Yeah, I think this is true to some extent, though sitcoms definitely existed in the 1950s and needed tons of writers to work on them. There was a huge transition to color tv in 1965 as part of the network wars back then, but I'm not sure that's enough to explain why slicks like the SEP and television could co-exist in the 1950's but tv would mostly replace the slicks by the end of the 1960's.
Is there just a shift away from the prestige of having a journal like the SEP around? This seems to be a part of the "middlebrow" problem in general. TV is lowbrow (until HBO, right?) and you couldn't signal how much you appreciated highbrow movies until VCR tapes arrived in the late 1970's, so it seems like if you want to be middlebrow you still need some signaling device. What is that device, if it's not a journal like the SEP?
I think the youth culture of the late 60s took down all this "middlebrow" stuff -- the baby boomers were suddenly in charge and all the stodgy midcentury stuff was their parents, right? So they just came for it. No fucking way were they going to subscribe to the magazines their parents subscribed to, watch the same movies, etc. Books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Mark Harris's book about Bonnie & Clyde document this effect in Hollywood --and I'm sure the same thing happened in magazines.
Pictures at a Revolution. Yeah, those are both good books, and you've probably got the right idea there. Unfortunately I've also read the biography of Jann Wenner, "Sticky Fingers," and magazines like Rolling Stone, Playboy, etc. are definitely anti-middlebrow. They had writers working for them that wouldn't have gotten within a mile of SEP, or even the New Yorker, because they were often so abrasive.
Importantly for me, Portis’s TRUE GRIT was serialized in the SEP in 1968, as was his previous novel, NORWOOD. He also wrote some journalism for the magazine, notably a piece on Nashville.
Oh wow, I can't believe I missed that! Now there's a genuine literary classic that came from these pages. See, there's definitely a story to be told here. Like...True Grit would not have gotten printed by the New Yorker. It needed the Post.
I remember reading a biography of Western writer Max Brand (real name Frederick Schiller Faust) and how, in spite of his popularity writing oaters for the pulps, he still preferred the slicks that funded his lavish lifestyle (I believe he owned a villa in Italy.) It's hard to conceive that writers could live like that writing for journals and I suspect the number of writers who did so is considerably larger than today. True, we have people like James Patterson, but unlike Brand, he doesn't even write most of what comes out under his name. Also, Brand could be a good writer in his more accomplished stories and classical poetry (although not a lot of people like the latter) whereas I am not familiar with Patterson's good work (I've been told his early crime fiction is not bad.) I have a collection titled Great Westerns from The Saturday Evening Post and the stories I've read so far give me the same impression you got from reading a much vaster corpus of stories from the magazine. My guess is that most of it wasn't meant to endure and that its appeal waned as popular tastes changed (I have a theory that a lot of that popular thirst for midbrow fiction was transferred to the anthology TV shows like Playhouse 90, a fascinating but rather short-lived genre where people like Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky wrote some quality dramas.) And speaking of midbrow, there is a professor of literature called Peter Swirski who's written extensively on the subject. The one book of his I've read (and apparently the most popular) is titled From Lowbrow to Nobrow, where he analyzes (and builds a theory he's later expounded on) the works of three writers whose fiction isn't easily pigeonholed as either high brow or lowbrow: Stainslaw Lem's The Chain of Chance, Raymond Chandler's Playback, and Karel Capek's War With the Newts.
This is fascinating, now that you crystalize it: the Post is like a giant hiding in plain sight while much smaller classic magazines get the veneration. I’m just old enough to remember the very tail end of the Post’s presence, although even then it had faded into a nostalgia thing, mostly to do with Rockwell and some aw-shucks vision of pre-1960s normalcy. I think you are right that, despite its mass circulation, it was not the sort of editorial product that inspires passion. (It was also aimed, it seems, at a non-metropolitan middle-class audience that would not be a likely source of great passionate fandom—unlike the sci-fi and crime pulps, appealing to edgier sensibilities.)
When I was studying the Victorian magazines, some background factors really caught me: the emergence of a mass educated audience, the existence of efficient postal services and big retail networks, the role of urban commuting and lower-end white-collar work—the creation of whole classes of clerks and secretaries with time, disposable income and educational attainment to enjoy, say, a Sherlock Holmes short story. I’m curious what the equivalent conditions were for the Post in its prime.
As a teen, I enjoyed the SEP. I appreciated its regularity. I liked the humor pages and the letters to the editor were always interesting. Little of the fiction stood out.
I’m not surprised it hasn’t attracted a fan base. It was like The Reader’s Digest. Everywhere. You found old copies in dentists’ offices.
One initial thought and question: Perhaps the Saturday Evening Post isn't missed because its literary style has never lost its place in culture? Aren't Taylor Jenkins Reid and Colleen Hoover the kind of mainstream writers that would fit in an updated (and somewhat rowdier) Saturday Evening Post?
Many of John Ford's films came out of stories originally published in Colliers or Saturday Evening Post (Stagecoach, Liberty Valance, Fort Apache and Yellow Ribbon), as did Howard Hawks' Red River.
There was a saying at the time in Hollywood that second rate stories make first rate movies and first rate novels make second rate movies. Maybe these stories weren't completely second rate (Hemingway reportedly liked Ernest Haycox's), but the form allowed a good director some freedom to visually and dramatically fill out a sometimes middling tale.
You sort of have to imagine a little town in New England somewhere populated by all these lovable American archetypes.
Conan (or Cthulhu, Sam Spade, etc) have a tactile, toyetic quality - it's easy to imagine picking them up and banging them together. Reading a Conan story inherently makes you want to write five more Conan stories. They make it into the popular imagination because people repurpose them and write their own derivative adventures and put them in comics and roleplaying games.
There's a little part of me that wants to write a Tugboat Annie story now, I guess. Maybe that would be a valuable exercise. The trouble is my first instinct is to have her solve a murder - it almost seems like these stories are defined by leaving out the thing that you would automatically put in if it was a pulp story. It does seem like you'd struggle to get seventy-five plots out of her without repeating yourself.
This is quite interesting. Growing up in the '60s and '70s, in a middle-class somewhat Republican family (though not one that could afford a country club membership!) we didn't subscribe to the SEP but it was sort of a background -- it was something you knew about, maybe mostly for the Rockwell covers?
I do remember looking into Philip Wylie, a mid-Century writer who was once quite famous but is now all but forgotten, and learning that he wrote a very popular series of fishing stories about characters named Crunch and Des, that appeared mostly in the SEP. I had heard of Wylie for his SF novels (When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide) and for his controversial novel The Disappearance (women and men mutually "disappear" from each other) and his controversial book of essays, Generation of Vipers; but I'd never heard of Crunch and Des (who apparently became TV characters too.) But I suppose it was Crunch and Des who paid his bills!
(If you do want to read Philip Wylie the book to try is Finnley Wren.)
It is curious how all or nearly all of those once popular series characters like Tugboat Annie seem utterly forgotten, while the likes of Jirel of Joiry are well remembered.
There's another typo or thinko -- I don't think Agatha Christie wrote a book called Slouching to Bethlehem (though Didion certainly did.) She did have a collection of stories called Star over Bethlehem or something like that.
I think these recurring character stories provided the comfy, mostly forgettable entertainment later provided by television. TV also put general interest publications out of business by offering a more cost-effective way for advertisers to reach mass markets.
Great article. I think you answered your own question on what happened to the slicks with your description of the subscriber base of the Post. That middle class, moderately progressive in a Rockefeller sort of way, somewhat intellectually curious, republican family is gone.
Running Nixon in 1960, Goldwater in 1964, followed by successfully running Nixon in 1968 destroyed that progressive faction of the republican party. That demographic group then had to choose between joinng the wingnuttery of the republican party or embrace, in stronger terms, the progressive polices and become a Democrat.
Keeping current copies of various slick magazines spread across your coffee table was no longer a meaningful social statement.
Very interesting. It also sounds like a significant number of stories must've been second-run, if Chesterton, Wodehouse etc were publishing their stories there. I wonder if they had a relationship with any specific British journals?
Also, you mentioned the lack of online work, but is there no academic work on the subject? I wonder if media historians, Fitzgerald scholars, etc might have touched on the subject?
The Saturday Evening Post is synonymous with F.S.Fitzgerald in my mind. I also have collections in 1950's hardback books of stories from Esquire and from Mademoiselle (who sponsored Sylvia Plath's ultimately almost fatal internship in New York which inspired The Bell Jar). The same sort of writing crops up. It's a market which no longer exists, seemingly. And yet there are more Creative Writing students than ever, hopefully turning out stories.
I think you may be having trouble deriving a larger lesson about these publications because there isn't one. People read for pleasure or information. The Post provided pleasure in the form of stories by a variety of authors and a modicum of information. Nothing particularly memorable, just pleasant. Looking back on my own reading history over time, I dabbled in a wide variety of publications, from MAD Magazine to Scientific American to my parents' Post. I read for pleasure. If I picked up some stray tidbits of science, so much the better. I'm guessing that the Post fit into that niche rather well during its heyday. No great literary lesson to the Post and its kin than there is to whatever fills that pleasurable niche today. Like television, as other commenters point out.
I have taken meetings in the Post's offices in Indianapolis, where a couple of my friends worked for Trap & Field magazine, which is now the official magazine of the American Trapshooting Association. They made it very clear to me that shooting trap was not to be confused with shooting skeet.
“the middlebrow recurring-character story” essentially became television. 📺 💘
Yeah, I think this is true to some extent, though sitcoms definitely existed in the 1950s and needed tons of writers to work on them. There was a huge transition to color tv in 1965 as part of the network wars back then, but I'm not sure that's enough to explain why slicks like the SEP and television could co-exist in the 1950's but tv would mostly replace the slicks by the end of the 1960's.
Is there just a shift away from the prestige of having a journal like the SEP around? This seems to be a part of the "middlebrow" problem in general. TV is lowbrow (until HBO, right?) and you couldn't signal how much you appreciated highbrow movies until VCR tapes arrived in the late 1970's, so it seems like if you want to be middlebrow you still need some signaling device. What is that device, if it's not a journal like the SEP?
I think the youth culture of the late 60s took down all this "middlebrow" stuff -- the baby boomers were suddenly in charge and all the stodgy midcentury stuff was their parents, right? So they just came for it. No fucking way were they going to subscribe to the magazines their parents subscribed to, watch the same movies, etc. Books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Mark Harris's book about Bonnie & Clyde document this effect in Hollywood --and I'm sure the same thing happened in magazines.
Pictures at a Revolution. Yeah, those are both good books, and you've probably got the right idea there. Unfortunately I've also read the biography of Jann Wenner, "Sticky Fingers," and magazines like Rolling Stone, Playboy, etc. are definitely anti-middlebrow. They had writers working for them that wouldn't have gotten within a mile of SEP, or even the New Yorker, because they were often so abrasive.
I wonder how deep this take really goes… what other arenas of the critical apparatus could this apply to?
I didn't even know I had a take, so for sure it doesn't go that deep.
Importantly for me, Portis’s TRUE GRIT was serialized in the SEP in 1968, as was his previous novel, NORWOOD. He also wrote some journalism for the magazine, notably a piece on Nashville.
Oh wow, I can't believe I missed that! Now there's a genuine literary classic that came from these pages. See, there's definitely a story to be told here. Like...True Grit would not have gotten printed by the New Yorker. It needed the Post.
That’s where I first read True Grit.
I remember reading a biography of Western writer Max Brand (real name Frederick Schiller Faust) and how, in spite of his popularity writing oaters for the pulps, he still preferred the slicks that funded his lavish lifestyle (I believe he owned a villa in Italy.) It's hard to conceive that writers could live like that writing for journals and I suspect the number of writers who did so is considerably larger than today. True, we have people like James Patterson, but unlike Brand, he doesn't even write most of what comes out under his name. Also, Brand could be a good writer in his more accomplished stories and classical poetry (although not a lot of people like the latter) whereas I am not familiar with Patterson's good work (I've been told his early crime fiction is not bad.) I have a collection titled Great Westerns from The Saturday Evening Post and the stories I've read so far give me the same impression you got from reading a much vaster corpus of stories from the magazine. My guess is that most of it wasn't meant to endure and that its appeal waned as popular tastes changed (I have a theory that a lot of that popular thirst for midbrow fiction was transferred to the anthology TV shows like Playhouse 90, a fascinating but rather short-lived genre where people like Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky wrote some quality dramas.) And speaking of midbrow, there is a professor of literature called Peter Swirski who's written extensively on the subject. The one book of his I've read (and apparently the most popular) is titled From Lowbrow to Nobrow, where he analyzes (and builds a theory he's later expounded on) the works of three writers whose fiction isn't easily pigeonholed as either high brow or lowbrow: Stainslaw Lem's The Chain of Chance, Raymond Chandler's Playback, and Karel Capek's War With the Newts.
That is a great recommendation! Lowbrow to nobrow. Seems right up my alley
This is fascinating, now that you crystalize it: the Post is like a giant hiding in plain sight while much smaller classic magazines get the veneration. I’m just old enough to remember the very tail end of the Post’s presence, although even then it had faded into a nostalgia thing, mostly to do with Rockwell and some aw-shucks vision of pre-1960s normalcy. I think you are right that, despite its mass circulation, it was not the sort of editorial product that inspires passion. (It was also aimed, it seems, at a non-metropolitan middle-class audience that would not be a likely source of great passionate fandom—unlike the sci-fi and crime pulps, appealing to edgier sensibilities.)
When I was studying the Victorian magazines, some background factors really caught me: the emergence of a mass educated audience, the existence of efficient postal services and big retail networks, the role of urban commuting and lower-end white-collar work—the creation of whole classes of clerks and secretaries with time, disposable income and educational attainment to enjoy, say, a Sherlock Holmes short story. I’m curious what the equivalent conditions were for the Post in its prime.
As a teen, I enjoyed the SEP. I appreciated its regularity. I liked the humor pages and the letters to the editor were always interesting. Little of the fiction stood out.
I’m not surprised it hasn’t attracted a fan base. It was like The Reader’s Digest. Everywhere. You found old copies in dentists’ offices.
One initial thought and question: Perhaps the Saturday Evening Post isn't missed because its literary style has never lost its place in culture? Aren't Taylor Jenkins Reid and Colleen Hoover the kind of mainstream writers that would fit in an updated (and somewhat rowdier) Saturday Evening Post?
Many of John Ford's films came out of stories originally published in Colliers or Saturday Evening Post (Stagecoach, Liberty Valance, Fort Apache and Yellow Ribbon), as did Howard Hawks' Red River.
There was a saying at the time in Hollywood that second rate stories make first rate movies and first rate novels make second rate movies. Maybe these stories weren't completely second rate (Hemingway reportedly liked Ernest Haycox's), but the form allowed a good director some freedom to visually and dramatically fill out a sometimes middling tale.
You sort of have to imagine a little town in New England somewhere populated by all these lovable American archetypes.
Conan (or Cthulhu, Sam Spade, etc) have a tactile, toyetic quality - it's easy to imagine picking them up and banging them together. Reading a Conan story inherently makes you want to write five more Conan stories. They make it into the popular imagination because people repurpose them and write their own derivative adventures and put them in comics and roleplaying games.
There's a little part of me that wants to write a Tugboat Annie story now, I guess. Maybe that would be a valuable exercise. The trouble is my first instinct is to have her solve a murder - it almost seems like these stories are defined by leaving out the thing that you would automatically put in if it was a pulp story. It does seem like you'd struggle to get seventy-five plots out of her without repeating yourself.
This is quite interesting. Growing up in the '60s and '70s, in a middle-class somewhat Republican family (though not one that could afford a country club membership!) we didn't subscribe to the SEP but it was sort of a background -- it was something you knew about, maybe mostly for the Rockwell covers?
I do remember looking into Philip Wylie, a mid-Century writer who was once quite famous but is now all but forgotten, and learning that he wrote a very popular series of fishing stories about characters named Crunch and Des, that appeared mostly in the SEP. I had heard of Wylie for his SF novels (When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide) and for his controversial novel The Disappearance (women and men mutually "disappear" from each other) and his controversial book of essays, Generation of Vipers; but I'd never heard of Crunch and Des (who apparently became TV characters too.) But I suppose it was Crunch and Des who paid his bills!
(If you do want to read Philip Wylie the book to try is Finnley Wren.)
It is curious how all or nearly all of those once popular series characters like Tugboat Annie seem utterly forgotten, while the likes of Jirel of Joiry are well remembered.
There's another typo or thinko -- I don't think Agatha Christie wrote a book called Slouching to Bethlehem (though Didion certainly did.) She did have a collection of stories called Star over Bethlehem or something like that.
I think these recurring character stories provided the comfy, mostly forgettable entertainment later provided by television. TV also put general interest publications out of business by offering a more cost-effective way for advertisers to reach mass markets.
Great article. I think you answered your own question on what happened to the slicks with your description of the subscriber base of the Post. That middle class, moderately progressive in a Rockefeller sort of way, somewhat intellectually curious, republican family is gone.
Running Nixon in 1960, Goldwater in 1964, followed by successfully running Nixon in 1968 destroyed that progressive faction of the republican party. That demographic group then had to choose between joinng the wingnuttery of the republican party or embrace, in stronger terms, the progressive polices and become a Democrat.
Keeping current copies of various slick magazines spread across your coffee table was no longer a meaningful social statement.
Very interesting. It also sounds like a significant number of stories must've been second-run, if Chesterton, Wodehouse etc were publishing their stories there. I wonder if they had a relationship with any specific British journals?
Also, you mentioned the lack of online work, but is there no academic work on the subject? I wonder if media historians, Fitzgerald scholars, etc might have touched on the subject?
The Saturday Evening Post is synonymous with F.S.Fitzgerald in my mind. I also have collections in 1950's hardback books of stories from Esquire and from Mademoiselle (who sponsored Sylvia Plath's ultimately almost fatal internship in New York which inspired The Bell Jar). The same sort of writing crops up. It's a market which no longer exists, seemingly. And yet there are more Creative Writing students than ever, hopefully turning out stories.
These analyses are interesting.
This was great!
I think you may be having trouble deriving a larger lesson about these publications because there isn't one. People read for pleasure or information. The Post provided pleasure in the form of stories by a variety of authors and a modicum of information. Nothing particularly memorable, just pleasant. Looking back on my own reading history over time, I dabbled in a wide variety of publications, from MAD Magazine to Scientific American to my parents' Post. I read for pleasure. If I picked up some stray tidbits of science, so much the better. I'm guessing that the Post fit into that niche rather well during its heyday. No great literary lesson to the Post and its kin than there is to whatever fills that pleasurable niche today. Like television, as other commenters point out.
I have taken meetings in the Post's offices in Indianapolis, where a couple of my friends worked for Trap & Field magazine, which is now the official magazine of the American Trapshooting Association. They made it very clear to me that shooting trap was not to be confused with shooting skeet.