Title:
The Anvil: The Proletarian Fiction Magazine
Later united with Partisan Review to form Partisan Review and Anvil

Date of Publication:
May 1933 – November 1935

Place(s) of Publication:
Moberly, Missouri

Frequency of Publication:
Bimonthly

Circulation:
Varied between 850 (Summer 1934) and 4,000 (3:13)

Publisher:
The Anvil Press, Moberly, Missouri.

Physical Description:
7 1/2″ x 10 1/2.” 30 pages of fiction and poetry. Some illustrations, typically small political cartoons or article accompaniments rather than art reproductions. No. 1- 10 published without Vol. numbers, No. 11-12 printed as Vol. 2, No. 13 as Vol. 3.

Price:
15 cents

Editor(s):
Jack Conroy

Associate Editor(s):
Walter Snow (March/April 1935 – Oct./Nov. 1935, no. 10 – 3:13)
Clinton Simpson (May/June 1935 – Oct./Nov. 1935, 2:11 – 3:13)
Michael Gold (October/November 1935, 3:13)

Libraries with Complete Original Issues:
Harvard University; Brown University; University of Virginia; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Indiana University

Reprint Editions:
New York: AMS Reprint Co., 1963.

Jack Conroy founded The Anvil in May, 1933, as an outlet for the Midwestern farming and working community to express their opinions in the midst of stifling living conditions. A laborer himself during the Great Depression, Conroy began publishing The Anvil, a magazine of fiction, out of his hometown in Moberly, Missouri, where economic and natural forces had combined to oppress the working classes.

Although The Anvil and its editors did not take a definitive political stance, its contributors were strongly proletarian. Many glorified the Soviet Union in their stories and advocated its philosophies’ extensions into America, with hopes that a leftist society would rectify the problems their working class experienced. Conroy did not explicitly propose a militant changeover, but he did create a forum for writers to advocate such proletarian values.

The Anvil did not receive contributions from more well-known authors, with the exception of a small number of prose pieces and poems by Langston Hughes. The magazine preferred the vigor of the average man, and it offered America’s working class a chance to speak their minds. Louis Adamic captured the true purpose of The Anvil when he described Jack Conroy as “one of the leaders in the movement which aim[ed] to demonstrate ‘that the life of common workers and the stench of their sweat and toil are as authentic literary material as the vicissitudes of society’” (14).

Jack Conroy describes the mission of the magazine in the inaugural issues of The Anvil:

“Contributors to The Anvil, successor to The Rebel Poet, and members of the Proletarian Writers’ League, successor to The Rebel Poets, need not be Communists, of course. My associate editors and I are going to try to present vital, vigorous material drawn from the farms, mines, mills, factories and offices of America. We’ll not devote much space to theoretical problems. For theoretical guidance, we refer you to The New Masses and International Literature.”

Jack Conroy, “The Anvil and its Aims.” 1:1 (May 1933): 4.

Later in the magazine’s run, the establishment of the Anvil League of Writers suggested a shift in the publication’s philosophy:

“The League also will try to improve the literary standard of THE ANVIL and to develop promising young writers. It will urge authors not only to deal with proletarian material but also to create revolutionary stories by bringing out the implications of the ceaseless class struggle between capital and labor, the internal conflicts within the classes as seen from a revolutionary viewpoint.”

“National Organizational Committee.” No. 9 (Jan. 1935): 30.

Jack Conroy (Dec. 5, 1898 – Feb. 28, 1990)
Editor: May 1933 – Oct. / Nov. 1935

Born in a coal-mining camp near Moberly, Missouri, Jack Conroy experienced early tragedy when his father died in a mining explosion in 1909, which forced Conroy to leave school at the age of thirteen to work in a car shop. After World War I he returned to school, taking classes at the University of Missouri, Columbia in the fall of 1920. After losing his job because of the Great Railroad Strike of 1922, Conroy traveled the Midwest looking for low-paying jobs. An avid reader, he began to write from the perspective of a laborer and sought to open a forum for others to do so as well. During the Depression-plagued ’30s, he edited The Rebel Poet from 1931-32 and founded The Anvil in 1933, which merged with the Partisan Review in 1935. In that same year, however, Conroy clashed with Communist party leaders who helped finance the magazine, and lost his editorial privileges. Despite an effort to reenter the magazine scene with the Chicago-based New Anvil in 1939, the magazine did not gain popularity and closed the next year.

Nelson Algren
“Pastoral”
“Within the City”
“A Holiday in Texas”

S. Balch
“Red Letter”
“To the Manlovers of Our Local Four Hundred”

B. C. Hagglund
“The One-Man Revolution”

Langston Hughes
“Park Bench”
“Ballad of Lenin”
“Dr. Brown’s Decision”

Boris Israel
“Will They Believe Us?”

Orrick Johns
“For A Dead Speaker”
“July Twenty-eight, 1932”

H. H. Lewis
“Down the Skidway”
“Dogmatrix”

Vladimir Pillin
“For Defense”

John C. Rogers
“When the Sap Rises”
“Middle Class”

Edwin Rolfe
“Not Men Alone”
“Barn in Wisconsin”
“Something Still Lives”

George Salvatore
“I’ll Steal First”

Leonard Spier
“Battle in Embryo”

Henry George Weiss
“To the Soviet Union”
“Lenin Lives”

Richard Wright
“Child of the Dead and Forgotten Gods”

Adamic, Louis. “Nothing to Lose.” Saturday Review of Literature 12.14 (1935): 14.

Cheyney, Ralph, and Jack Conroy, eds. Unrest: The Rebel Poets’ Anthology for 1929. London: Arthur H. Stockwell, Ltd., 1929.

Anvil: The Proletarian Fiction Magazine. 1935. Microfilm. No. 1 – 13. New York: New York Public Library.

Gale, Robert L. “Conroy, Jack.” American National Biography Online. Feb. 2000. Davidson College Lib., Davidson, NC. 26 Oct 2004.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

Larsen, Erling. “Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited or, The Way It Was.” Proletarian Writers of the Thirties. Ed. David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1968.

Murphy, James F. The Proletarian Movement: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Phelps, Wallace. “Form and Content.” Partisan Review 11.6 (1935): 31-39.

“The Anvil” compiled by David Tulis (Class of ’05, Davidson College)

Title:
Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature 

Date of Publication: 
Autumn 1940 – Autumn 1960

Place(s) of Publication:
Urbana, Illinois

Frequency of Publication: 
Quarterly

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher: 
University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana Press (1952-1960),
1325 South Oak Street, Urbana, Ill.

Physical Description: 
24 cm. Straightforward textual layout: 10-15 pages of fiction, scholarship, theatre, and poetry. No illustrations or cartoons in any issue. The magazine for 20 volumes with four quarterly issue per volume. One-year subscriptions cost $1.00 and two-year subscriptions cost $1.75.

Editor(s): 
Kerker Quinn, Charles Shattuck, Kenneth Andrews, W.R. Moses, Thomas Bledsoe, Keith Huntress, W. McNeal Lowry, Donald Hill, and Robert Bauer. 

Associate Editor(s):
None

Libraries with Original Issues: 
University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana; Yale University; Pennsylvania State University; University of Michigan; University of Virginia

Reprint Editions: 
New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946

Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature was inaugurated in 1940 by Kerker Quinn at his alma mater, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, while Quinn was an Assistant Professor at the school. The magazine was distributed regularly from 1940 to 1960, publishing quarterly issues without any deviations. Accent published well-known figures like E.E. Cummings, Richard Wright, Sylvia Path, Eudora Welty, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. The magazine is also notably one of the first places where Flannery O’Connor, William Gass, and Grace Paley published their work.

Frederick Hoffman characterizes Accent as “eclectic”, a category he uses to describe magazines that are (perhaps loosely) associated with universities; they are not necessarily founded with the intent of glorifying a particular university, yet often reflect the character of the institution (Hoffman 9). From the very beginning, Accent sought to serve as a “representative collection of the best creative and critical writing of our time, carefully balancing the work of established authors with that of comparative unknowns”  (Hoffman 350). The magazine attempted to avoid a ‘biased viewpoint’, rejecting what it considered to be ‘stereotyped and the trivial and the unintelligible’ from its pages (Hoffman 350).

Accent’s most distinctive feature may be its diverse assortment of poems, short stories, and critical articles. The magazine rarely emphasized one form of writing over the other nor did they have special issues dedicated to one writer or piece. According to Clement Greenberg, “its ‘unbiased’ editorial policy belies its name, placing accent upon nothing in particular and asking to be nothing more than a grab bag of good reading” (Greenberg 45). Yet Greenberg also criticizes its neutral, objective tone as lacking character. He writes: “as a whole, this magazine is unexciting and unambitious. It leaves the reader with a strong thirst for a good refreshing dose of bias” (Ibid). In spite of its more conventional style and straightforward structure with its writing, Accent was a valuable, open forum for many well-known and unknown writers.

Unlike many little magazines of the time, Accent never had an editorial column. The magazine also never published a manifesto – only at the end of the first issue was a short statement of purpose, one of the few direct communications from the editors during its entire run. The statement is reprinted below:

The editors of Accent hope to build a magazine which discerning readers will welcome as a representative collection of the best creative and critical writing of our time, carefully balancing the
work of established authors with that of comparative unknowns. By avoiding a biased viewpoint and rejecting the stereotyped and the trivial and the unintelligible, they will try to make the
contents of each issue significant, varied and readable.

America has need and room for such a magazine. Look down the list of today’s periodicals–the few that are open to the serious creative writer either allow articles on current events to dwarf the
space left for him or else specialize in poetry or short stories or criticism to the exclusion of the other fields. Accent has not first-rate parallel in aim and scope at this time.

(Accent: 1 (1940), 63, qtd in Hendricks 75).

Kerker Quinn (1911-1969)
Editor: (1940-1960)

Founder and Editor for the entire twenty-year runtime of Accent, John Kerker Quinn was born in Urbana, Illinois into an intellectual family; his parents encouraged each of their three children to attend the local university. (Hendrix 40) Attending University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana as a graduate student in 1934, Quinn began his first little magazine, Direction: A Quarterly of New Literature.  Quinn edited Direction for two years, and the magazine was renamed Accent once Quinn joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1940 (Greasley, 332). Accent published the work of talented writers like Flannery O’Connor, William Gass, Langston Hughes, and Grace Paley, publishing their work. While the list of contributors is extensive, Quinn had a particularly close relationship with Hughes, O’Connor, and Plath, corresponding personally and welcoming Hughes to campus for guest lectures. (“J. Kerker Quinn and the Festival of Contemporary Arts.”)

Charles Shattuck (1911-1992)
Editor: (1940-1960)

Co-founder of Accent with Kerker Quinn, Charles Shattuck was born in Belvedere, Illinois to a similar background that encouraged intellectual curiosity and education. Shattuck earned his BA, MA and PhD from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. For most of his career, Shattuck was a full-time professor at the University of Illinois but he also taught as a Visiting Professor at Vassar College, specializing in teaching Experimental Theater (Saxon). An eminent Shakespeare scholar, Shattuck founded a reproduction of Bard’s Globe Theater and reestablished Elizabeth staging for Shakespearean plays (Ibid). A respected editor, scholar, and writer, Charles Shattuck corresponded with many of the premier writers published in Accent and helped the magazine flourish in its twenty-year career.

Bertolt Brecht
“The Horatians and the Curatians”

Kenneth Burke
“The Criticism of Criticism” (reviewing R.P. Blackmur’s The Lion and the Honey Honeycomb)
“Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore”

Joy Davidman
“Trojan Women”

Wallace Stevens
“In the Element of Antagonism”

Flannery O’Connor
“The Crop”
“The Geranium”

Grace Paley
“Goodbye and Good Luck”
“The Pale Pink Roast ”

Eudora Welty
“The Robber Bridegroom”

William Carlos Williams
Translations of Yvan Goll – “Landless John Circles the Earth Seven Times” and “Landless John Leads the Caravan”

Richard Wright “The Man Who Lived Underground”

Greasley, Philip A. Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume 2: Dimensions of the Midwestern Literary Imagination. Indiana University Press, 2016.

Greenberg, Clement. “The Renaissance of the Little Mag: Review of Accent, Diogens, Experimental Review, Vice Versa, and View’ in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgements 1949-1944.  edited by John O’Brian, University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp. 42-46.

Hendricks, Fredric Jefferson. “Accent” 1940-1960: The History of a Little Magazine. 1984. University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, PhD dissertation.

Hoffman, Frederick J. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princetown UP, 1947.

Michelson, Bruce. “American Literature in the Cornfields: Stuart Pratt Sherman and J. Kerker Quinn.” No Boundaries: University of Illinois Vignettes, edited by Lillian Hoddeson, University  of Illinois P, 2004, pp. 88-101.

Accompanying text for Dream Singer and Story Teller: Langston Hughes at University of Illinois by Jameatris Rimkus “J. Kerker Quinn and the Festival of Contemporary Arts.”  University of Illinois Archives.

Saxon, Wolfgang. “Charles H. Shattuck, 81, Shakespearean Scholar.” The New York Times, 23 Sept. 1992. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/23/obituaries/charles-h-shattuck-81-shakespearean-scholar.html.

Compiled by Matt Bell and Naira Oberoi (Class of ’19, Davidson College)

Title:
291

Date of Publication: 
Mar. 1915 – Feb. 1916

Place(s) of Publication: 
New York, NY

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher: 
291 Publishing, 291 Fifth Avenue, New York

Physical Description:
4 – 6 pages. Deluxe Version: 19.5″x12″ printed on fine Japanese Vellum paper. Standard Version: 19.5″x12″ printed on standard non-glossy paper

Price:
10 cents

Editor(s): 
Alfred Stieglitz

Associate Editor(s): 
Paul de Haviland, Marius de Zayas, Agnes Meyer (Editorial Contributors)

Libraries with Complete Original Issues: 
National Gallery of Art; Northwestern University; Columbia University; The Museum of Modern Art
PDFs of full run available online at the University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive

Reprint Editions: 
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2004. (Little Magazines. American 1910 – 1919) [Microform].
New York: Arno Series of Contemporary Art, with an introduction by Dorothy Norman

Although it lasted only a year and was seen by many as a failed elitist experiment, 291 succeeded in its effort to “weld together the plastic and the literary arts” (Abrahams 194). Named for Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, the magazine was a forum for avant-garde photography, literature, and art; like the gallery, Stieglitz intended for his magazine to unite all forms of art on equal levels.

291 arose at the prompting of close friend and fellow artist Marius de Zayas along with moneyed enthusiasts Agnes Meyer and Paul de Haviland, who thought that the new project would revitalize the “sturdy Islet of enduring independence in the besetting seas of Commercialism and Convention” that the war had brought (Whelan 337). Selling only about one hundred copies of both the regular and deluxe subscriptions, the four to six page 291 gave away almost as many copies as it sold. With radical Dadaist principles that did not appeal to a mass audience, the magazine turned out to be “nothing more than an experiment, and a means to give de Zayas, Mrs. Meyer, Katharine Rhoades, and some others a chance to experiment” (Leavens 128). Its failure to sell forced the magazine’s demise after twelve issues, but in its short run it helped publicize the works of Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Katharine Rhoades, and other artists and authors.

While the editors of 291 never published a manifesto, Close Up magazine offered a powerfully idealized description of what the gallery 291 and its community meant. These responses by Eugene Meyer to Stieglitz’s question, “What is ‘291’?” were printed in the January 1915 issue of Close Up:

“An oasis of real freedom –
A sturdy Islet of enduring independence in the besetting seas of Commercialism and Convention –
A rest – when wearied
A stimulant – when dulled
A Relief –
A Negation of Preconceptions
A Forum for Wisdom and for Folly
A safety valve for repressed ideas –
An Eye Opener
A Test –
A Solvent
A Victim and an Avenger.”

(Whelan 337-338)

Alfred Stieglitz (Jan. 1, 1864 – Jul. 13, 1946)
Editor: Mar. 1915 – Feb. 1916

A German-American Jew born in Hoboken, NJ in 1846, Alfred Stieglitz was the preeminent photographer of the Modernist period. As an artist Stieglitz was rabidly anti-commercial; his primary concern was the elevation of photography to the realm of high art by breaking away from conventional notions of photography, and he cared little for sacrificing his art to the mass appeal of the American public. In 1897 Stieglitz co-founded the Camera Club of New York and served as editor for the club’s magazine, Camera Notes. He left five years later to found the school of Photo Secession, which defined itself as “seceding from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph;” Stieglitz’s new magazine, Camera Work, appeared in 1903 as the public face of the movement (Stieglitz). 291 Fifth Avenue, a fifteen square foot room of avant-garde art and photography, became home to Stieglitz and his contemporaries in their artistic endeavors. By 1915 these artists felt the 291 could use reinvigoration, so Stieglitz, as well as fellow artists and financiers, created a public representative–the short-lived magazine 291.

Guillaume Apollinaire
“Voyage”

Georges Braque
Cover Design (No. 9)

Ribemont Dessaignes
“Musique”

Paul B. Haviland
“291”

C. Max Jacob
“La Vie Artistique”

J.B. Kerfoot
“A Bunch of Keys”

John Marin
Cover Design (No. 4)

Agnes E. Meyer
“How Versus Why”; “Mental Reactions”; “Woman”

Francis Picabia
New York
Fille Née Sans Mère
Cover Design (No. 5)
Canter
Portrait d’une Jeune Fille Américaine dans l’État de Nudité
J’ai Vu
Voila Haviland
Voilà Elle
Fantasie
“We Live in a World”

Pablo Picasso
Oil and Vinegar Castor
Cover Design (No. 10)

Katharine Rhoades
Drawing
“I Walked into a Moment of Greatness”
“Flip-Flap”
“Narcosis”

Albert Savinio
Dammi L’anatema
Cosa Lasciva

Edward Steichen
“What is Rotten in the State of Denmark”

Alfred Stieglitz
One Hour’s Sleep – Three Dreams
The Steerage

A. Walkowitz
Cover Design (No. 3)

Marius de Zayas
Cover Design (No. 1)
Simultanism
“New York n’a pas Vu D’abord”
“Picasso”
“Modern Art…Negro Art….”

Ades, Dawn. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

Images. “Digital Dada Library Collection.” The International Dada Archive. 2007. University of Iowa. 14 July 2009.

Images. The Blue Mountain Project. Princeton University. Web. 1 Jul 2016.

Leavens, Ileana. From 291 to Zurich: the Birth of Dada. Ann Arbor, MI.: UMI Research Press, 1983.

Norman, Dorothy. Ed. 291, Nos. 1-12. New York: Arno Press, 1972.

Steiglitz, Alfred. Transcribed by Cary Ross (1942). “The Origin of the Photo-Secession and How It Became 291.” Twice A Year (8-9).

Tashjian, Dickran. Skyscraper Primitives. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1975.

Whelan, Richard. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1995.

de Zayas, Marius, and Paul Haviland. A Study of the Modern Evolution of Plastic Expression. New York: 291, 1912.

“291” compiled by Alex Entrekin (Class of ’06, Davidson College)