University of Virginia Library

Henry James and the Atlantic Monthly: Editorial Perspectives on James' "Friction with the Market"
by
Ellery Sedgwick

In 1864, the year he committed himself to the profession of authorship, Henry James sent his friend Thomas Sergeant Perry a sketch of an editor of the Atlantic Monthly kneeling before a masterful and confident author who looks down on the editor's supplications with dignified calm. "One of these days," wrote James, "we shall have certain persons on their knees, imploring for contributions" (28 Oct. 1864, Anesko frontispiece). At the beginning

of his career, James, like William Dean Howells and several other young writers of what would soon become America's first substantial generation of professional authors of fiction, saw the Atlantic as representing the market that he would need to conquer to gain credibility, an audience, and a livelihood.

James' career reflects how closely the rise of post-war literary professionalism was tied to the rise of the "quality" monthly magazines. Michael Anesko has demonstrated that until 1900, the substantial majority of James' income derived not from book sales but from payments by American periodicals (168, 175, 167-197). James played the periodical market astutely, often writing in response to the specific solicitation of editors, sometimes intentionally adapting to the requirements of periodical audiences or editors, and consciously stimulating competition for his work. He published in all of the quality magazines. But the Atlantic, with its high literary tradition and relatively small circulation, accepted his first fiction, solicited his contributions regularly for twenty-five years, and published far more of the major work than what James referred to as the "New York picture books," the larger-circulation New York illustrated monthlies like Harper's, Scribner's, and The Century. Until the mid-eighties James met with rising success in the American periodical market, but after that American monthlies, eventually including the Atlantic, increasingly failed to support his work. This failure was caused partly by the evolution of James' later style, but also in large part by changes in the magazine market for fiction. This paper examines those changes in the literary market and its treatment of James from the perspective of six successive Atlantic editors.

James' approximately forty years of active publishing in periodicals spanned the Atlantic editorships of James T. Fields (1861-71), W. D. Howells (1871-81), T. B. Aldrich (1881-90), Horace Scudder (1890-98), Walter H. Page (1898-99), and Bliss Perry (1899-1908). Before 1890, Atlantic editors were, if not suppliant, at least consistently receptive to James' work, supporting it with frequent publication as well as highly sympathetic reviews. From the beginning, James did experience a mild aesthetic "friction" with Fields and even with Howells. But they, like Aldrich, solicited him regularly for both fiction and nonfiction, praised his work, and were eager to identify him with the magazine. Beginning in 1890, however, the Atlantic's editors, while generally acknowledging James' stature as a literary master who would rank permanently with the great novelists in English, were increasingly evasive and hesitant to publish his fiction. Over the next fifteen years, as James' work became increasingly subtle, it encountered growing resistance from Atlantic editors, who for both commercial and ideological reasons were consciously attempting to survive in the new climate of "progressive" publishing by closing the gap between literature and journalism, between highbrow and middle-class popular culture.

James' entrance into the Atlantic seems to have been astonishingly easy compared to that of most contemporaries. While Howells and other young

aspirants experienced frequent rejections or requests for revision, there is no evidence that James ever suffered these. On the contrary, from his earliest years as a writer, the Atlantic gave him ready acceptance and a fairly liberal scope for aesthetic experiment and development. Clearly Howells, who became Fields' assistant in March 1866 at the age of 29, played a major role in the magazine's publication of seven stories and two three-number novellas by James during Fields' editorship. Fields himself, however, had printed James' first published fiction, "The Story of a Year," as the lead piece in March 1865, an unusual distinction for a new writer, and had followed it with another in February 1866 before Howells arrived at the Atlantic.

James' personal and family connections with influential members of intellectual Cambridge like James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton probably facilitated initial access to the Atlantic as well as the North American and the Nation. But both Fields and the Atlantic readership were inclined to be more receptive than other American audiences of the time towards the realistic and anti-conventional tendencies of James' early fiction. From its inception, the Atlantic, first under Lowell (1857-1861), then under Fields, had consciously opposed the prevailing literary didacticism and sentimentality and supported the early development of American regionalism and realism (Brodhead 474; Donovan 6; McMahon 100; Mott 2: 173 and 3: 501). Howells was being accurate as well as generous when he later wrote: "I could not claim there was anything original in my passion for the common, for the familiar and the low. . . . Lowell had the same passion for it in the intervals of his 'toryism of the nerves' and nobody could have tasted its raciness with a keener gusto than my chief [Fields]" ("Recollections" 600). Fields demonstrated his taste for various experiments in American realism by publishing works such as Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron Mills" and "A Story of Today," some of Mrs. Stowe's "Old Town Stories," and Howells' "Suburban Sketches," as well as James' earliest fiction, which consciously experimented with breaking the conventional patterns and morality of sentimental literature.

Fields, however, was not only the editor who brought the Atlantic to its highest 19th-century circulation (50,000) but also perhaps the most successful American publisher of his generation, in part because his own tastes mirrored those of a relatively broad audience. He was also a hearty, sanguine selfmade man of an older generation whose patterns for realism were Dickens and Thackeray, rather than George Eliot (on whom James wrote a highly sympathetic early Atlantic article in 1866). James later recalled, with amusing embellishment, that Fields, after publishing several of James' stories, began to hint that he found the young author "precociously dismal" and to warn against his dispiriting endings. According to James, Fields communicated to Howells his amusement that "such a strain of pessimism in the would-be picture of life had an odd, had even a ridiculous air on the part of an author with his mother's milk scarce yet dry on his lips." This amusement Howells quickly shared with James (James, "Fields," 27).

The limits of Fields' taste for pessimism and irony became a running joke between Howells and James. Inevitably, these young Turks of the next generation of realists amusingly magnified the literary limitations of the editor who very substantively supported both at the beginning of their careers, as he had consistently supported the deeply pessimistic Hawthorne. Howells wrote to James: "'What we want,' says Mr. Fields with perfect truth, 'is short, cheerful stories.' And our experience of you is quite in that way of fiction" (Letters 1: 352). Despite this claim, however, there is no evidence that Fields, who had the final say on virtually everything that went into his Atlantic, rejected any of James' stories or that he requested or influenced James to modify any specific work. The last of James' stories Fields published, "A Passionate Pilgrim" (March-April 1871), was typically neither short nor cheerful: Clement Searle dies (possibly of syphilis) just as the girl becomes free to marry him.

Fields was genially tolerant, but Howells was a sympathetic contemporary and co-conspirator. His quick accession to editorial power, culminating in his succession as editor-in-chief in July 1871, gave James virtually unlimited access to the Atlantic. James later recalled both the delicious exhilaration of having a friend who was also an editor and the confidence Howells gave him:

Howells recalled that when Fields in 1867 sent him a copy of James' "Poor Richard" asking his recommendation on publishing it, he had responded: "Yes, and all the stories you can get from the writer" ("James" 25). While perceptive from the beginning about the quality and originality of James' work, Howells was perceptive too about James' problems in developing an audience among readers habituated to the conventional expectations created by the fiction of writers like Mrs. Southworth and Josiah Holland. Howells wrote to Charles Eliot Norton: "I cannot doubt that James has every element of success in fiction. But I suspect that he must in a very great degree create his audience. In the meantime, I rather despise existing readers" (10 Aug. 1867, Letters 1: 283). Among these readers, he undoubtedly sometimes numbered his "chief."

Throughout his own editorship Howells was plagued by a decline in readership from 50,000 in 1869 to under 20.000 in the late seventies, due largely to the increasing popularity of the New York illustrated magazines, especially the immediately successful Scribner's (later The Century) begun in 1871. Howells, willing to a degree to resist and "educate" his readers' tastes, took every opportunity to expose the Atlantic audience to James' work (Ballou 213). During the early seventies, he agreed to publish a piece by

James every month if one was available (10 March 1873) and during his decade as editor the Atlantic carried thirty-one short stories, reviews, or travel pieces, two short novels, and three major serials: Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1876-77), and The Portrait of a Lady (1880-81).

Howells' editorial relationship with James was mainly generative, admiring and encouraging rather than prescriptive. Howells tended to edit manuscripts heavily, but he was restrained in editing or advising James. It was William James, not Howells, who on seeing proofs of The American already reviewed by Howells found some phrases "so shocking as to make the reader's flesh creep," and asked Howells, with Henry's permission, to remove them (18 Dec. 1876 in James' Letters 2: 84). Howells did, however, express his infamous hope that Newman, the American, would be allowed to marry Claire de Cintré despite the opposition of her cynical and ruthless family. This suggestion was ironic in the face of his conspiratorial jokes with James over Fields' taste for cheerful resolutions. Also, Howells' own Atlantic novel, A Chance Acquaintance (1873), had ended with an "evaporated" relationship between a culturally incompatible Miles Arbuton and Kitty Ellison which he had vigorously defended on the basis of its realism. Howells' willingness to resist his readers had limits, but he also felt a genuine concern for James' cultivation of his audience.

James, of course, refused to throw the "rather vulgar sop to readers who don't really know the world and who don't measure the merit of a novel by its correspondence to the same." The predictable critical and public outcry of betrayed confidence followed. (See, for example, Scribner's July 1877, 406-407.) James, however, in a less-quoted section of the letter to Howells defending the integrity of his ending, responded to this friction with the market by promising the editor "the brightest possible sun-spot for the four number tale of 1878 . . . a very joyous little romance" and proceeded to outline his idea for The Europeans (30 March 1877, Letters 2:105).

By the mid-seventies, James had grown adept at producing "sun spots" and "small potboilers" as he called them and was publishing them in several of the American monthlies. From his first publication, James had had a distinctly modern sense of himself as a literary professional whose aim was to make a full livelihood from writing, in contrast with his father's genteel intellectual dilletantism or Hawthorne's struggle to support himself with patronage jobs while laboring in obscurity. Such an aim was possible, of course, mainly because of the steady increase after 1850 of "quality" literary monthlies. As Anesko argues, James both manipulated the magazine market and responded to its demands, building an audience and earning a livelihood by seeking a "middle way" between a prostituted popularity and an esoteric aestheticism that would leave him unread (8).

By the middle of Howells' editorship, James had become practiced at playing the magazine market. The rise of the quality New York illustrated magazines during the seventies and eighties, aimed at a broader, generally less liberally educated or intellectual middle-class audience than the Atlantic's, seemed to offer a considerably wider field, although James was generally

to find that the larger the readership a magazine aimed at, the more difficulty he had sustaining its interest in his work. Since 1866, he had published occasional stories in the Galaxy, New York's lively, short-lived answer to the Atlantic; Howells had encouraged him to do so to expand his readership (letter to James, 26 June 1869, Howells Letters 1: 328). But by 1874, Howells and the Atlantic were experiencing strong competition from the new, lavishly illustrated Scribner's for both readers and authors, including James. In fact, it was Scribner's editor, Howells' old antagonist, the sentimental novelist and moralist Dr. Josiah Holland, and not Howells, who in early 1874 first fired James up with the prospect of serializing a full novel (James to parents, 9 March 1874, and to Howells, 10 March 1874; Letters 1: 434-437). Acting from a convenient combination of personal obligation to Howells and self-interest, James notified Howells of Holland's offer. Initiating the pattern that would henceforth characterize his relationships with the magazines, James made it clear that there was competition for his work, that to meet his financial needs he must use several sources of publication, and that rather than being bound by either "trade courtesy" or personal friendship, publication was to be "a pure money question" (to Howells, 9 Jan. and 10 March 1874; Letters 1: 424, 436-437). As a result, Howells had to bid for both Roderick Hudson and The American while James published shorter works in Scribner's, Harper's, and the Galaxy and experimented with the less prestigious magazines like Lippincott's. Also, James' payments from the Atlantic rapidly rose from $100 per number for Roderick Hudson in 1875 to $250 per number (about $15 a page) in 1880 for Portrait of a Lady with permission to publish it simultaneously in England in Macmillan's.

When Thomas Bailey Aldrich succeeded Howells to the Atlantic editorship in February 1881, James wrote to T.S.Perry: "I . . . congratulate Howells and commiserate Aldrich. . . . As for Aldrich, he seems to me good enough for the Atlantic and the Atlantic good enough for him" (16 Feb. 1881, Letters 2: 341). James, flush with two years of popular success following "Daisy Miller" and with consciously popularized short sequences like Confidence in Scribner's and Washington Square "simultaning" in Harper's and Cornhill, was irritated at the Yankee financial conservatism of the Atlantic's new publisher, Henry Oscar Houghton (to Henry James Sr., 19 April 1878, Letters 2: 166). He was also scathingly contemptuous of Aldrich, whom he considered an intellectual lightweight: "the great little T. B. Aldrich" surrounded by a "queer atmosphere of travel, luxury, and purchase" (quoted in Ballou 354). As it turned out, James would receive a major part of his income as well as solid editorial and critical support during a difficult decade from Aldrich, Houghton, and the Atlantic.

John Tomsich has claimed that the cultural leaders of the genteel tradition, prominently including Aldrich, repudiated James as too depressing and therefore were "always insensitive to the greatest American artist of their day" (189). Aldrich's editorial treatment of James during the eighties, as well as Horace Scudder's reviews in the Atlantic, flatly contradict this conclusion. In fact, Aldrich's conservative aestheticism and his acceptance during his

editorship of the Atlantic's position as a small-circulation defender of high culture made the Boston magazine a haven for James' major work at a time when the New York illustrated monthlies with far larger circulations and broader readerships were backing away from him.

If James in the early eighties was flush with success, the Atlantic was in distinct decline. While Harper's and the new Scribner's claimed circulations well over 100,000 and by mid-decade the Century boasted 210,000 and "still rising," the more austere, old-fashioned Boston organ was clearly losing the competition for popular authors like Twain and ex-editor Howells and for a broad spectrum of middle-class readers. Atlantic circulation continued to decline from around 20,000 in 1880 to nearer 12,000 in 1885 (Ballou 365 and Houghton Mifflin Cost Book 12).

Portrait, while a critical success and reasonably profitable in book form, had not helped circulation of the Atlantic, which had paid $3500 to serialize it, partly because copies of Macmillan's, which had paid only $1580 to carry each installment a month earlier, were available in the United States before the corresponding Atlantic number was issued. Houghton henceforth ruled out all simultaneous publication, and as Portrait finished its 14-month run in the fall of 1881, Aldrich declined James' proposal for another serial to be "simultaned" at the increased price of $300 per number. But when Aldrich went on his annual summer excursion to Europe in 1882, Houghton apparently gave him "carte blanche" to negotiate major contributions from James (Ballou 289). Houghton's unusual liberality in this case was almost certainly motivated by his desire to keep James from entering an exclusive contract with his ex-partner, James Osgood, from whom he had parted in bitterness and who was now successfully raiding several publishers to secure major authors such as Twain, Howells, and Cable. Osgood was also in Europe this summer, and James again experienced the pleasure and profit of being the object of a bidding war. Aldrich, whom James derisively described as "that gilded youth who edits periodicals from Brown's Hotel," duly reported to Houghton that "after a great deal of diplomacy and Old Port, combined with several attacks on Henry James in his bathtub, I have secured the dramatization of 'Daisy Miller' for the Atlantic. I think it is a great card" (James quoted in Ballou 354, and Aldrich to Houghton, Sept. 1882, in Ballou 363). Certainly James had realized his youthful ambition to have "certain persons" on their knees begging for contributions. Even better, those persons were offering substantial money. Aldrich and Houghton got their "great card" at the very steep price of $1000, about $18 a page.

The "great card" proved a losing gamble and initiated a longstanding Atlantic policy against publishing dramatic literature. But Aldrich continued to solicit whatever he could get from James. By 1882, however, James had contracted with Houghton's arch-rival Osgood for both magazine and book rights to a novel and several stories. All Aldrich got for 1883 and 1884 was a long series of French travel sketches and miscellaneous critical essays. Even aside from his personal animosity with Houghton, the high-rolling Osgood had more ambitious plans for James' fiction. Osgood's plan, as well as James'

own ability to capitalize on the competition, and perhaps on the Houghton-Osgood animosity, was revealed in James' response to Aldrich's solicitation of a novel for 1885:

The Century now claimed a circulation over 200,000 and Charles Dana's Sun over 130,000. Both represented a much broader audience than the Atlantic and paid on a more liberal scale, Dana paying well over $40 a page for two stories by James (Ballou 376). But James was never again to enjoy this degree of confidence in his ability to win a popular American audience and command its financial rewards. Rather than bringing the expected popularity, the next several years brought the bankruptcy of the lavish Osgood in 1885, a resulting severe financial loss for James that put him under increased financial pressure, a very mediocre critical reception of his major works, a declining overall income, and a sharply diminished editorial demand, especially for full-length serials.

On receipt of James' letter requesting $500 per installment for his next novel, Aldrich responded that while he was much interested in the serial, Houghton would not pay what seemed an exceptionally high price. James, in a less ebullient mood, replied that on reconsideration his demand did seem "offhand and undigested," even "inconsiderate." He must, he claimed, have been thinking of the total he received from simultaneous English and American serializations of the Portrait which together yielded about $500. His more "deliberate," "digested," and final proposal was for his recent rate of $15 a page, which would bring about $350 a number for a twelve-month serial, compared with $250 for Portrait (19 March 1884, Letters 3: 37-38, 89).

James' original proposal had probably been based not so much on misremembering the simultaning of the Portrait as on a conscious testing of the Atlantic's upper limits in light of his recent successes, the competition of Osgood and Houghton, and the resulting windfall he had had from Houghton for the play of "Daisy Miller." At any rate, Aldrich and Houghton accepted James' counterproposal; and James made $4550 from serial rights for the Princess, in part because, like virtually all of James' full serials, it ran longer than projected and Aldrich and Houghton insisted on paying James the full rate for the numbers not in the original contract (Anesko 190).

Both The Bostonians, which ran in the Century from February 1885 to

February 1886, and the Princess (Atlantic, Sept. 1885-Oct. 1886) proved unpopular with most reviewers and readers. The Bostonians provoked a brief, lively scandal over James' satirical portrait of the indefatigably idealistic reformer Elizabeth Peabody in the dotty, pathetic Miss Birdseye. But after this notoriety, James feared that the book would be "a fiasco, as not a word, echo or comment on the serial . . . have come to me . . . from any quarter whatever. This deathly silence seems to indicate that it has fallen flat. I hoped much of it, and shall be disappointed" (to William James, Oct. 1885, Letters 3: 102). To the end of his life, James recalled with bitterness the response of R. W. Gilder, the Century's editor, who confirmed James' fears by telling him frankly that "they had never published anything that appeared so little to interest their readers" (James to E. Gosse, 25 Aug. 1915, Letters 4: 778). The Bostonians was the first and last full novel James published in The Century.

The dominant note in American critical response to both serials was anticipated in William James' warning to his brother that he risked "turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter with less art" (May 1886 in Gard 160). Mark Twain swore that he would rather be "damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than suffer the tedium of reading The Bostonians (to Howells, July 1885, Gard 156). The Critic's representative review of The Princess Casamassima called it an interminable tale that could appeal only to "the lover of . . . emotions analytically examined, of hair radiantly split, of spectroscopic ratings capable of dividing a ray of light into 32,000 lines to the square inch, or of intellectual engines describing 50,000 sensations to the twenty pages" (29 Jan. 1887, 51-52).

For a year and a half after the Princess finished its run in the Atlantic, only one short story by James was published in a periodical. From 1872 through 1884, James' income, most of it from American periodicals, had risen steadily, but it now entered a clear downward trend that was sustained until 1895 (Anesko 175, 176, 190). Further, with the Princess, he had tried for but failed to achieve a higher rate of payment, and now his rate, which had steadily advanced as a result of competition, entered a stasis that lasted for the rest of his life. By December 1887, he was lamenting to Edmund Gosse that editors as well as the public had lost confidence in him, and in February 1888 he wrote in his well-known letter to Howells that he was "still staggering a good deal under the mysterious and (to me) inexplicable injury wrought—apparently—upon my situation by my two last novels, the Bostonians and the Princess, from which I expected so much and derived so little. They have reduced the desire, and the demand, for my productions to zero" (Anesko 128; to Howells 2 Jan. 1888, Letters 3: 209).

By 1888, the adverse reception of the Princess and The Bostonians had strongly influenced James temporarily to abandon the full-length novel in favor of short stories and brief serials. In a letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, James explained his wish to "leave a multitude of pictures of my time . . . going in for number as well as quality . . ." (Letters 3: 240). But this shift of aesthetic focus from novel to story was also very clearly influenced by his

extreme disappointment at the reception of his recent serial novels and by a magazine market indifferent, even hostile, to his longer work, yet still open to occasional shorter fiction.

As Leon Edel demonstrates, James in 1887 and 1888 continued producing a number of short pieces, a few of which would be published soon in the illustrated New York monthlies. But solicitation of his work had, in fact, sharply diminished, and none of the large-circulation periodicals was inquiring about a major, full-length work. Aldrich and Houghton, however, essentially beaten in the competition for more popular writers like Twain and Howells, still viewed him as an important contributor, financially accessible as well as appropriate to the Atlantic's support for literary quality and its relatively highbrow audience. Shortly after James' despairing letter to Howells, Aldrich began publishing the three-number serial "The Aspern Papers" and laid siege to James for a major serial novel for 1889. In July 1887, in the absence of offers for serials, James had confided to Grace Norton that he was beginning to think of "a novel about half as long (thank God!) as the Princess" to be published as a volume without periodical serialization (Letters 3: 198). In his discouragement with longer fiction and turning to shorter pieces, he seems not, however, to have begun work on the idea. Aldrich's solicitation changed his plans considerably. It provided a new focus for the major work of his next two years as well as one-third to two-thirds of his literary income each year between 1888-1890:

The Tragic Muse was the last novel James would write for a decade, and when he returned to novels he would virtually give up serializing them because there was no market. Its central theme, reflecting James' own frustration in developing a substantial readership, was the conflict between the integrity of the artist and the public world, including "the essentially brutal nature of the modern audience" (Anesko 137, Tragic Muse 72). In integrating his two plots around this theme to meet Aldrich's request, James had worse than usual problems corsetting what Howells had called his "buxom muse." Despite James' reprimanding himself in his notebooks that he had begun "too complacently illustrative and descriptive" and must compress to gain "rapidity and action," the Muse ran on unflaggingly past the contracted twelve installments to fully seventeen, netting James almost $5000 for the serial rights (Anesko 125). Aldrich, while concerned at the constant requirement to curtail other material, was highly accommodating. Horace Scudder, chief Atlantic reviewer and soon to succeed Aldrich as Atlantic editor, countered in his review the widespread criticism of James' verbal abundance by asserting

that it was the "lavishness of true art, not the prodigality of a spendthrift of words." He concluded that "we can only advise students of literature and art who wish to see how fine a thing may be presented with a technique which . . . proves to be the facile instrument of a master workman who is thinking of the soul of his art to read The Tragic Muse" (Sept. 1890, 419-422).

Scudder's reviews of James during the decade had been consistently sympathetic, though not uncritical, and Aldrich had published work by James, including three major novels, in 66 of the 111 issues he edited. Clearly Aldrich's Atlantic, representing a relatively small cultural minority and an editorial pride in resisting commercial incursions on aesthetic quality, had continued to support the production of major work by the most important novelist of his day at a time when others had retreated. During the next decade, however, as the magazine became gradually more progressive and ambitious, Atlantic editors would cease to besiege James in his bathtub and ply him with old port.

When Houghton asked Horace Scudder to replace Aldrich in 1890, Scudder had written in his diary: "My aim is to keep the magazine at the front of American literature . . . and my heart beats quicker at the thought of serving God in this cause of high, pure literature" (17 June 1890). But Scudder was aware that he was "taking the magazine at a time when it is running down financially" and that his employers, who blamed part of this running down on Aldrich's stance of aesthetic indifference to commercial prospects, expected him to reverse the decline. As the Atlantic's major critic of American fiction, he had sometimes questioned James' elaborate psychological "vivisection" at the expense of "surface event" but consistently praised James as the contemporary master craftsman both in the short story and the novel. As a trade book editor, however, he was well aware that, except for Portrait, James' books with Houghton Mifflin had sold very poorly. The Tragic Muse would not even sell out its edition of 1000 during its first decade. He was conscious too that both Howells and Aldrich had agonized over unsuccessful efforts to contain James' buxom muse. Even more importantly, he knew that the firm's younger partner, George Mifflin, now coming into increasing control, considered the record seventeen installments of The Tragic Muse as so many millstones around the magazine's neck (Ballou 626, n. 20). These were the forces that would create Scudder's friction with James.

In 1890, with the Muse finishing its marathon run, Scudder decided not to solicit another serial from James. The Atlantic was belatedly joining the other quality magazines in being wary of James' longer fiction. But Scudder still wanted James substantively represented in the magazine and requested four short stories instead. "The new editor of the Atlantic," he assured the novelist, "values your work highly," and he sent as evidence his appreciative review of the Muse (20 Aug. 1890). James, genuinely appreciative of this authoritative tribute after years of exasperation with American editors, responded that the review "really brought tears to my eyes—giving me a luxurious sense of being understood, perceived, felt." To Scudder's proposal he replied,

"I embrace it with enthusiasm. . . . I will do the very best I can for you; I appreciate the friendly quality of your hospitality" (30 Aug. 1890, Ballou, 446).

Scudder's response to the first story quickly terminated James' "luxurious sense of being understood" at last by an American editor. In a lament echoed by thousands of James' later readers, Scudder apologetically suggested that "The Pupil" lacked "vivid surface" incident. "I do not need to tell you how much I admire your best work," Scudder wrote. "The Atlantic has been hospitable and its doors are wide open to you now. . . . [But] frankly my reluctant judgment insists upon regarding the story as lacking in interest, in precision, and in effectiveness. . . . I hate to write all this, but I should hate myself still more if I didn't" (30 Oct. 1890). James was stunned. He had not received a rejection from the Atlantic for twenty-five years, and although he was irritated by its rate of pay, he had considered it a safe haven. "I am very sorry to learn we have made such a bad start," he wrote. "I sent off The Pupil with a quite serene conviction that I had done a distinctly happy thing." The rejection, James said, made him "nervous and insecure" about the other works he had intended to write on demand for Scudder (10 Nov. 1890, Letters 3: 307). According to Leon Edel, the jolt from his first Atlantic rejection shook James sufficiently to lead him, with great personal distaste, to contract with one of the first of the new literary agents, A. P. Watt, for help in placing his work (Letters 3: 194).

Hearing nothing from James for several months, Scudder now began to feel nervous himself. "Why this deathly silence?" he wrote. James' response suggested both that the rejection had continued to rankle and that he had a very different idea than Scudder of an editor's rights. "Your letter demands a frank answer. My 'deathly silence' has been the result of the fact that . . . I quite failed to see that you had treated me fairly: I could not see that it was a performance that the Atlantic ought to have declined—nor banish from my mind the reflection that the responsibility, in any case, as regards the readers of the magazine, the public, should, when it's a question of an old and honourable reputation, be left with the author himself. The editor, under such circumstances, may fairly leave it to him. . . . These impressions were distinctly chilling as regards the production of further work" (4 March 1891, Letters 3: 338).

Scudder lamented to his diary that James "did not take my rejection of his story with as much equanimity as I first thought" (13 March 1891). The conciliatory editor now urged the author to contribute not only three more stories but also a personal remembrance of the recently deceased James Russell Lowell. All of these were duly written and accepted with polite gratitude, including assurance that even the punctuation would be "rigidly respected" (21 Oct. 1891).

Convinced of the collapse of the market for his serial fiction, which had sustained him, James tried with humiliating unsuccess during the next several years to win in the theater the appreciative and lucrative audience his fiction lacked. Scudder did not reestablish contact until 1895, when he again

solicited from James three short stories, each to run 12,000 to 15,000 words, around twenty pages, a length that was standard for the Atlantic but somewhat longer than most magazines encouraged.

James' painful attempts to accommodate this conventional literary form, which he had earlier used with facility, cost him considerable personal agony and considerable irritation with Scudder. They also graphically reflected the growth of both his art and his increased unwillingness in this "major phase" to compromise it. "I will with pleasure," he wrote, "send you three short stories for the Atlantic—if you will permit me to remind you what I mean by 'short.' I can't, with the accumulated manner which is the result of my time of life, or maturity of means, treat a subject that I find interesting enough to be treated at all, in the brief compass of the usual snippit story of the usual magazine. . . . I will do my best in the three things you propose to confine myself to . . . about 20 pages of the Atlantic, but I must ask you for a margin or an alternative if hard-pressed" (12 May 1895).

The first two "short" stories he began for Scudder eventually became novels. The day after writing Scudder, James found in his notebooks the seed of a story which he tentatively titled "The House Beautiful," about a refined mother dispossessed of a house filled with museum pieces by a philistine son and his boorish, vindictive bride. Within days the story bloomed luxuriantly in his imagination as a three-act drama, outgrowing the narrow limits of twenty pages. The same happened with his next idea, tentatively titled "The Awkward Age." After failing in what he bewailed to himself as a "tragic . . . waste of effort" to contain them, he set the two pieces aside, certain that no magazine editor would take them and that he would have to "make terms for them in some other way, terms bad, terms sadding, at the best" (Notebooks 131). "The truth is," he lamented to Scudder, "I can't do the very little thing any more, and the process—the endeavour—is most expensive. . . . However, you shall have your three stories, and have them tiny. They are probably the last (very small ones), I shall ever do—so cherish them" (3 Sept. 1895, Letters 4: 18).

But James faced an economic truth that directly conflicted with his aesthetic impulse, the truth that he still needed income from magazines and that those few magazines that still asked him for anything were asking him for single-number stories, generally of 10,000 words or less. On sitting down to make the next attempt for Scudder he wrote: "I must now try to do the thing of 10,000 words (which there is every economic reason for my recovering and holding the trick of)" (Notebooks 131).

After agonizing for a month attempting with limited success a "ferocious compression" in the third story, "The Glasses," James wrote Scudder: "I am in much humiliation and distress, for though I am sending you something by this post I am not sending you what will satisfy you. This is not, heaven knows, for want of time and labour—but because I can't, alas, even after renewed heroic effort, . . . keep within your limits of space. . . . As I wrote you the other day, I find, in my old age, that I have too much manner and style, too great and invincible an instinct of completeness and of seeing things in

all their relations, so that development, however squeezed down, becomes inevitable. . . . I must candidly and cynically say that, rather than worry over [the other promised stories] as I have worried over this, I shall have . . . sadly to renounce the attempt. But I will make it, once more" (4 Oct. 1895, Letters 4: 22).

Scudder, genuinely sympathetic to James' tribulations and worried about losing a contributor he valued highly, responded that he liked the story "immensely" and would publish it in a single number despite its length. He also invited James to rework one of the earlier stories into a three- or four-part serial instead of agonizing over two new stories. James expressed his "eternal gratitude" and proposed to work "The House Beautiful" into a short serial of 30,000 to 40,000 words. Inevitably, what was proposed as a story of 12,000 words and recast into a serial of 30,000, swelled to a novel of 70,000 words by the time Scudder ran it in seven installments in 1896 as "The Old Things" and Houghton Mifflin published it under the title The Spoils of Poynton. It was James' longest work since The Tragic Muse in 1890. Scudder joked to his protégée Josephine Peabody that "Henry James can make his hero make a speech of 20,000 words by just looking in some peculiar way at the heroine" (Diary, 10 Dec. 1896). But he accommodated the expansion of Spoils at each step, praised the "delicate patterns" of the narrative, and declared himself "filled with admiration of the art which has so firmly defined conduct so evasive" (to James, 9 June 1896). James defended the expansion as necessitated by aesthetic integrity, and expressed gratitude: "one has to do these things as one can (at least I have), and as one 'can' depends on the whole aesthetic life of one's donné. I am greatly obliged to you for your patience and tolerance" (to Scudder, 21 May 1896).

Later, however, recalling the evolution of The Spoils of Poynton in the Preface to the New York edition, James wrote: "I found myself—as against a mere commercial austerity—beguiled and led on," while "the sole impression it made [on the editor], I woefully gathered, was that of length . . ." (x). James' sensitivity had made his memory selective; Scudder had actively invited the short serial and praised it sincerely. But as editorial negotiator between James and the public, he had indeed responded to a "commercial austerity" rooted in the resistance of even the educated reading public, as well as his employers, to James' later style.

James, adept at defending his aesthetic integrity from editors since Howells' time, was, of course, right to resist the confinement of "magazineable" short fiction. But at a time when most American and British magazine editors were not asking James for anything, Scudder's solicitations had initiated at least six stories and two short novels; and the Atlantic during his editorship had carried seven of only sixteen pieces of non-dramatic fiction that James published in the years 1890 through 1896. Scudder had also asserted both in a long series of reviews and in Houghton Mifflin's publishing councils that James was a consummate literary artist who had achieved permanent stature and deserved to be more widely read. Unfortunately, his successor would not agree.

In 1895, Scudder had hired Walter Hines Page, who had recently resurrected the polemical New York monthly The Forum, as his assistant, and by 1896 Page was given virtual control of the magazine, though he was not officially named editor until 1898. During his four years at the Atlantic the enormously forceful and energetic Page laid the groundwork for its transformation over the next twenty years from a respected but musty literary periodical with a circulation of 11,000 to a thriving monthly commentary emphasizing current affairs with a circulation over 100,000. In the process, he eliminated it as a market for Jamesian fiction.

Page represented a new type of "progressive journalism" in its purest form (Wilson 40-62). Page had learned magazine editing in the early nineties in New York, where a host of entrepreneurial editor-publishers like Frank Munsey, Edward Bok, and the archetype, Samuel McClure, were creating a new wave of 15 cent "magazines for the masses" that rapidly gained circulations of several hundred thousands and threatened to drain writers, advertising, and subscribers from the old 35-cent "quality" monthlies like Harper's, Scribner's, and the Century. Page, although recognizing the entirely different tradition and current audience of the Atlantic, attempted a pragmatic application of the new magazine journalism to the old Boston organ. While previous Atlantic editors from Lowell to Scudder had aimed to "represent the permanent element in American literature" and in some sense to produce a monthly book, Page believed that a magazine had a shelf life of thirty days. Its focus should be on contemporary issues, not aesthetics or history. Its style and substance should be essentially journalistic, not literary. It should aim to have as direct, forceful, and immediate an impact on as broad an audience as possible.

Page explicitly rejected Aldrich and Scudder's tacit acceptance of the Atlantic as filling a small, "high-culture," literary niche. Like other prominent progressives—Roosevelt, whom he knew and supported, and Wilson, who later appointed him ambassador to England during the First World War—Page regretted the alienation that Santayana and Van Wyck Brooks would later define between intellectual and cultural interests on the one hand and social, economic, and political action on the other. Motivated, therefore, by both financial incentive and progressive personal ideology, Page explicitly edited the Atlantic to reduce the previous gap between high and middlebrow culture, between literature and journalism, and to promote the application of humanistic intellectual training to contemporary social issues.

Page's editorial treatment of literature was based on the same combination of progressive values and pragmatic ambition for a larger circulation. Atlantic editors since Lowell had believed that literary criticism in the magazine could establish high standards and discourage commercial cheapening of literature, and many of James' literary essays had been published in the Atlantic in support of this conviction. Page, however, dismissed literary criticism as "mere talkee-talkee." Written by alienated intellectuals who sneered at public tastes, literary criticism was, he believed, actually destructive.

"The present dearth in American letters," he wrote, "is due to the abnormal development of our smart critical faculty and our lack of sympathy alike with writers and with people in the mass" (to J. E. Chamberlin, 30 Sept. 1896). Accordingly, Page reduced Atlantic literary criticism by two-thirds, giving the additional space to current affairs; unlike his predecessors, he published none of James' literary essays.

Page showed a similar financially pragmatic progressivism in selecting fiction. Indifferent to literary quibbles such as the distinction between realism and romance, Page liked what had immediate "human," emotional impact and disliked the excessively subtle, cerebral, and aesthetically refined. He accepted Jack London's first nationally published story, launched Charles Chesnutt's career as a professional writer, and solicited authors as various as Stephen Crane, Abraham Cahan, James Whitcomb Riley, Mary Johnston, and the frothy Kate Douglas Wiggin.

Page shared the contempt of another red-blooded progressive, Theodore Roosevelt, for the neurotic, cynical, self-indulgent, mollycoddling fiction of psychological introspection. Page explained his literary philosophy in a letter to F. Hopkinson Smith, who had submitted a Jamesian psychological study by a young protégée, Lillie French: "[The story] is too subjective, too introspective. We wish to keep the Atlantic utterly free from the present fashion of stories about the innermost vitals and immortal souls of meditative people." To Miss French herself he wrote: "Our feeling is very strong in favor of stories not necessarily of adventure, but certainly of action—objective rather than subjective stories. We believe that wholesomeness in literature as well as in life discourages . . . the laying of emphasis on introspective tendencies. We are aware that in this feeling we run counter to a strong fashion in current fiction, but this strong fashion is itself . . . an additional reason why the Atlantic Monthly should stand for the opposite tendency" (4 March 1897).

Obviously, editorial solicitations to James ceased abruptly when Page took control in 1896. When James tested the silence in 1898 by submitting the short novel "In a Cage," Page wrote in his reader's report:

Page had implied in his letter to Lillie French that his editorial stand against the "strong fashion" of psychological introspection in fiction was a bold risk. In fact, however, he was entirely aware that his stand was a financial advantage. The vogue of historical romance, in part a popular reaction against the "morbidities" of naturalism and psychological realism, was in full sway, selling vast numbers of books; and Page, like the Century's Gilder and other editors, welcomed it. Citing several romances on the firm's list, including one he was serializing in the Atlantic, Page enthusiastically bragged to Scudder in 1897 that "the second and third rate literature booms"

(3 Sept. 1897). Page's own greatest coup was securing a novel titled To Have and to Hold by a fellow southerner, Mary Johnston. The work was, as Howells would have said, pure Scott-and-water, but Page and the firm's promotion director MacGregor Jenkins knew they had a windfall when they found the stenographers borrowing galley proofs to read at lunch time. To Have and to Hold temporarily "almost doubled" Atlantic circulation when it was serialized in 1899, and it sold 275,000 copies during its first year as a book (Perry, Gladly Teach 175; Ballou 464, 422).

Just as To Have and to Hold was creating a boom in Atlantic circulation, the ambitious Page was hired by S. S. McClure to rule "a kingdom or two" at Harper Brothers, which had recently gone into receivership to J. P. Morgan. A desperate Scudder and Mifflin, prompted by promotion director Jenkins, hired Princeton professor Bliss Perry to fill the vacancy in the Atlantic editorship. Perry, himself a writer of realistic fiction as well as author of the first major scholarly work on Whitman, had a more sophisticated, modern literary taste and greater commitment to literature than Page. Perry knew also that James was perhaps the greatest living writer of fiction in English and one whose stature would be permanent. When W. C. Brownell proposed contributing a major overview of James' work, Perry welcomed the offer, commenting that "a square look in the mirror ought to prepare his soul for the Judgment Day. . . . There will be one for him, I know, whatever may be the luck of the rest of us" (3 Feb. 1905).

As an academic in publishing, however, Perry was insecure. He needed to prove his commercial mettle and was oversensitive to advice and pressure from other members of the firm. From Mifflin, he felt a mandate to continue Page's progressive emphasis on current events, an emphasis that Mifflin credited with boosting Atlantic circulation from around 11,000 to 18,000 in a few years.

Another strong influence on Perry was the magazine's business director, MacGregor Jenkins, a fellow Williams graduate who became a collegial guide for the inexperienced Perry. Jenkins, who remained with the Atlantic long after Perry had shaken its dust from his feet, had decided views on literature which he later condensed into a lecture and book titled Literature with a Large L. Like Page, Jenkins was committed, for both ideological and even more transparently commercial reasons, to reducing the gap between highbrow and popular culture. He expressed genial contempt for "Literature with a Large L," aesthetically self-conscious, intellectually sophisticated, excessively subtle literature written by precious professional aesthetes, further desiccated in the literary criticism of pretentious professorial types, and appropriately viewed with deep suspicion by the majority as terminally "highbrow." The only genuine purposes of literature were entertainment and emotional impact. Real literature was written not by professional "literary persons," self-serious about their bogus "art" (and probably demanding large payments), but by people with a vital experience to tell who could express that experience directly to large numbers of their fellows. Jenkins, for whom James was the archetype of the "highbrow" professional literary person, was

a resolute voice of the mass market and the Saturday Evening Post influential in the inner councils of the Atlantic.

In the fall of 1899, as Perry began his editorship, James, in need of revenue to purchase Lamb House, hired a new literary agent, James Pinker, and again began writing prolifically, producing several stories and a scenario for a novel which eventually became The Ambassadors (Edel, Treacherous Years 337-338). Pinker distributed the stories among the quality monthlies, and Perry, anxious to include James in the magazine's prospectus for 1900, took one titled "Maude Evelyn." Perry also responded favorably to James' proposal to contribute some "literary papers." But with some embarrassment, the editor stated frankly his belief, based partly on Jenkins' analysis of subscription lists, that the Atlantic had a more diverse, less aesthetically and intellectually sophisticated readership than formerly and that this new readership would require concessions:

Despite Perry's qualms and a rate of pay now distinctly lower than the New York illustrated monthlies', Pinker judged the Atlantic the most likely target for James' prospective novel. The proposal left Perry uncomfortably undecided for months. In December, he expressed to James clear interest in the novel and wrote Pinker that "we have been considering the outline (of the proposed serial) carefully and are pleased with it" (to James, 13 Dec.; to Pinker, 20 Dec. 1899). He added, however, that negotiations in progress for other serials precluded unreserved commitment.

Who were the authors with whom James was now competing for space in the Atlantic? One was the Virginian Mary Johnston. Page's assistant, William Parker, had spent much of the fall helping her to edit some of the more flamboyant absurdities out of To Have and to Hold. Miss Johnston, an insecure author who depended on her editors for confidence, admitted that "sometimes I think it is the veriest trash that ever escaped a wastebasket" (to Perry, 18 Dec. 1899). But Perry accurately predicted very large book sales and as sales boomed assured her of his sincere interest in her next novel. Second, Albert Houghton, one of the firm's partners and a friend of the

bottom line, had recommended Kate Douglas Wiggin, soon to become author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, whose first book had gradually accumulated sales over 250,000 and who could readily produce a light commercial confection at a reasonable price (Ballou 432-433). On the advice of Horace Scudder, still editor-in-chief of trade books, Perry was also sounding out the popular novelist Arthur Hardy. Finally, both Scudder and Charles Dudley Warner had managed to persuade a reluctant Sarah Orne Jewett, at the height of her career and near its sudden end, to abandon her quiet regional realism for a dash at commercial popularity on the crest of the tidal wave of historical romance, and Scudder was conferring with her about serializing the result.

As the new century began in the early spring of 1900, Perry, despite his own taste and conscience, found it increasingly difficult to encourage James' proposal. To Have and to Hold came out as a book in February and sold 135,000 copies in its first two months; James' last novel with the firm, The Tragic Muse, had sold only 897 copies in its first year and for nearly a decade had carried a loss in the firm's list of "Books that Have Not Paid for Themselves" (Ballou 448). Although Miss Johnston would undoubtedly raise her price for her next work, serial rights for To Have had cost only $3500 as opposed to almost $5000 for the Muse and, at James' rate of $15 a page, probably about $4500 for the new novel.

In March, Perry wrote James again stalling a decision pending his hearing from "one or two authors to whom we owe every consideration." But by now his tone was dubious: "Furthermore, we must reckon more or less of course, upon the passing taste of the American public. Just now people are quite daft, as you know, over the American historical romance, and incline to be suspicious of anything else. This makes us hesitate—I wish it did not!—to engage a serial from your hand in spite of the convincing plot that you have already submitted. It may be that it will prove best to do so. Yet our uncertainty is so great that I cannot feel comfortable without laying the matter thus frankly before you" (14 March 1900).

The nail in the coffin came two weeks later when the April issue of the Atlantic came out carrying James' story, "Maude Evelyn." MacGregor Jenkins, encouraged by Page's legacy of increased political and social reportage and the robust success of Johnston's swashbuckler, had been trying with some success to convince the American News Company that the Atlantic was no longer a "highbrow" literary magazine but deserved wider distribution, including newsstand sales. The appearance of "Maude Evelyn" nearly destroyed his credibility, and he now came to editor Perry "with actual tears in his eyes" beseeching him not to print another "sinker" by James (Gladly Teach 178).

Turning down proposals by both James and Howells, Perry over the next two years serialized Sarah Orne Jewett's The Tory Lover, Mary Johnston's Audrey, A. S. Hardy's His Daughter First, and Kate Wiggin's Penelope's Irish Adventure. Responding to Jewett's gift copy of The Tory Lover, James noted as gently as he could the "fatal cheapness" of historical romance and begged

Jewett to "go back to the dear country of the Pointed Firs, come back to the palpable present-intimate" (5 Oct. 1901, Letters 4: 208). No one was more conscious of this fatal cheapness than Perry. By early 1902 he was declaring his loathing of the genre to Page, who characteristically responded that "of course we are all tired of them," but after all, the next one could be another blockbuster (31 Jan. 1902). In an editorial titled "Catering to the Public," Perry tried to vindicate his aesthetic judgment and absolve his troubled New England conscience by frankly, with a veneer of humor, blaming his readership. "Does anyone suppose," he wrote, "that Mr. Munsey's favorite reading is the Munsey Storiettes? Does the sound of the swashbuckler swashing on his buckler seem less humorous to the editors who encourage it than it does to Mr. Howells who has laid aside his editorial armor and can smile at the weaknesses of his former fellow warriors?" (3). Perry's native Yankee humanism eventually made him, unlike Page, unable to live with this cynicism and drove him out of publishing back to academe with bitter memories of his own compromises.

Through Howells, The Ambassadors was finally serialized by the flamboyant Col. George Harvey in the North American Review, which he was operating at a loss for prestige (Exman 190). It was the last of James' novels to be serialized. In the future, sympathetic but reluctant magazine editors took only an occasional story, sometimes at Howells' urging. By 1900, the American "quality" magazines, among which the Atlantic had been the most consistently supportive, were no longer a viable market for James' fiction. Fortunately, James' income from his family, resulting from the death of his sister in 1892 and improved management of family property, as well as royalties on an increasing number of books, relieved him of the necessity of constant magazine publication. He was, thus, increasingly liberated to resist compromises with the marketplace, to return his energies mainly to the novel, and to produce the monuments of the "major phase" without what he considered the onerous requirements of serialization. Those requirements had, in some cases, clearly influenced the work he undertook, the shape of his narratives, and his concept of the audience for which he wrote.

During James' first fifteen years as a writer, the Atlantic, partly from its early sympathy with realism, partly through Howells' friendship, had provided a major market for his fiction, exerting some but relatively little pressure on James to compromise his aesthetic experimentation and integrity. Between 1875 and 1885, James, building on his Atlantic base and encouraging competition, made good headway in placing some fiction, generally shorter or lighter, in the mainstream illustrated quality magazines, such as Scribner's, Harper's and The Century, that achieved large circulations and success during the seventies and eighties. After the failure of The Bostonians in The Century in 1885, however, it became clear that the New York illustrated monthlies would not provide a market for major novels by James, though they continued, with diminishing frequency, to take short works.

During the eighties, the Atlantic under Aldrich had compensated for its

sharp decline in circulation by seeking a niche as a defender of high literary culture. Accordingly, Aldrich continued actively to solicit a large quantity of James' work, including the last two full novels before his "major phase." But as the Atlantic began to grow ambitious for a larger circulation, its commitment to James waned. Influenced by the progressive publishing movement of the nineties that produced a new wave of cheaper, larger-circulation magazines like McClure's, Page and business manager Jenkins placed new emphasis on current affairs reportage rather than fiction, journalism rather than "Literature." The Atlantic's survival, effective promotion, and influence, they believed, required systematically diminishing the perceived gap between high literary culture and middle-class popular culture. The progressives also condemned the fiction of psychological realism as not only aesthetically pretentious and dull, but also unhealthy in its encouragement of introspection. Preferring extroversion, vigorous action, and broader readerships, they promoted the inundation of historical romances around the turn of the century. Under these market influences, Perry, like other magazine editors who recognized James' quality and permanence, were ashamedly reluctant to publish his work, often supplanting it with fiction they acknowledged to be third rate.

Works Cited

• Unless otherwise specified, all references in the text to unpublished correspondence refer to manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University and are used by permission of the Houghton Library.
• Anesko, Michael. "Friction with the Market": Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
• Ballou, Ellen, The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin's Formative Years. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
• Brodhead, Richard. "Literature and Culture" in The Columbia Literary History of the United States. Ed. Emory Elliot. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. 468-481.
• Donovan, Josephine. New England Local Color: A Woman's Tradition. New York: Frederick Unger, 1983.
• Edel, Leon. Henry James. 4 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962-72.
• Exman, Eugene. The House of Harper. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
• Gard, Roger. Henry James: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968.
• Howells, William Dean. "Henry James." Century 25 (Nov. 1882): 25-29.
• ___. "Recollections of an Atlantic Editorship." Atlantic 100 (Nov. 1907).
• ___. Selected Letters. Vol. 1. Ed. George Arms et al. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
• Jacobson, Marcia. Henry James and the Mass Market. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama, 1983.
• James, Henry. The Complete Notebooks. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall Powers. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
• ___. The Letters of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975-84.
• ___. "Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields." Atlantic 116 (July 1915), 21-31.
• ___. "An Open Letter to Mr. Howells." North American Review 195 (April 1912), 558-562.
• ___. The Spoils of Poynton. New York: Scribner's, 1908.
• ___. The Tragic Muse. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890.
• Jenkins, MacGregor. Literature with a Large L. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919.

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• McMahon, Helen. Criticism of Fiction: A Study of Trends in the Atlantic Monthly: 1857-1898. New York: Bookman, 1973.
• Mott, Frank L. A History of American Magazines. Vols. 2 and 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1939.
• Perry, Bliss. And Gladly Teach. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935.
• ___. "On Catering to the Public." Atlantic 100 (Jan. 1904): 1-5.
• Tomsich, John. A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1971.
• Wilson, Christopher. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens, GA: Georgia UP, 1985.