Extract

“Little magazines” is a term referring to a set of literary periodicals published between roughly 1912 and 1939 that are characterized by their small readership, financial fragility, and artistic innovation. Little magazines were the nursery of several literary movements but are most closely connected to the birth of American modernism. They provided a place where writers of new, unusual, and often iconoclastic work could get into print. Those who published little magazines were amateurs and often artists themselves. Their goals were more likely to be artistic than commercial, a distinction borne out by their overwhelming tendency to be short-lived. They were especially important in creating and developing new American poetry and in consolidating and establishing ties between literary communities all over the world, but especially those in the urban centers of Chicago, New York City, London, and Paris.