importance of Opportunity does not lie mainly in its being a black magazine bent on giving expression to young black voices, but rather in its modification and intensification of what other magazines and newspapers had been doing even before its establishment” (86). Johnson’s goal was to foster creative expression among young black writers, but also to expose that writing to an audience outside of the African American community (Austin 236).

Opportunity never became financially self-sufficient. In 1927 its circulation reached 11,000, a fraction of that of The Crisis (Johnson 48). It was kept afloat through the financial support of the NUL and grants from the Carnegie Foundation. It was never able to pay contributors and its literary contests were financed by friends of the magazine or successful authors. Opportunity ceased publication in 1949.

The editorial statement of purpose for Opportunity reads matter-of-factly:

“Opportunity is a venture inspired by a long insistent demand, both general and specific, for a journal of Negro life that would devote itself religiously to an interpretation of the social problems of the Negro population….The policy of Opportunity will be definitely constructive. It will aim to present, objectively, facts of Negro life. It hopes, thru an analysis of these social questions to provide a basis of understanding; encourage interracial co-operation in the working out of these problems.”

Opportunity, 1:2 (1923): 1.

Charles Spurgeon Johnson (Jul. 24, 1893 – Oct. 27, 1956)
Editor: Jan. 1923 – Sept. 1928

The son of an emancipated slave, Charles Spurgeon Johnson shone as a successful student, graduating cum laude from Virginia Union University and attending graduate school at the University of Chicago. He served as a sergeant major in World War I and returned to Chicago during the height of race riots. His published sociological observations of the events, The Negro in Chicago: The Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922), won him recognition as a leader in racial studies. He became the director of the Research and Investigation Department of the National Urban League, and founded Opportunity in 1922 to be the league’s official publication. He served as editor until September 1928. Johnson went on to become the head of the Social Research Department at Fisk University, and in 1946 he became the university’s first black president.

Gwendolyn Bennett
“Song”
“Ebony Flute”

Arna Bontemps
“Here is the Sea”

Countee Cullen
“To the One Who Said Me Nay”
“Dark Tower”

Joseph S. Cotter
“The Wayside Well”

Angelina W. Grimke
“Heritage”

Langston Hughes
“The Weary Blues”

Zora Neale Hurston
“Spunk”

Claude McKay
“Desolate”

Clement Wood
“The Mother”

Austin, Addell P. “The Opportunity and Crisis Literary Contests.” CLA 32 (1988):
235-46.

Carroll, Anne. “‘Sufficient in Intensity’: Mixed Media and Public Opinion in
Opportunity.” Soundings 80 (1997): 607-40.

Daniel, Walter C. Black Journals of the United States. Historical Guides to the
Worlds Periodicals and Newspapers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

De Jongh, James. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Ikonne, Chidi. “Opportunity and Black Literature, 1923-1933.” Phylon 40 (1979):
86-93.

Johnson, Abbey Arthur, and Ronald Maberry Johnson. Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.

Johnson, Charles S. “The Rise of the Negro Magazine.” Journal of Negro History. 13 (1928): 7-21.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life. New York: National Urban League. Vols. 1-27.

“Opportunity” compiled by Erica Bahls (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Title:
New Masses

Date of Publication:
May 1926 – Jan. 12, 1948

Place of Publication:
New York City, NY.

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly (1926 – 1933)
Weekly (1934 – 1948)

Circulation:
The circulation of the magazine fluctuated, but it reached tens of thousands, with 25,000 issues printed weekly in 1934, and and peaking at 100,000 issues printed in December 1936.

Publisher: 
The New Masses, Inc. 39 West Eighth Street, New York, NY.

Physical Description:
11”X14,” 32 pages, 4 columns, colored ed. (May 1926 – Oct. 1926).
9⅓”X12¼,” 32 pages, black ink. (Nov. 1926 – Sept. 1928). 
9&13/16”X11¾,” 24 pages, black ink. (October 1928 – ?).

Price:
 10 – 25 cents.

Editor(s):
Mike Gold (1926 – 1934)
Joseph Freeman (1926 – 1927).

Associate Editor(s):
Egmont Arens
Hugo Gellert
James Rorty
John Sloan
Robert Evans
Louis Lozowick

Libraries with Original Issues:
E.H. Little Library, Davidson College; Holt Labor Library of San Francisco; Stanford University’s Hoover Library. PDF Archive at Marxists.org.

Reprint Editions:
Unknown.

Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman founded New Masses in 1926 with explicit intentions to recapture the characteristics of Max Eastman and Floyd Dell’s The Masses, a magazine both Gold and Freeman enjoyed and contributed to in their youth. New Masses’ contents included prose, poetry, editorials, reviews, and letters, often with a leftist bend. The magazine was distinguished by its support of the visual arts, publishing “acerbic cartoons and mordant political drawings” (Langa 25), as well as reproductions of prints and paintings that addressed relevant social issues.

New Masses published monthly in 1926 until it went weekly in January 1934. The magazine tackled political topics such as labor unions, birth control, and civil rights, with long time contributing editors such as Sherwood Anderson, Art Young, Claude Mckay, John Dos Passos, Floyd Dell, and Carl Sandburg. Other notable writers include Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway. Gold and others wanted the magazine to be “interesting above everything else” (Klein 70), in ways that came across as youthful, new, biting, and brave, but they were by no means in pursuit of beauty. Gold continued as the central editor for New Masses until 1934, and the magazine published its last issue on January 12, 1948.

The New Masses offers a manifesto in an editorial entitled “IS THIS IT?” (1.1 May 1926):

“Is this the magazine our prospectuses talked about? We are not so sure. This, however, is undoubtedly the editorial which, in all our prospectuses, we promised faithfully not to write.

As to the magazine, we regard it with almost complete detachment and a good deal of critical interest, because we didn’t make it ourselves.

We merely “discovered” it.

We were confident that somewhere in America a NEW MASSES existed, if only as a frustrated desire.

To materialize it, all that was needed was to make a certain number of prosaic editorial motions.

We made the motions, material poured in, and we sent our first issue to the printer.

Next month we shall make, experimentally, slightly different motions, and a somewhat different NEW MASSES will blossom profanely on the news-stands in the midst of our respectable contemporaries, the whiz-bangs, the success-liturgies, the household aphrodisiacs, the snob-baedekkers and the department store catalogues.

It’s an exciting game, and we’d like very much to draw you, our readers, into it. What would you like to see in the NEW MASSES? Do you want more cartoons? More labor stories? More satire—fictions—poetry? How about criticism of books, theatre, art music, the movies?

How would you feel if the NEW MASSES went in for some confession articles? America is going through a queer period of stock-taking. Maybe we’ll get some well-known tired radicals to tell what made them tired; or induce some quite unknown people, who are, however, rich both in experience and in honesty, to describe their experience in print.

We would like to fill a page with letters from all over the country telling of industries, occupations, changing social customs, the daily work and play of Americans everywhere. We see this as a possible feature—a monthly mosaic of American life, in which the tragedy and comedy, the hopes and dreams of the most obscure American mill town or cross-roads village will be chronicled with as much respect and sympathy by our correspondents as if they were reporting the political or artistic events of a European capital. Will you write us a letter of this sort? Will you send us ideas for other features?”

Michael “Mike” Gold (Apr. 12, 1894 – May 14, 1967)
Editor: May 1926 – Jan. 1934

Mike Gold was the pen name for Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich, who was born to Romanian parents in the Lower East Side of New York City. He published a poem in 1914 in Masses, and soon thereafter fell into the inner circle of Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, contributing regularly to the magazine at the age of only twenty-one. Gold would later recognize Dell and Eastman as his teachers. Two of Gold’s most notable publications were his semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money, published in 1930, and an article in New Masses titled “Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot.” Gold was often fierce in his writing and recognized later on as a strong voice in the Communist party.

Joseph Freeman (Oct. 7, 1897 – Aug. 8, 1965)
Editor: May 1926 – Nov. 1926

Joseph Freeman was born in the village of Piratin, Ukraine, which was under control of the Russian Empire at the time. Freeman, of Jewish decent, lived through a period of strong anti-Semitism and pogroms across the Russian Empire. Freeman’s family fled Russia in 1904 and emigrated to the United States, where Freeman became a naturalized citizen in 1920. Freeman graduated from Columbia University in 1919 and worked as a writer or editor for several magazines in the United States and abroad. Freeman co-founded New Masses with Mike Gold and acted as an international correspondent in Moscow for its first year of publication. Freeman also co-founded The Liberator, but would eventually leave the Communist party and work in the private sector for the later part of his life.

Michael Gold
“Proletarian Realism”
“Go Left, Young Writers!”
“Why I Am A Communist”
“A Night in the Million-Dollar Slums”

Max Eastman
“Class War In Colorado”

Claude Mckay
“Song of New York”

Upton Sinclair
“What We Have Learned”
“My Secrets”

John Dos Passos
“Review of The Sun Also Rises”
“The New Masses I’d Like”
“They Are Dead Now”

Langston Hughes
“Not Without Laughter”
(excerpts from before publication)

William Carlos Williams
“The Five Dollar Guy”
“Letter to the Editor”

Ernest Hemingway
“Who Murdered The Vets?”

Sherwood Anderson
“At Amsterdam”
“A Writer’s Note”
“How I came to communism, symposium.”

Ralph Ellison
“Recent Negro Fiction”
“Stormy Weather”
“Big White Fog”
“The Great Migration”

Hugo Gellert
Cover Artwork

Anderson, Jervis. A. Philip Randolph. A Biographical Portrait. [1st ed.]. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Print. A Harvest book, HB 280.

Bassett, John Earl. Harlem in Review : Critical Reactions to Black American Writers, 1917-1939. Susquehanna University Press, 1992. Print.

Burnett, Colin. “The “Albert Maltz Affair” And The Debate Over Para-Marxist Formalism In New Masses, 1945–1946.” Journal Of American Studies 48.1 (2014): 223-250. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

Coyle, Michael. Ezra Pound and African American Modernism.Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 2001. Print. Ezra Pound scholarship series; Ezra Pound scholarship series.

Gold, Michael, et al. New Masses. New York, 1926. Print.

Goodman, Martin, ed. “New Masses.” Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 15 Jun 2016.

Klein, Marcus. Foreigners : The Making of American Literature, 1900-1940. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. Print.

Langa, Helen. “‘At Least Half The Pages Will Consist Of Pictures’: New Masses And Politicized Visual Art.” American Periodicals: A Journal Of History, Criticism, And Bibliography 21.1 (2011): 24-49. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

Tadié, Benoît. “The Masses Speak: The Masses (1911-17); The Liberator (1918-24); New Masses (1926-48); And Masses & Mainstream (1948-63).” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894-1960. 831-856. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2012. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 18 Sept. 2015.

Therborn, G. “New Masses?” New Left Review 85 (2014): 7-18. Print.

Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time : The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Print.

“New Masses” compiled by Scott Cunningham (Class of ’16, Davidson College)

Title:
Challenge/New Challenge

Date of Publication: 
Mar. 1934 – Fall 1937

Place(s) of Publication:
Boston, MA; New York, NY

Frequency of Publication: 
Quarterly (somewhat irregularly)

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher: 
The Boston Chronicle

Physical Description: 
Approx. 50 pages (New Challenge is 94). Cover with single-color print on colored paper (changing by the issue). The cover design is minimalistic, emphasizing the title and contributors. Common segments include short stories, songs, and a “Dear Reader” section.

Price:
15 Cents (later raised to 25 cents)

Editor(s): 
Dorothy West

Associate Editor(s):
Marian Minus (Associate Editor)
Richard Wright (Associate Editor)

Libraries with Original Issues: 
Harvard University, New York Public Library, Library of Congress

Reprint Editions: 
University of North Carolina, Smithsonian Libraries, University of Michigan, Library of Congress

The New Challenge was Dorothy West’s effort to reinvigorate Challenge, a magazine she founded in 1934, began with the goal of giving “younger Negro writers” a platform to share their voices, writings, and perspectives. As James Weldon Johnson put it in the first issue’s foreword, young black artists “can bring to bear a tremendous force for breaking down and wearing away the stereotyped ideas about the Negro” (Johnson 2). And to break down stereotypes, Johnson added that writers need not be propagandists, but sincere artists. With this plan for the platform, early issues of Challenge included works by Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes, Lucia Mae Pitts, and Countee Cullen. The January 1936 “Dear Reader” section (penned by editor Dorothy West) elaborated on her vision for the magazine. On the topic of pieces submitted for publication, West shared that she was looking for well-written pieces with strong style. These pieces were supposed to depict scenes of protest and be written by promising young black authors.

Despite gaining momentum, the submissions Challenge received did not meet West’s standards, so she sought to recenter her efforts. West published the 1937 Fall issue as the New Challenge, bringing in associate editors Marian Minus and Richard Wright to help her curate a magazine that for writers devoted to the “realistic depiction of life through the sharp focus of social consciousness” (Daniel 499). To remain authentic and unbiased in that regard, she disavowed any politically-motivated funding and refused excessive contributions from any individual, even going as far to pour her own savings into New Challenge as she had done for its earlier iteration. These practices, along with the editorial disputes between West and the vocally communist Wright, led to the premature demise of the rebranded publication after its first issue.

While Challenge never published an explicit manifesto, the March 1934 issue’s foreword by James Weldon Johnson included insights into the magazine’s purpose and outlook:

It is a good thing that Dorothy West is doing in instituting a magazine through which the voices of younger Negro writers may be heard…They can bring to bear a tremendous force for breaking down and wearing away the stereotyped ideas about the Negro, and for creating a higher and more enlightened opinion about the race. (Vol. 1., No. 1: 2)

Additionally, the May 1935 “Dear Reader” section by Dorothy West reasserts this commitment to supporting new, young writers:

We are rather pleased with this issue, for most of the names are new to us, and we are glad to note that not all of the voices are Negro. Most of them are young too, really young, which means that as good as they are now, think how much better they will be one fine day. So that for all we know we may be raising a crop of young geniuses. And we are glad they are cutting their talent on our papers. (Vol. 1., No. 3: 45)

Dorothy West (Jun. 02, 1907 – August. 16, 1998)
Editor: 1934 – 1937

One of the youngest writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance—she published her first story at age 14—Dorothy West was the primary editor of Challenge and New Challenge. In 1907, West was born to a middle-class family in Boston, Massachusetts where she attended Girls’ Latin School before moving to New York City in 1926 (“Dorothy West” 1). There, she enrolled in writing classes at Columbia University while continuing her work in short fiction. Her short story “The Typewriter” went on to tie with a piece by Zora Neale Hurston for 2nd place in Opportunity magazine’s short story contest (Garman 1). The resulting celebration banquet introduced West to the likes of Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and Langston Hughes, all of whom she would befriend soon afterward (Garman 1). Her time spent with these influential thinkers inspired her to found her own literary magazine, Challenge, with an initial investment of $40 in 1934. Shortly after, following six issues and one attempted relaunch, West’s magazine-editing days ended when Richard Wright took over her New Challenge to transform the magazine into a communist-oriented publication in 1937 (Scutts 1). Six years later, West returned to Massachusetts, moving away from the city to Martha’s Vineyard where she could focus on her writing (“Dorothy West” 1). There, she published her first novel, The Living is Easy, which satirized West’s own experience growing up as a member of the black bourgeois of Massachusetts. She then went on to publish her second novel, The Wedding, nearly fifty years later in 1995 before her death in 1998.

Norman Macleod
“Asylum of a Century’s Silence”

Benjamin Appel
“As A Friend”

Valdemar Hill
“Jessie’s Mother”

George B. Linn
“When Ladies Legislate”

Clarence Hill
“The Canny Cannibal”

Frank M. Davis
“Snapshots of the Cotton South”

Sterling Brown
“Old Lem”

Owen Dodson
“From Those Shores We Have Come”

Charles H. Ford
“War, to the Ethiopians”

Robert Davies
“South Chicago, May, 1937”

Margaret Walker
“Four  Poems”

Anthony Lespes
“Song for Youth”
(Translated by Langston Hughes)

Richard Wright
“Blueprint for Negro Writing”

Allyn Keith
“A Note on Negro Nationalism”

Eugene Holmes
“Problems Facing the Negro Writer”

Verna Arvey
“The Ballets of William Grant Still”

Alain Locke
Review of A Long Way From Home

Marian Minus
Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Ralph Ellison
Review of These Low Grounds

Henry Lee Moon
Review of American Stuff

Andrews, William L., et al. The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2001, pp. 428-429. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/davidson/detail.action?docID=430299.

Daniel, Walter C. “Challenge Magazine: An Experiment That Failed.” CLA Journal, vol. 19, no. 4, 1976, pp. 494–503.

“Dorothy West.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, 27 Aug. 1998, www.economist.com/obituary/1998/08/27/dorothy-west.

Garman, Emma.“Feminize Your Canon: Dorothy West.” The Paris Review, 11 July 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/11/feminize-your-canon-dorothy-west/.

Johnson, James Weldon. “Foreword.” Challenge, Mar. 1934, pp. 2.

Scutts, Joanna. “The Woman Who Changed the Game for Black Writers.” Time, Time, 3 Feb. 2016, http://time.com/4199755/dorothy-west-history/.

The President and Fellows of Harvard College. “Schlesinger Library Dorothy West Digital Collection.” Schlesinger Library Online Digital Collections, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard University), 2018, schlesinger.radcliffe.harvard.edu/onlinecollections/west/.

West, Dorothy. “Dear Reader.” Challenge, May 1935, p. 45.

West, Dorothy. “Dear Reader.” Challenge, Jan. 1936, p. 38.

Compiled by Matthew Days (Class of 2019, Davidson College) and a fellow student.