THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY, as the cliché goes, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, yet American intellectuals have been founding little magazines since at least 1840, when a group of Transcendentalists published the inaugural issue of The Dial—often cited as the progenitor of the form on this side of the Atlantic. Contrary to what you might think, the diminutive moniker refers not to the size of a publication’s staff, nor its budget (though it might as well), but to its willed marginality in style or substance. In their 1947 study The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography, Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich defined the little magazine as one “designed to print artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses.” These magazines have advocated for modernism and for communism, defined countercultural scenes, and staged internecine battles among the organized left. They have also been vulnerable to chronic budget deficits, editorial squabbling, and—notoriously—interference by the CIA. To work at such a publication can be an exercise in cognitive dissonance: high-minded principles coexisting with petty feuds, intellectual nourishment with organizational dysfunction. It can also be a lot of fun—a refuge from the flagrant careerism and inanity of a shrinking media industry. Maybe that’s why we can’t seem to stop making them, even though the odds of survival are long.
The novelist and critic Wilfrid Sheed had a fond but unromantic view of this niche business, one he formed as an editor at the progressive Catholic magazines Jubilee and Commonweal, where he worked from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. In a 2004 essay about his time at Commonweal, Sheed quipped with characteristic self-deprecation that “one could only afford to work at the magazine until one reached two and a half babies, or bumped into a sudden change in the rent-control laws, or just about any other surprise whatever. So at least our blood was always new and our ideas the latest, if not best.” His tone may be ironic, but the sentiment was real: Sheed had long dreaded editorial homogeneity. As he complained to the New York Times, where he’d previously served as a literary columnist, back in 1979, “Magazines start life with beautiful brochures and then get stuck. They hire editors from other magazines, with the baggage labels still fresh, and then writers who are known to do such and such, and then the magazine winds up being the same old magazine you’ve been reading all your life.”
This staleness would seem to be the fate of The Outsider, the invented liberal magazine at the center of Sheed’s 1966 novel Office Politics, newly reissued by McNally Editions. {read}