Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/540

 524 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The close of its career was chronicled by Field in 1887, with the following paragraph :

For the information of our public we will say that the Atlantic Monthly is a magazine published in Boston, being to that intelligent and refined com- munity what the Literary Life was to Chicago before a Fourth Ward con- stable achieved its downfall with a writ of replevin.

The efforts of the editor-publishers of America, the literary- political weekly, 1888-91, are of more interest in many ways than any others by periodical publishers at Chicago in the eighties. Mr. Slason Thompson and Mr. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor were the founders of America, and Mr. Thompson stuck to it as editor and publisher to the end of its career. At the time of its founding, Mr. Thompson, as he is today, was a strong journalist. Mr. Chatfield-Taylor, now a novelist and prominent society man, was then a recent college graduate of independent means, just begin- ning a career of literary endeavor.

Mr. Thompson is one of the men drawn to Chicago by the growing importance of the north-central American metropolis. Educated for the bar at the University of New Brunswick, ad- mitted to practice in that Canadian province, and later to the bar in California, he had entered journalism at San Francisco, served on the New York Tribune, and, after coming to Chicago as agent for the New York Associated Press, had been one of the founders of the Chicago Herald, and had held numerous important editorial positions. While in San Francisco, Mr. Thompson had been an admirer of the Argonaut, published there by Frank Pixley. He believed that if a serious literary periodical published on the Pacific coast could succeed, one brought out in Chicago should surely do so. Mr. Thompson was one of the " Saints and Sinners," an intimate friend of Field, and in later years the collator of some of that author's writings. In " Sharps and Flats," Field, referring to an imaginary sale of pews in the famous corner, made the following remark :

Mr. Slason Thompson, boiling over with indignation, declared that if the Rev. Mr. Bristol and General McClurg intended to form a trust on pews, they must expect to feel the castigatory torments of the nimble pen and sar- castic pencil wielded by the facile editor of America.