Chapter 7 - Anonymous

Summary

Among the many, many transitions in American literature that have been attributed to the US Civil War, one of the less often noted is that the war years coincided with a decisive shift away from authorial anonymity. This transition can be observed in the publication practices of the day’s leading magazines. Harper’s, which had been started in 1850, began naming authors in the index to its twentieth volume (1860), while the Atlantic Monthly, introduced in 1857, began publishing the names of its authors in the index to its tenth volume (1862). The first series of Putnam’s, which ran in the 1850s, did not identify authors in either its issues or its volume indices, but the second series, begun in 1868, did, a distinction that holds when comparing the Continental Monthly, which ran during the war (1862–64) and never identified authors, with the Galaxy, which debuted in 1866 and always did. Even the hoary North American Review got into the act, and started attributing its authors with the January issue of 1868, after more than fifty years of never doing so. There were, of course, exceptions to this trend; antebellum periodicals like Graham’s Magazine or the Broadway Journal sometimes identified the more famous authors who contributed to their pages, while reprint journals like Littell’s Living Age (1844–96) attributed only the original publication sources of its contents, never the individual authors, even at the end of the century. In general, though, postbellum readers of American magazines would be much more likely than their antebellum forebears to know the name of the person who had written whichever article they were reading.