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THE "SMART MAGAZINES"

From Society and Comedy

A new class of magazines began to publish during the 1910s, which writer George Douglas has dubbed the "Smart Magazines." The principal examples from this era were The Smart Set and Vanity Fair. Later additions to the fold included The New Yorker and Esquire. They grew out of two separate strains in magazine publishing: the urban society journal and the humor magazine. Urban society journals published news about the "Four Hundred" high-society families, their parties and charities, their debutantes, weddings, and travels. Humor magazines such as Life (not to be confused with a later publication by that name), Punchy and Judge published satire, cartoons, and comedic fiction. The "Smart Magazines" catered to an elite audience but set out to amuse, entertain, and provoke, to be the fodder of conversation at parties.

Vanity Fair.

Vogue publisher Condé Nast bought two dying society journals in 1913, Dress and Vanity Fair. He originally combined the two as Dress and Vanity Fair, but when he hired Frank Crowninshield as editor, Crowninshield immediately dropped the first part of the name. Crowninshield was a dapper man-about-town who knew so many prominent people in the arts and belonged to so many society clubs that the magazine sometimes resembled an outlet for his friends. He was unapologetic about the magazine's pretensions, saying, "My interest in society—at times so pronounced that the word 'snob' comes to mind—derives from the fact that I like an immense number of things which society, money, and position bring in their train: painting, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, dances, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women." Vanity Fair was beautifully published on slick paper and was what a later era would call a "coffee-table" magazine. Crowninshield's vision was of a publication that people could not stop talking about. He managed to present serious issues with a light touch. Vanity Fair, if not the best magazine ever, as critic Cleveland Amory called it, certainly reflected the spirit of its age and printed the work of outstanding writers and artists.

The Smart Set.

Started in 1900 by William D'Alton Mann, the publisher of the society tattle sheet Town Topics, The Smart Set bore the subtitle, "The Magazine of Cleverness." While it had a steep newsstand price of twenty-five cents, it was a commercial success from the beginning because advertisers were eager to reach the highbrow carriage trade that read it. Mann wanted The Smart Set to be for the Four Hundred, but also by and about them. If the idle rich never wrote for the publication (ghost writers took on aristocratic names instead), they did embrace its innovative fiction, features, and design coverage. Looking to revivify the magazine in 1908, Mann recruited two of the most promising young men of letters in the nation, who met for the first time in the New York office of The Smart Set. George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken started as the magazine's drama and literary reviewers and became its coeditors from 1914 until 1923, after a succession of changes in ownership. Mencken wrote to Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, that he intended The Smart Set to be a "magazine for civilized adults in their lighter moods. A sort of frivolous sister to the Atlantic."

"The Aristocrat Among Magazines."

Both Nathan and Mencken styled themselves as iconoclasts, working against the tides of popular enthusiasm. They supported and attacked their prejudices with gusto and delight and seemed to find amusing spectacles everywhere. The Smart Set published a new generation of European writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, and William Butler Yeats. Americans such as Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Robinson Jeffers also made their appearances. The Smart Set was part of the cultural renaissance triggered by the famous Armory Show of paintings and the introduction of "little" magazines such as Poetry. The Smart Set soon became one of the premier literary magazines in the United States. It limped along financially, but the sheer force of the coeditors' personalities and wit, their industry (they sometimes wrote half the issue under pseudonyms), and their nerve carried it forward until they abandoned it in 1923 to launch the American Mercury.