THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO 379
interest always engrafted on a business interest? What were the causes for the brevity of duration and early death of these periodicals ?
In reply, a half-dozen dusty files, to be found in the library of the Chicago Historical Society, will tell an interesting story. It is often said that Chicago is the graveyard of literary magazines. And it is true that in the vaults of the Historical Society library, the Public Library, the Newberry Library, and other institutions of Chicago, the remains of fifty-five such literary creations lie buried, the relics filed for all the periods. In gathering data on the magazines of the later periods, thirty-three men and women who were connected, as publishers, editors, or contributors, with forty-three Chicago literary periodicals, have been interviewed.
Only three living witnesses of periodical events in the pioneer times could be found ; and two of these were merely newsboys in those days. General James Grant Wilson, of New York city, is the only surviving literary man who was among the editors directing campaigns for the periodic publication of literary efforts in the Chicago field before the Civil War. From his present liter- ary headquarters, General Wilson sent on illuminating recollec- tions of these undertakings. The histories of Chicago are more instructive concerning the literary development of the earlier periods than of the later, and they also furnish side-light on the economic and social conditions. However, they give no adequate literary history of Chicago. Even Rufus Blanchard, having himself, in 1858, undertaken the establishment of an ambitious quarterly, made no mention of literary magazines when he wrote a history of Chicago. It is, then, to the old files that we turn for the story of the pioneer periodicals.
Although the impulse to write and to publish is a phenomenon of the individual, the constant reflection of environment, both physical and spiritual, or social, has shone in the literary maga- zines and papers of Chicago and "the West." This was clear and simple in those of the forties, the days of the western prairie pioneers. In the magazines of today it is clear, but complex. The keynote to which the literary publications of the midland metropolis have been attuned is westernism. In the sweep of six
