Early American literary magazines

Abstract

In October 1803, Charles Brockden Brown began the publication of a periodical entitled the Literary Magazine, and American Register, in the new nation’s publishing hot spot, Philadelphia. This chapter seeks to offer a version of how American magazines functioned in the pre-revolutionary era and the Early Republic. It addresses this through attention to the question of the literary and its location within that larger problem. Only a small number of magazines were attempted in absolute terms in the British colonies in North America prior to the American Revolution. The requirements of the magazine business militated heavily against the slowly churning mills of American literature. American magazines and autochthonous literary production were read against the known quantities of British publications, and while many editors insisted on their desire to print American originals, readers sometimes resisted the impulse. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the upheavals of the Revolution, no colonial magazine survived into the Early Republic.