The literary magazine in Gilded Age America

Abstract

This chapter examines a sampling of select “literary” magazines, based in New York, across three decades. New York City during Gilded Age America could in fact be considered a magazine in and of itself: a vast storehouse of publishing institutions whose presses produced not only poems, stories, and serialized novels in abundance but advertisements, political cartoons, and articles and columns on the latest fashions, technological advances, and social developments. Frank Leslie and Company also had editions of its extensive magazine offerings printed in both Spanish and German. Perhaps no Gilded Age magazine is more representative of genteel culture than The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. The Century is interesting case study in the multiplicity of important literary forms that a single magazine can provide. Like poems and serialized stories, literary reviews, personal ads, letters to the editor, art criticism, histories, and biographies are additional forms of “literature” that can be found often in just a single issue of a “literary” magazine.