The weight of forty-four pounds: commercial publishing houses and transition magazine in the 1930s

Monk, Craig

The weight of forty-four pounds: commercial publishing houses and transition magazine in the 1930s

Author

Monk, Craig

Date

2015

Keywords

little magazines

Abstract (summary)

As early as the first edition of Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley’s 1934 “narrative of ideas,” transition magazine was acknowledged widely as the European outlet for “dyed-in-the-wool expatriates” from the United States, those “colts who had jumped the fence without breaking their tethers.” A divisive topic of discussion amongst its contemporaries, transition was eventually lauded by Samuel Putnam, once one of its fiercest critics, in his Paris Was Our Mistress (1947), as the magazine “that really awakened the broader circles of the American intelligentsia to the fact that something was going on in Europe and among our expatriates.”

Publication Information

Monk, C. (2015). The Weight of Forty‐Four Pounds: Commercial Publishing Houses and transition Magazine in the 1930s. American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, 25 (1), 80‐93. doi: 10.1353/amp.2015.0004.