Supply and Demand

One of the most significant aspects of short-story writing in our own immediate decade has been the emergence of a New Market. In 1900, Conrad wrote for Blackwood’s and Henry James for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. A generation later, Fitzgerald wrote for Cosmopolitan and Faulkner for Satevepost. But by 1950, our comparably serious young writers were adapting themselves to the particular requirements of the literary quarterlies (hereinafter referred to as LQ), a widening market which should neither be underestimated, nor confused with its brasher forerunner, the “little magazine.” For unlike the latter, which lived on a shoestring, was frequently edited in Europe, and mostly died an early, martyr’s death, the LQ lives on subsidies, is frequently edited on a college campus, and enjoys an unruffled, prosperous middle age.

It may not pay very well per word, but it has become the principal source not only of elite readership and prestige, but of the teaching sinecures, Rockefeller grants and writer’s colony residence which the professional writer who is not a mere hack—the man whose business, as Conrad once put it, is to “make a certain number of pages of prose”—must depend on today to eat. And what is most interesting about the LQ vis-à-vis young talent is the extent to which the latter can use the former for its own purposes, as Shakespeare used the Elizabethan stage. For it is just as possible to be ruined by the Kenyon Review as it is by Blackwood’s. It takes just as much cunning, kenning, and plain conning to work for one as for the other.

RP

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Robert Phelps

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One of the most significant aspects of short-story writing in our own immediate decade has been the emergence of a New Market. In 1900, Conrad wrote for Blackwood’s and Henry James for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. A generation later, Fitzgerald wrote for Cosmopolitan and Faulkner for Satevepost. But by 1950, our comparably serious young writers were adapting themselves to the particular requirements of the literary quarterlies (hereinafter referred to as LQ), a widening market which should neither be underestimated, nor confused with its brasher forerunner, the “little magazine.” For unlike the latter, which lived on a shoestring, was frequently edited in Europe, and mostly died an early, martyr’s death, the LQ lives on subsidies, is frequently edited on a college campus, and enjoys an unruffled, prosperous middle age.

It may not pay very well per word, but it has become the principal source not only of elite readership and prestige, but of the teaching sinecures, Rockefeller grants and writer’s colony residence which the professional writer who is not a mere hack—the man whose business, as Conrad once put it, is to “make a certain number of pages of prose”—must depend on today to eat. And what is most interesting about the LQ vis-à-vis young talent is the extent to which the latter can use the former for its own purposes, as Shakespeare used the Elizabethan stage. For it is just as possible to be ruined by the Kenyon Review as it is by Blackwood’s. It takes just as much cunning, kenning, and plain conning to work for one as for the other.