Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/325

 "The Atlantic Monthly" 307 personal friends, and in many ways he made an ideal editor. No other magazine has come so near to comprehending the best that American writers had to offer as did the Atlantic during these early years. It was fortunate in having so many of its contributors within easy reach of Boston, and the dinners of the Atlantic Club — which seems never to have been a club — and of virtually the same group of men in the Saturday Club have often been celebrated in reminiscence and history. The jealous charge that only New Englanders were welcome to the pages of the Atlantic was probably never well founded, though it was natural that New England standards should be applied in judging contributions. It was the Atlantic which first recog- nized the value of Bret Harte's early tales, and drew the author from the West ; and this is but one example of the reaching out of the magazine for what was best everywhere. A list of the contributors for the first fifty years would lack but few names of American writers of distinction, and these would in almost all cases be men who were committed to some other publisher. Yet perhaps after all the case is best put by Howells when he says: "The Atlantic Monthly . . . was distinctively a New England magazine, though from the first it has been charac- terized by what was more national, what was more universal, in the New England temperament. " Successive editors of The Atlantic Monthly have been James Russell Lowell (1857-61), James T. Fields (1861-71), William Dean Howells (1871-81), Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1881-90), Horace E. Scudder (1890-98), Walter Hines Page (1898-99), Bliss Perry (i 899-1 908), EUery Sedgwick (1908- ). While the development of the illustrated magazines during the seven- ties deprived the Atlantic of its conspicuous pre-eminence it long continued to maintain its high standard and its distinctive character. In 1908 it was sold by the Houghton Mifflin Com- pany, the direct successors of Ticknor and Fields, to the Atlantic Publishing Company, of which EUery Sedgwick is president, and under his editorship it has increased its circulation without be- coming cheapened, though to conservative readers who recol- lect former days it seems to have departed sadly from its old traditions. Harper's Monthly Magazine, the first of the greater illus- trated magazines, was established in 1850 by Harper and