| The thesis contends that the development of American literary modernism took place in more popular venues than formerly believed. This premise is supported through an analysis of the reception history of the Smart Set magazine, an early 20th century mass-market magazine published in New York and edited by the famous literary critic H. L. Mencken and the then well-known drama critic George Jean Nathan. The Smart Set was not one of the little magazines, the small circulation avant-garde monthlies such as the Dial and the Little Review that are currently associated with the development of modernism in America. Rather, the Smart Set was a monthly magazine with a sizable audience of 30,000--40,000 readers. In this commercial magazine, Mencken and Nathan published and promoted the early drama, poetry, and prose of such American and European writers as Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce.; While considerable academic attention has been paid to the little magazines of the era, the mass-market magazines have, until recently, received little academic attention. This neglect of the mass-market magazines has resulted in a distorted impression of cultural and literary trends in the United States at the turn-of-the-century since at that time monthly mass-market magazines reached more readers than newspapers and weekly periodicals combined, and vastly outsold individual books. During this period, the Smart Set played a pivotal role in introducing American readers to the writers, trends, and ideas of American modernism. |
