Wikipedia Deep Dive

Little magazine

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The Magazines That Couldn't Afford to Play It Safe

In 1896, a graduate student at Washington State University named Keith Abbot wanted to publish a poetry magazine. He had no money. So he stole a box of mimeograph paper from the university and borrowed a friend's mimeograph machine. The magazine he produced, Blue Suede Shoes, joined a peculiar tradition in American publishing: the little magazine, where poverty wasn't just a constraint but practically a requirement for membership.

The name sounds dismissive. George Plimpton, the legendary editor of The Paris Review, certainly thought so. But the term stuck, and it captures something essential about these publications. They were little in budget, little in circulation, often little in physical size—typically about five inches by eight inches, roughly the dimensions of a paperback novel. What they lacked in resources, they made up for in ambition.

What Makes a Magazine "Little"

The defining characteristic isn't size or subject matter. It's penury.

A 1978 study by the editors of TriQuarterly magazine put it bluntly: these publications "put experiment before ease, and art before comment." They could afford to take those risks precisely because they couldn't afford much of anything else. They weren't trying to make money. Most of them couldn't have made money even if they'd wanted to.

This poverty created a kind of freedom. Ezra Pound, the modernist poet and tireless advocate for experimental literature, observed that the more a magazine cares about profits, the less willing it becomes to publish work that might alienate a mainstream audience. The little magazines inverted this logic entirely. With nothing to lose financially, they could publish whatever they believed mattered.

Frederick J. Hoffman, an English professor who wrote a foundational study of little magazines in 1942, defined them as outlets for "artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses." The mainstream magazines wouldn't touch this material—not because it was bad, but because it was unproven, difficult, or ahead of its time.

How far ahead? Robie Macauley, who edited the Kenyon Review, thought little magazines "ought to be ten years ahead of general acceptance." A decade of obscurity before the culture catches up.

The Technology of Poverty

The history of little magazines tracks closely with the history of cheap reproduction technology.

In the 1960s, the mimeograph machine sparked what historians call the "mimeo revolution." A mimeograph works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper—crude but effective, and crucially, affordable. Suddenly anyone with access to the machine and a stack of paper could become a publisher. Hence Keith Abbot's resourceful theft.

The photocopier brought another revolution in the 1980s. You no longer needed to own the equipment at all. Companies like Kinko's, the chain of copy shops that became ubiquitous on college campuses, would do the work for you. The barrier to entry dropped again.

Then came the internet. By the turn of the twenty-first century, little magazines migrated online—first to blogs, then to Twitter and Facebook, eventually to podcasts and video. The physical constraints vanished entirely. A magazine could exist with no printing costs, no mailing costs, no production schedule at all.

But something interesting happened along the way. The technology changed; the economics of prestige did not. Even now, with publishing costs approaching zero, most little magazines still operate on the edge of insolvency, still rely on grants and university sponsorship, still pay their contributors poorly or not at all. The poverty seems almost constitutional—built into the definition of what these publications are.

The Editors and Their Obsessions

Little magazine editors, as a class, share certain characteristics. Hoffman described them as idiosyncratic and dissatisfied with the status quo. These are not people who went into publishing to make a living. They went in because they believed something was missing from the literary conversation, and they intended to provide it.

This personal investment has consequences. Most little magazines don't outlast their founding editors. When the animating personality departs, the magazine usually dies with them. There are exceptions—The Sewanee Review, founded in 1892, is still publishing today—but they're rare. The typical little magazine burns bright for a few years, then flames out.

The financing schemes these editors devised ranged from ingenious to, as one scholar delicately put it, "devious." Some paid for printing out of their own pockets. Others secured grants from universities or arts foundations. Some, like our friend Keith Abbot, simply took what they needed.

Where It All Started

The lineage traces back to The Dial, published in Boston from 1840 to 1844 under the editorship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. This was the house organ of the Transcendentalist movement—the loose collection of New England thinkers who believed in individual intuition, the divinity of nature, and the corruption of mainstream society. If that sounds like a countercultural position, it was. The little magazine as a form was countercultural from the beginning.

Across the Atlantic, The Savoy appeared in London in 1896, edited by Arthur Symons. Its explicit agenda was "revolt against Victorian materialism." The Victorians valued industry, commerce, respectability, progress measured in pounds sterling. The Savoy valued beauty, sensation, and art for its own sake. The two value systems were incompatible.

Throughout the twentieth century, little magazines served as incubators for literary movements that would later reshape the mainstream. Modernism and Post-modernism both gestated in these pages. Writers who were too strange, too difficult, too new for commercial publishers found homes in little magazines. Some of those writers became canonical figures. The magazines that published them mostly did not.

A Case Study: The American South

The history of little magazines in the American South offers a particularly clear window into how these publications work—how they reflect the anxieties and aspirations of their moment.

After the Civil War, Southern little magazines served a specific function: keeping Southern literature alive. The region was economically devastated, culturally defensive, and cut off from the national mainstream. Magazines like The Land We Love, published from 1866 to 1869 by Daniel H. Hill, mixed literature with agriculture and military history—a combination that might seem odd until you remember that the readership was largely former Confederate soldiers trying to rebuild their lives and their sense of identity.

Other magazines from this era include De Bow's Review, briefly revived from its antebellum incarnation, and The Southern Bivouac, which ran from 1882 to 1887 and was one of the last publications devoted to what its editors called "the Lost Cause"—the mythology that recast the Confederacy as a noble, doomed civilization rather than a slaveholding republic.

The second phase came at the turn of the twentieth century, when young scholars in Southern universities began pushing back against this mythology. William P. Trent founded The Sewanee Review in 1892, and his critical stance toward Southern tradition influenced John Spencer Bassett to start The South Atlantic Quarterly in 1902. Bassett, a professor at Trinity College (now Duke University), took real professional risks; his magazine directly addressed racial issues and reform in a region that did not welcome such discussions.

By the 1920s, Southern little magazines had become vehicles for modernism. The Fugitive, published from 1922 by the Vanderbilt University Group—including John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, who would become major American poets—championed new forms and new sensibilities. The Double Dealer, based in New Orleans from 1921 to 1926, served as another modernist outpost. These magazines helped launch what literary historians call the Southern Renascence, the flowering of Southern literature in the mid-twentieth century that produced William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Tennessee Williams.

The 1930s brought yet another turn. The Great Depression forced a reckoning with the South's economic future. Should the region industrialize and join the national economy, or should it preserve its agrarian character? Little magazines took sides—mostly on the agrarian side, arguing against what they saw as the soullessness of industrial capitalism. This wasn't nostalgia for the antebellum period exactly, but it drew on some of the same romantic attachments to land, tradition, and local community.

The Numbers Game

By the late twentieth century, thousands of little magazines existed across North America. Most could not support themselves. They survived on grants from state arts councils and the National Endowment for the Arts, on subsidies from universities and foundations, often with unpaid or barely-paid staff.

The ratio of submissions to publications remained staggering. The Atlanta Review reported in 1997 that it received twelve thousand submissions for every one hundred pieces it actually published. That's a 0.8 percent acceptance rate—more selective than Harvard, and for far less reward. The writers submitting to these magazines were not doing it for money or fame. They were doing it because these were the only venues that would consider their work.

The pattern holds today. Despite the internet's promise of unlimited publishing capacity, little magazines remain fiercely selective. The scarcity is artificial but real—not a scarcity of pages, but of attention, of editorial commitment, of the stamp that says this work matters.

Why They Matter

The case for little magazines rests on a simple premise: the market doesn't always know best.

Commercial publishers serve commercial interests. They need to sell enough copies to stay in business, which means they need to publish work that appeals to existing tastes. But tastes evolve, and the work that shapes that evolution often starts out unpopular. The modernist poets whose names are now taught in every university English department were once too difficult, too strange, too new for mainstream publication. They needed somewhere else to go.

Little magazines provided that somewhere. They still do. The online revolution hasn't eliminated the form; it has multiplied it. The barriers to entry are lower than ever, which means more people can start magazines—and more magazines can fail, which they do, constantly, just as they always have.

The failures are part of the point. A little magazine doesn't need to last forever. It needs to exist long enough to publish something that wouldn't have been published otherwise, to give a platform to a voice that needed one, to push the conversation a few inches in a direction it wasn't going to go on its own. Then it can die, and something else can take its place.

This is inefficient. It is wasteful. It produces mountains of work that no one remembers. But somewhere in those mountains, occasionally, is something that changes how we think about what literature can be. The little magazines exist to find it.

The Opposite of a Little Magazine

To understand what little magazines are, it helps to think about what they're not.

The opposite of a little magazine is a commercial periodical like The New Yorker or The Atlantic—publications that publish literary work but need to turn a profit doing so. These magazines pay their contributors well, have professional editorial staffs, reach millions of readers. They are not avant-garde. They cannot afford to be. Their readers expect a certain level of accessibility, and the advertisers expect a certain kind of audience.

Another opposite is the academic journal, which shares the little magazine's indifference to profit but has entirely different goals. Academic journals exist to advance scholarly careers; they publish peer-reviewed research for specialist audiences. Little magazines publish creative work—poetry, fiction, essays—for readers who want to be moved or challenged or surprised. The difference is between knowledge and art.

There's also the zine, which overlaps with the little magazine but isn't quite the same thing. Zines tend to be even more personal, more handmade, more explicitly countercultural. A little magazine, even a poor one, usually aspires to some version of professional presentation. A zine celebrates its own roughness.

The distinctions blur at the edges. Some publications that call themselves little magazines look more like zines. Some university-sponsored journals function like little magazines. The category is loose, defined more by spirit than by strict criteria. But the spirit is recognizable: a commitment to publishing work that matters regardless of whether it sells, an acceptance of financial precariousness as the price of editorial freedom, a belief that the mainstream needs alternatives.

The Tradition Continues

Several little magazines from the twentieth century are still publishing. The Sewanee Review, founded in 1892, claims the title of oldest continuously published literary quarterly in America. Southwest Review dates from 1915. Virginia Quarterly Review started in 1925. The Georgia Review has been running since 1947.

These survivors have mostly found institutional homes—universities that subsidize their operations in exchange for the prestige of housing a respected literary publication. The model works, after a fashion. It provides stability. But it also raises questions about whether a magazine can remain truly independent when its existence depends on an institution's continued support.

The scholars debate this. Some argue that university-affiliated magazines aren't really little magazines at all—that true little magazines must be unaffiliated, scrappy, perpetually on the edge of collapse. The majority view, though, is that the affiliation doesn't disqualify them. What matters is the commitment to publishing experimental, non-commercial work. As long as that commitment holds, the magazine belongs to the tradition.

Meanwhile, new little magazines continue to appear—online, in print, in formats that would have been unimaginable to the transcendentalists who started The Dial in 1840. The technology changes. The economics remain impossible. The editors remain obsessive, dissatisfied, convinced that something important is being ignored.

They're usually right. That's why the tradition persists.