378 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
working expressions of those constant forces generated by the daily desires of men, women, and children. The concept may well serve as the starting-mark for an endeavor to describe and explain the social process in whole or in part. It leads to the selection of some particular interest. The one thus picked out from the congeries of interests that go to make up the life of Chicago, as the subject for the reports here submitted, is a sub- division of the aesthetic interest. The main query as to the char- acter of the literary interest in this commercial city unfolds into many subsidiary questions. And since the idea of interests con- notes their interdependence in the social process as a whole, some of these questions are directed at tracing the relations of the literary interest to the other interests of Chicago; for example, to the business interests. Half are inquiries about literary pro- duction ; the others, on the reading done by all classes of people to satisfy the desire for the artistic through literary form liter- ary consumption. In getting answers, the collection of facts for narrative reports on merely a few phases shows that in Chicago the literary interest has been greater in quantity, and more varied and interesting in quality, than is generally supposed, even among the local litterateurs.
Efforts to establish literary magazines and periodicals in Chi- cago were begun as far back as the early prairie days. These attempts were the earliest budding of the creative literary desire in this locality ; and similar undertakings have been its most con- stant expression since then. All told, at least 306 magazines and journals, whose generic mark is an appeal chiefly to the aesthetic or artistic sense, have sprung up in Chicago ; and there have been some fifteen distinct varieties. Of this large crop, twenty-seven, or 9 per cent, of the total, germinated, lived their lives, and died in the forties and fifties.
About these pioneer magazines and journals, as of those in each decadal period, one may ask many questions : What was the character of the typical literary periodicals ? What were the social factors in their origin? How go the stories of their struggles for permanence ? What were the interrelations between these publishing enterprises and other interests ? Was the literary
