The Press: A Living Tradition

Over burgundy and brandy at Boston’s Parker House in May 1857, there occurred a rare fusion of good minds and venturesome money. In ten hours at table, eight Bostonians agreed to start a magazine “devoted to literature, art and politics” that would “endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.” Thus was born the Atlantic Monthly, whose first issue, edited by Poet James Russell Lowell, appeared 100 years ago this week. Eight editors, 1,200 issues and some 100 million words later, the Atlantic is the second oldest magazine of ideas (after 107-year-old Harper’s) in the U.S., and one of the few in any country to survive a century.

Molded Mandate. Still edited in Boston, the unorthodox, politically independent Atlantic has grown from a genteel gazette for Brahmins into a national monthly of moment that boasts more readers in California than in any Eastern state. From Walt Whitman to Archibald MacLeish, from Thoreau to Thornton Wilder, it has diligently cultivated the best U.S. writers of every decade since its founding. In its broader role as an exponent of the American idea, it has molded its mandate to the times and, at its best, brought to trie vital issues of the day that “nervous force” without which, as Atlantic Editor Walter Hines Page said in 1902, “a magazine deserves to die.”

The alert Atlantic was one of the first U.S. magazines to devote regular sections to news of education, art, music and science. It plunged eagerly into controversies over Darwin and Al Smith, published William James’s eloquent plea for world government ten years before World War I, exposed Stock Exchange malpractices in 1926 that were not banned by law until after the crash. Unlike most “quality” magazines, the Atlantic today aims at giving the reader a well-rounded view of the month’s events as well as the standard quota of articles and criticism.

Papa’s Fifty Grand. The Atlantic’s nervous force was apparent in its first year, when Editor Lowell and Ralph Waldo Emerson pounded out white-hot antislavery editorials, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier contributed poetry, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had given the Atlantic its name, wrote The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. The Atlantic, long famed for its fiction, has “enjoyed a perpetual state of literary grace,” as Professor Frank Luther Mott once noted. When Boston started fading as literary hub of the U.S., the magazine introduced its readers to such diverse talents as Bret Harte and Kipling, Mark Twain and Henry James.

In competition with better-heeled fiction magazines, the Atlantic—which helped pioneer the short story—has long been forced to search for stories by new and inexpensive writers, and has started many U.S. authors on the road to fame. Example: in 1927, after Cosmopolitan, the old Scribner’s, Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s had all turned down a brutally succinct short story about a crooked prizefighter, it was accepted by Staffer Edward Weeks, now editor of the Atlantic. Titled Fifty Grand, it was the first story by Ernest Hemingway to be published in a general-circulation U.S. magazine.

Survival Formula. Like most magazines of ideas, the Atlantic has sunk at times into near-fatal lethargy. In Jubilee (Atlantic-Little, Brown), a 100th anniversary winnowing of Atlantica published this week, Editor Weeks says that his magazine has survived because it has “changed editors more frequently than any other magazine in our field.” Says Weeks: “Whenever the circulation began to sag, a younger mind was brought in.”

Edward Weeks, 59, a slim, hawk-nosed New Jerseyite of good schooling (Cornell, Harvard, Cambridge) and filigree style, has been the Atlantic’s editor for 19 years, longer than all but his immediate predecessor, the celebrated Ellery Sedgwick. Weeks’s Atlantic has had to endure the penalties of lasting into a time when new forms of journalism and communication offer new competition to the printed word as well as many other ways for writers and thinkers to express themselves. But the privately owned monthly (major shareholder: Mrs. Marion D. Strachan of Groton, Mass.) has prospered, increased advertising revenue 100% and doubled circulation (to 241,520) under Weeks and his editorial staff of 8. And its 268-page, 100th anniversary edition, typographically redesigned and filled with original contributions by some of the world’s best-known writers (for one example, see box), is proof that the Atlantic is still, in its editor’s words, “a living tradition.”