Our Eliot

The mid-century explosion of articles about and reproductions of T.S. Eliot’s work in the pages of big magazines like Time and Life repatriates modernism, especially Eliot's The Waste Land, as the cultural arm of Cold War American nationalism. Thus, at the same time that modernism saturates American popular culture, mass-market magazines reimagine themselves as modernist texts.

Making Modernism Big

FRESH ON THE HEELS OF COMPILING FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS (1920), a short-story collection mostly culled from fiction previously published in the Saturday Evening Post, F. Scott Fitzgerald momentarily paused to imagine how popular magazines might occupy themselves when no one is reading them. The resulting short play, “This Is a Magazine,” published in ...

Working from Home

Journalistically speaking … —DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, “Federer Both Flesh and Not” THIS BOOK HAS MADE A CASE FOR THE CENTRALITY OF journalism—its office cultures, professional protocols, and print media—in the development and reception of literary modernism in the United States over the first half of the twentieth century. It has tracked the two fields’ codependence from the migration of the staff system out of the newspapers and into muckraking magazines like ...

On the Clock

Time Inc., at one time the largest media conglomerate in the world, invented the “poet-reporter” by strategically hiring modernist authors to develop its uniformly stylish periodical voice. In different ways James Agee's and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock formalize the felt erasure between personal writing and salaried corporate work that accompanies their jobs in a corporate media company.

Willa Cather’s Promiscuous Fiction

Willa Cather’s ideal of the “unfurnished novel,” while ostensibly a rejection of what she calls “machine-made fiction,”, emerges directly out of her editorial work for the most influential magazine of the 1890s, McClure’s. It is here that she learned the best creative act is the one that cannot be seen on the page, which becomes the guiding aesthetic principal of her mature novels.

Hemingway’s Disappearing Style

The publication of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in Life magazine, where it sold more than two million copies in 48 hours, capstones two midcentury debates about the proper format of literature (book or magazine) and the extent to which Hemingway's literary style--and modernism in general--have become synonymous with American popular culture. Simultaneously, the rise of television forces big magazines to conceptualize themselves as a “minor” form in 1950s media culture.

Printing the Color Line in The Crisis

W.E.B. Du Bois’ and Jessie Fauset’s interest in new printing technologies – multigraphs, linotypes, and halftone reproduction – are crucial for understanding the political and aesthetic missions of The Crisis. They envision the magazine as both constituting and creating an archive of a national African American intellectual community; at the same time Du Bois' essays, Fauset's fiction, and Frank Walt's illustrations thematize the technological and political roadblocks for establishing a recognizably black print culture in the 1910s and 1920s.