The Smart Set

The Smart Set
Title	The Smart Set
Editor	H. L. Mencken; George Jean Nathan
Category	Literary magazine
Frequency	Monthly
Publisher	Smart Set Company
Firstdate	1900
Finaldate	1930s
Country	United States
Based	New York City
Language	English

The Smart Set was an influential American literary magazine founded in 1900 that published fiction, criticism, and commentary and shaped early 20th-century cultural debates. Its pages featured fiction and essays by prominent and emerging writers associated with Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry (magazine), and The Dial (magazine), while editors connected the magazine to theatrical networks such as Broadway theatre and publishing houses like Scribner's Sons. The magazine's intersection with figures from Progressive Era politics to Harlem Renaissance arts made it a nexus for debates involving leading personalities and institutions.

History

The magazine was founded in 1900 in New York City by publisher William Randolph Hearst associates and initially modeled on British periodicals such as Punch (magazine), drawing on transatlantic literary currents tied to London salons and the Bloomsbury Group. Early years saw involvement from editors connected to McClure's Magazine and contributors who later appeared in Vanity Fair (British magazine), with editorial shifts reflecting tensions between Gilded Age sensibilities and emerging Modernist literature. In the 1910s the editorship of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan aligned the magazine with the theatrical networks of New York City and the critical circles of Chicago, while interactions with figures from World War I era politics influenced its coverage. Financial pressures during the Great Depression and changing magazine markets involving rivals such as Esquire (magazine), Time (magazine), and Life (magazine) contributed to its eventual decline in the 1920s–1930s.

Editorial and Contributors

Editors such as H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan cultivated a staff and stable of contributors that included novelists, poets, and critics who were simultaneously linked to institutions like Columbia University, Princeton University, Harvard University, and theaters on Broadway. Notable contributors appearing in its pages included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Lee Masters, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Sandburg, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, Edith Wharton, Clarence Darrow, Rudolf Nureyev, and theatrical critic networks tied to Theatre Guild. The editors' connections to theatrical producers such as Elsa Maxwell and managers like Florenz Ziegfeld helped secure reviews and essays bridging drama and literature.

Content and Themes

The magazine's content combined short fiction, serialized novels, drama criticism, and satire, reflecting aesthetic conversations among Modernism, Realism (literature), and Naturalism (literature). It ran pieces engaging with urban life in New York City and rural perspectives linked to regions such as Southern United States and Midwestern United States, publishing works that intersected with movements like the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance. Recurring themes included examinations of social mores debated alongside figures such as Sigmund Freud, legal controversies involving Clarence Darrow, and cultural debates resonant with publications like The Nation and The North American Review. The magazine frequently published book reviews and polemics that responded to new works from Charles Darwin's intellectual heirs and to theatrical premieres associated with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller.

Publication and Distribution

Published monthly by the Smart Set Company from its New York City office, the magazine circulated among subscribers in urban centers including Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, leveraging distribution networks used by Street & Smith and book dealers like G. P. Putnam's Sons. Advertising relationships linked it to emerging commercial brands and to department stores such as Macy's (store), while distribution deals intersected with library systems at institutions such as the New York Public Library and university libraries at Yale University and Princeton University. Circulation fluctuated with economic cycles and competition from magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Collier's Weekly.

Reception and Influence

Contemporary reception combined praise from literary reviews in publications like The New York Times Book Review and criticism from moralists in The Saturday Evening Post and religious periodicals such as The Christian Science Monitor. The magazine influenced later editors and journals including The New Yorker, Poetry (magazine), and The Sewanee Review, and its editorial model informed anthologies published by houses like Charles Scribner's Sons and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Its role in launching careers affected prize trajectories tied to honors such as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature for writers promoted in small magazines and mainstream reviews.

Legacy and Adaptations

The magazine's archives are held in special collections at institutions including Library of Congress, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Princeton University Library, and University of Virginia. Its influence appears in literary histories, adaptations of fiction into stage productions on Broadway and into film treatments by studios such as Paramount Pictures and MGM Studios. Scholarly work on the magazine connects it to studies involving Modernist studies, archival projects at the Modern Language Association, and exhibitions at museums like the New-York Historical Society.

Category:American literary magazines Category:Magazines established in 1900