One fiction journal has left me stumped. I can't get a handle on it.

Once upon a time, there existed a set of journals that published lots of fiction and were extremely popular. They were printed on slick, glossy paper and for this reason they were known as ‘the slicks’. These journals often had circulations in the millions, and they paid thousands of dollars per story—You could become a rich man or women just by writing for these journals.

But what kinds of stories did these journals publish? Well, the natural temptation is for us to believe that they published the kinds of highbrow mid-twentieth century writers that we’ve heard of: J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Grace Paley, etc.

However, although these writers sometimes placed a few stories in these journals, they generally published their work in higher-brow periodicals—Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic—that had lower circulations and paid less.

So the question remains: what was happening in the high-circulation fiction journals known colloquially as ‘the slicks’? What exactly was in them? Who were they publishing?

Well, for the last month I’ve been investigating that question. When I talk about the slicks, I’m talking about a set of magazines like American, McCall’s, Collier’s, Lady’s Home Journal, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post. From about the 1910s through the 1970s, these were the most popular magazines in America. The Saturday Evening Post was the most popular of these journals: it had the highest circulation of any magazine in America from about 1910 to 1965. At its peak, it had a circulation of eight million, dwarfing even the largest pulps.¹

And yet, compared to the pulps, it is relatively difficult to get information about these journals. When you’re looking into pulp fiction, a Google search will reveal that H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard are the quintessential Weird Tales writers. Similarly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were the quintessential Black Mask writers. At a remove of a hundred years, these are the writers that are held up as exemplars of these journals: representatives of the best of what they were attempting to do.

For The Saturday Evening Post, there is one name that is similar: F. Scott Fitzgerald. He published many of his best-known stories in The Post, including his most famous (“Babylon, Revisited”). My understanding is that during the 1920s, the Post had a period when it was a bit edgier and flirted with more ambiguous, self-consciously aesthetized stories, and it was during this period when Fitzgerald broke in.

However, they also published other writers whose reputation has endured. The Post published sixteen stories by William Faulkner, and it published a number of other well-known writers. They published a lot of P.G. Wodehouse. They were the first U.S. publisher (in serial form) for Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. They were the initial home for many of the essays in Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. They published some of Ray Bradbury’s better-known stories.

There is definitely a tale to be told about The Saturday Evening Post, and its role in 20th-century literature. But I don’t know that anyone has actually bothered to tell it. I feel like I understand the quintessential Black Mask or Weird Tales or New Yorker story, but I do not understand the quintessential Post story.

It is striking the degree to which the critical apparatus surrounding The Saturday Evening Post is much less than what exists for Weird Tales. I can buy a collection that purports to contain the best stories from Weird Tales, but there is nothing similar for the Post—at least nothing that’s current in print. Similarly, there’s been a lack of work online to contextualize the Post and define what kinds of stories it championed.

Eventually I did track down one such collection, The Saturday Evening Post Treasury. This book came out in 1956, at the height of the Post’s readership and influence. The volume is long out of print, but I purchased a used copy, and it is the source of much of what I know about the Post, because this volume’s aim was to print a representative sample of the Post’s fiction and nonfiction, and it included helpful blurb’s in front of each story to describe its impact.

The stories in this volume tend to fall into three categories. There are pulp-style adventure tales (for instance, about a man confronting a murderer on a back country road). There are stories that resemble high-brow short stories (Fitzgerald’s “Babylon, Revisited”, and stories by William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe), and then there are a third category of middlebrow story that feels quite different from anything else I’ve read.

As this book reveals, there was a variety of writer whose career was made by the post. These are writers like Kelland Clarence Buddington, Norman Reilly Raine, Arthur Train, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Oftentimes these writers wrote series characters—recurring characters—that sometimes made fifty or a hundred appearances in the Post.

I have a collection of stories sitting next to me about a character named Tugboat Annie—a canny female tugboat captain who uses her intimate knowledge of salvage law to beat out rival captains on the Pacific Coast. Norman Reilly Raine sold seventy-five of these stories to the Post between 1930 and 1960. Given that the Post paid between three and five thousand dollars per story to its top contributors ($5000 in 1930 would be more than $90,000 today), this means he made some insane, fantastic sum from writing these stories.

And he was just one of many writers who wrote these stories and made this kind of money. Out of all the writers who wrote series-characters for the Post, a few are well-known, P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Another, Booth Tarkington, still has something of a reputation for his novels, although his character Penrod—about whom he wrote dozens of stories for the Post—is largely unknown. But most of the writers who wrote this sort of fiction are completely forgotten.

I am a little astonished by the degree to which I had never heard not just of these names, but of this entire genre of fiction—the middlebrow recurring-character story.

These recurring characters definitely have a particular flavor to them. They’re usually genial characters with a deceptively deep wisdom. For instance, there’s Ephraim Tutt, a lawyer (originally from Maine) who practices in New York City and uses legal tricks to ensure the good party always win (even when he happens to be representing the bad guy). There’s Scattergood Baines, a fat little man who arrives penniless in the town of Coldriver, and slowly comes to dominate both the business and political interests in his state. There’s Tugboat Annie, who I already mentioned. There’s Penrod, Booth Tarkington’s character, who is a twelve-year-old scamp in the Tom Sawyer mold. There’s the Siwash College stories, about undergrads at this little college who are always getting into scrapes.

Many of these characters seem to have been quite popular. When they were reprinted in collections, the books often sold quite well (this is particularly true of Penrod). And oftentimes these characters gave rise to movies, television shows, and radio plays: Scattergood Baines, Tugboat Annie, and Siwash College all inspired movies.

And that doesn’t even get into the detective and thriller stories. J.P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto stories were originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, so were many of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels. And I am sure there are other famous detectives who appeared there—people I am overlooking or forgetting.

The Middle-Class Story

Taken as a whole, the journal seems to be quite distinctively middle-class. The paper was well-known for having a Republican, pro-business bias. It represented the old sort of Republican: the country-club Republican. It was the journal that you subscribed to if you were a certain sort of respectable middle-class family—my wife says that there were stacks of these magazines in the house of her grandfather, who’d been a professor of physics at Caltech.

And in this journal there were serious, high-brow stories and there were articles about world affairs, but there were also lighter-hearted, more entertaining stories. And…that’s what it was.

Unlike with Weird Tales, the Post did not give rise to an enduring fandom. One can certainly imagine a scenario where people felt nostalgic for Scattergood Baines and Tugboat Annie, and they devoted some effort to preserving the memory of these characters. But that didn’t happen. A number of authors who published in that journal (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, and Ray Bradbury and others) retained or regained their popularity, and many other writers faded away. But nobody ever felt the need to create some narrative about this journal and its particular place in American letters.

It does seem like this journal paid people a lot of money to write these series characters (Tugboat Annie and Scattergood Baines and the like), and that these characters…weren’t necessarily that good. I’ve been trying to read this Tugboat Annie book for a few hours. Same thing with Scattergood Baines, I spent a few hours trying to read a book of stories about thise character. In each case, the first few stories were interesting, but over time I got the picture and lost interest. I personally don’t feel a strong desire to sell you on Tugboat Annie or Scattergood Baines—so it’s no surprise that nobody else has taken the trouble.

If you want an example of this kind of Post story, you could do worse than reading the initial story in this volume about Baines.

True, he had but a moment's glimpse of Coldriver before he decided he had moved there, but the glimpse showed him the location was the one he had been searching for.... Scattergood's specialty, his hobby, was valleys. Valleys down which splashed and roared sizable streams, whose mountain sides were covered with timber, and whose flats were comfortable farms—such valleys interested him with an especial interest.

This first story is quite good, even if the rest become tedious. Baines is probably not the best example of a Post character, because although his author, Budington, sold over a hundred stories to the Post, he only sold a few Baines stories there—the rest appeared in American magazine.

I also read a collection of stories about the kindly lawyer, Ephraim Tutt, and I found these very entertaining, especially his flights of rhetoric about the nature of the law:

"But why is it," persisted Miss Wiggin, "that we invariably associate the idea of crime with that of 'poverty, hunger and dirt'?"

"That is easy to explain," asserted Mr. Tutt. "The criminal law originally dealt only with crimes of violence—such as murder, rape and assault. In the old days people didn't have any property in the modern sense—except their land, their cattle or their weapons. They had no bonds or stock or bank accounts…But"—and here Mr. Tutt's voice rose indignantly—"our greatest mistake is to assume that crimes of violence are the most dangerous to the state, for they are not. They cause greater disturbance and perhaps more momentary inconvenience, but they do not usually evince much moral turpitude. After all, it does no great harm if one man punches another in the head, or even in a fit of anger sticks a dagger in him. The police can easily handle all that. The real danger to the community lies in the crimes of duplicity—the cheats, frauds, false pretenses, tricks and devices, flimflams—practised most successfully by well-dressed gentlemanly crooks of polished manners."

---

My takeaway from the Post

I have had trouble writing this post, because I keep wanting to draw some kind of larger lesson about literature from this investigation. In fact, given the amount of time I’ve spent reading stories from the Post over the last few weeks, it’s shocking how little I’ve managed to write here.

For me, the biggest lesson has been that what I do, in this newsletter, really requires the work of other people. When I look into an author or a phenomenon, I am often hooked by messages that other people have spent a lot of time trying to put out. A great example is O. Henry. Many academics put in their time to studying O. Henry and trying to rehabilitate his reputation. That’s exactly why this Library of America collection about him existed. And because of that collection, other critics wrote great articles about him. And I used all of that to inform myself and to write a post about him.

With The Saturday Evening Post, that groundwork never got done. The story about the influence of this journal—it never got told in an easy-to-understand way. As a result, I’m only able to gesture somewhat at that influence, but even after this month of investigation I have only the vaguest idea of how people actually felt about The Saturday Evening Post and what its readers expected from its pages.

My impression—and folks are free to dispute this with me—is that there is relatively little fondness out there for this journal. It is not a source of nostalgic memories. It’s been revived periodically, but I don’t know if anyone really cares that much about it. People might miss Norman Rockwell (who painted many Post covers) and Walter Cronkite, but they don’t necessarily miss the Post.

On the other hand, The Saturday Evening Post was revived recently, by a foundation run by a former editor of the journal. They’ve got a really nice website, and they seem quite purposeful in their work. As their missions statement notes:

We have undertaken the important task of carefully preserving the history of the magazine. Through the use of specialized, high-resolution large-format digital scanners, and the hard work of dedicated staffers, we are working to convert every word and image of our print magazine to a digital format….We have just begun to scratch the surface of this rich history. It’s a challenging but rewarding undertaking to document such an important record of not only the magazine, but also the weekly concerns and entertainments of our nation.

So clearly there is some level of love and attention here, and perhaps this is the beginning of some turn-around in the fortunes of the journal. Maybe in twenty years, my own blog post will be viewed derisively, and folks won’t even be able to imagine how I could’ve been confused about the tremendous, stupendous literary impact of the greatest journal of the 20th century, The Saturday Evening Post.

Postscripts

• I have one more post this week, a story on Thursday, and then I’m going on a two-week vacation with my family. My next post should be on August 25th.

• All the entries for the Samuel Richardson Prize have come in! I am tabulating and assigning them to judges. Thank you all for your interest. The judging process will probably take some time, but I will keep you posted.

1. In this post, I am mostly writing about The Saturday Evening Post. I’ve also read a few stories from the other slicks, but not enough to say that I can really understand what they were like.