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Literary magazine

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The Little Magazines That Changed Everything

In 1914, a young American banker living in London sent a strange poem to a small magazine in Chicago. The poem was long, dense, and defied nearly every convention of the time. Its opening line—"Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table"—was unlike anything readers had encountered. The magazine was Poetry, barely two years old and operating on a shoestring budget. The banker was T. S. Eliot. And "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" would become one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century.

This is what literary magazines do. They find the strange, the experimental, the not-yet-celebrated, and they give it a home before anyone else will.

What Exactly Is a Literary Magazine?

A literary magazine is a periodical—meaning it comes out regularly, like a newspaper or regular magazine—devoted primarily to literature. But here's where it differs from what you might find at an airport newsstand: literary magazines care about the writing itself, not about selling advertising or chasing mass audiences.

These publications typically feature short stories, poetry, and essays. Many also include literary criticism (thoughtful analysis of how and why literature works), book reviews, interviews with authors, and biographical profiles. Some specialize—Poet Lore, founded in 1889, publishes only poetry and has been doing so for over a century.

You'll hear these publications called by different names. "Literary journals" sounds more academic. "Little magazines" emphasizes their small-scale, often handmade quality and their willingness to take risks on unknown writers. The term "little" isn't dismissive—it's a badge of honor, signaling independence from commercial pressures.

Born in the Coffeehouses of Europe

The first literary magazine appeared in France in 1684, when a philosopher named Pierre Bayle founded Nouvelles de la république des lettres—roughly translated as "News from the Republic of Letters." That phrase itself tells us something important about the era. European intellectuals imagined themselves as citizens of an invisible country united not by borders or governments but by ideas and learning. A magazine that could circulate those ideas across distances seemed almost revolutionary.

But literary magazines truly flourished in the nineteenth century, riding a wave of rising literacy, cheaper printing, and the emergence of a middle class hungry for culture. In Britain, the Edinburgh Review appeared in 1802, founded by three young critics who wanted to shake up the literary establishment. It was sharp, opinionated, and sometimes vicious—Lord Byron once called its reviews "the assassin of the literary reputation."

Britain soon had competitors: the Westminster Review in 1824, The Spectator in 1828, the Athenaeum that same year. Each had its own character and audience.

America was building its own tradition. The North American Review began in 1815 in Boston and still publishes today, making it the oldest American literary magazine—though it took a break during World War II. The Yale Review, founded four years later in 1819, never stopped, giving it the distinction of longest continuous publication.

Something fascinating was happening in these early years. The magazines weren't just publishing literature—they were creating literary culture. The Dial, which ran from 1840 to 1844, became the voice of the Transcendentalist movement. Ralph Waldo Emerson edited it for a time. These weren't just venues for work; they were movements with pages.

The Explosion of the Small Press

By the mid-twentieth century, something shifted. Literary magazines multiplied rapidly, and they got smaller, stranger, more specialized.

This boom corresponded with the rise of the small press—independent publishers operating outside the major New York houses. Suddenly, anyone with access to a mimeograph machine (a kind of early copying device that used ink and stencils) could start a magazine. And many did.

The Paris Review launched in 1953, founded by a group of young Americans living abroad who wanted to interview writers about their craft rather than just review their books. Its "Writers at Work" interview series became legendary—long conversations with Hemingway, Faulkner, Borges, and countless others about how they actually made their art.

The Massachusetts Review and Poetry Northwest appeared in 1959. The Denver Quarterly followed in 1965. The 1970s brought another surge: Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Granta, The Missouri Review, and Agni all began during this decade.

These magazines couldn't pay much—often nothing at all—but that was almost the point. Writers published in them for love, for reputation, for the chance to be read by other serious writers and editors. Steve Almond, Jacob M. Appel, and Stephen Dixon built their careers almost entirely through literary magazine publication, accumulating credits one story at a time until book publishers took notice.

Two Magazines, Two Philosophies

To understand what literary magazines meant to American intellectual life in the twentieth century, consider two of the most influential—and how completely they disagreed about what literature was for.

The Kenyon Review, edited by the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, championed what became known as the New Criticism. This approach insisted that a poem or story should be analyzed purely on its own terms—its language, structure, imagery—without reference to the author's biography or political views. The Kenyon Review was, as its editors put it, "avowedly unpolitical." Literature was its own world, and that world was enough.

The Partisan Review took exactly the opposite stance. It had started with ties to the American Communist Party and the John Reed Club, a leftist literary organization. Even after breaking with the party, politics remained central to its identity. You couldn't separate literature from the world that produced it. Art meant something only in relation to power, class, and ideology.

These weren't just aesthetic disagreements. They represented fundamentally different answers to the question of what literature is for. Is a poem a self-contained object of beauty, or is it a weapon? Can you read Ezra Pound without considering his fascism? Should you?

Both magazines published brilliant work. Both launched major careers. And their argument—about whether art serves politics or politics corrupts art—has never really been resolved.

Argentina's Political Crucible

In Argentina, literary magazines were never merely aesthetic ventures. They were political battlegrounds from the very beginning.

The country's first literary magazine, La Aljaba, appeared in 1830—remarkably, it was created by and for women, making it one of the earliest such publications in the world. Seven years later, Juan Bautista Alberdi—the political philosopher whose ideas would later shape Argentina's constitution—founded La Moda. Through it, the Generation of 1837 introduced Romanticism and liberal political thought from Europe into Argentine culture.

Then came Martín Fierro in 1924, named after the epic poem that defined Argentine national identity. This magazine became the engine of the country's avant-garde, heavily influenced by ultraism—a poetic movement that stripped away ornament and aimed for concentrated, surprising imagery. A young Jorge Luis Borges was among its contributors.

When Martín Fierro's contributors founded Sur in 1931, they created what might be the most influential literary magazine in Latin American history. Borges published many of his greatest stories there, including "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Circular Ruins," and "The Aleph"—mind-bending fictions that reimagined what stories could do. But Sur was also fiercely political, openly opposing both Peronism and Nazism at considerable risk to its editors.

Think about what this means. Some of the most important literature of the twentieth century first appeared not in books but in the pages of a magazine that was simultaneously fighting fascism. Art and politics weren't opposites. They were the same fight.

The Awards and the Ecosystem

Literary magazines aren't just publication venues. They're the foundation of an entire ecosystem that identifies, cultivates, and rewards literary talent.

The Pushcart Prize—one of the most prestigious honors for writers published in small presses and literary magazines—draws from this world. Each year, editors nominate their best pieces, and a committee selects winners for an annual anthology. For many writers, a Pushcart nomination or prize is a career-defining credential.

The O. Henry Awards perform a similar function for short fiction. And the annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays draw heavily from literary magazine publication—in many years, almost all the selected pieces originally appeared in these small journals.

This creates a strange economy. Literary magazines typically can't pay professional rates. Some pay nothing at all. But publication in the right magazines leads to prizes, which lead to book deals, which lead to teaching positions and speaking fees. The prestige flows upward. The money, eventually, follows.

Going Digital—Reluctantly, Then Enthusiastically

The first online literary magazine appeared in 1984. It was called SwiftCurrent, and it functioned more like a database than a publication in the traditional sense—a place where literary works were stored rather than curated and presented.

The Mississippi Review became the first established literary magazine to publish a fully online issue in 1995. Three years later, Fence and Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern launched to enthusiastic audiences. Around 1996, online literary magazines began appearing regularly.

The transition was not smooth. Many writers and editors dismissed online publications as inferior—not quite real magazines, more like "ezines," a term that carried a whiff of amateurism. How could something without ink and paper carry the same weight?

But the economics were undeniable. Print magazines cost money to produce and ship. Many survived only through grants, university support, or the unpaid labor of devoted editors. Online publication eliminated most of those costs. A single person with strong taste and an internet connection could reach readers worldwide.

Today, thousands of online literary publications exist. The old distinctions between print and digital have mostly dissolved. What matters is the quality of the work and the reputation of the editors selecting it. In Argentina, while print magazines have declined, publications like Revista Ñ thrive online, continuing the country's tradition of literary journalism in a new medium.

Why Little Magazines Still Matter

Here's something that might seem paradoxical. In an age when anyone can self-publish instantly—when a writer can post a story to their own website or social media with no gatekeepers at all—literary magazines remain vital.

Why? Because curation matters. Because the act of selection—an editor saying "yes, this is good enough"—still carries meaning. Because being published alongside other writers you admire puts your work in a conversation.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison houses one of the most extensive collections of little magazines in the United States, approximately seven thousand English-language literary publications from the twentieth century. This archive exists because scholars recognized that these ephemeral, often financially precarious publications had documented something important: the history of literary experimentation, of risk-taking, of the unglamorous work that precedes recognition.

Every famous writer was once unknown. Somewhere, usually, there was a small magazine willing to take a chance on them before anyone else would. That's what little magazines have always done. They are laboratories where literature evolves.

And if you want to understand what literature might become ten or twenty years from now, the best place to look is probably not the bestseller list. It's the little magazines—still small, still financially uncertain, still irregular, still showcasing what no one else will publish yet.