by James Baxter
On December 10, 1951, a lively party was underway at a luxurious apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Among those invited were writers Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams, publishers Roger W. Strauss, Howard Moss, Mary Louise Aswell, and Robert Giroux, as well as power brokers from literary agencies, influential journals, and newspapers. The host, New American Library co-founder Victor Weybright, was poised to launch a dynamic new publishing venture—New World Writing—alongside colleagues and friends from across the industry. Marketed on the publisher’s non-fiction Mentor imprint as both a prestige paperback and avant-garde “little magazine,” New World Writing promised an adventurous cross-section of conspicuously “high” culture available from newsstands throughout the nation. Weybright delivered a speech to the assembled partygoers, highlighting the dynamic potential of the dual-format periodical which benefited from specialist attention by New American Library editors, and industrial cooperation by literary insiders from New York publishing. Between 1952 and 1959, the paperback magazine was sustained for 15 issues, providing a venue for influential post-war American novelists Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, and Joseph Heller, trans-Atlantic avant-gardists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, and international voices from across forty countries and five continents. In 1984’s Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America, cultural historianKenneth C. Davis regards the series as “a cultural high watermark for the paperback book in the 1950s.” (191-192) Largely unique among the many nominally “little” magazines of the period, New World Writing played a fundamental role in the formation of company identity, acting as an embedded literary compass that was simultaneously entangled within the processes of mid-century branding and marketing. Eschewing the coterie elitism commonly associated with modernist little magazines, New World Writing instead upheld a stance of breezy corporate “hospitality,” mediating between market interests while hijacking the little magazine format to champion the perceived value of the paperback as a quality institution.
Throughout the 1950s, the perception of cultural value within the literary marketplace was undergoing significant change, fundamentally impacted by the post-war expansion of college education and the mass market distribution of category titles, literary reprints, and any number of anthologies available in softcover editions. As Paula Rabinowitz argues, the absorption of prestige authors like James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and William Faulkner into mass-market paperback lists engendered a form of “pulp modernism,” with paperback markets providing a channel for modernism’s uneasy passage into the mid-twentieth-century. (30) At the same time, the cachet of avant-garde little magazines significantly informed the marketing language of “quality” paperbound series. By the following decade, New World Writing would famously pass into the urban miscellany detailed in Frank O’Hara’s 1964 poem “The Day Lady Died.” Capturing a moment in time, marking the death of jazz singer Billie Holiday on July 17, 1959, the poem’s second stanza finds the speaker picking up “an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days.” Related in a breezy and vernacular tone, O’Hara implicitly signals the mercenary and somewhat inauthentic character of the new anthologies, whereby one might purchase a copy of a literary magazinein the same instant as a pack of cigarettes or a hamburger. Unacknowledged is the expiry of a second cultural institution, with the final issue of New World Writing released a month prior to the date of the poem’s events. The intertextual link to Ghanaian poetry draws a connection between O’Hara’s unconventional elegy and the June 1959 edition, which includes a curated selection of the “Voices of Ghana,” alongside a series on contemporary Icelandic poetry, a short story by Boris Pasternak, a translated excerpt from Dante’s Purgatory, and an essay on the history and production of the little magazine Furioso. While New World Writing was an especially long-standing “middlebrow” institution, O’Hara’s speaker may just as easily have picked up a copy of discovery (Pocket Books) or Avon Stories in the Modern Manner (Avon), as serial paperback magazines distributed widely on newsstands, in groceries, and drug stores. [1]
Formerly the U.S. branch of Penguin Books, New American Library played a vital role in shaping the cultural cachet of the paperback, alongside competing mid-century institutions like Pocket Books, Bantam, Avon, Dell, and Noonday. As leading New American Library historian Thomas L. Bonn suggests, the publisher acquired a steady reputation as a “literary gatekeeper” on the mass market, developing a more selective reprint list and intimate relations with agents and authors—up to that point largely the preserve of trade hardcover houses. [2] The release of New World Writing played a pivotal role in galvanizing this institutional transition, with publisher Victor Weybright citing the influence of Penguin New Writing, edited by John Lehmann,as a prime example of a high-cultural publisher’s periodical that successfully found a broad-based readership. Unlike its predecessors, New American Librarywould not disclose the charismatic vision of a single editor, but rather highlight the paperback series as the bountiful and collaborative expression of the publisher’s editorial department.
Key to the sensibility of the magazine was Arabel J. Porter, senior NAL editor, and magazine “coordinator,” later described by editor and essayist Ted Solotaroff as the “tutelary spirit” of the New World Writing.(261) Responsible for maintaining contact with authors, agents, and publishers, disbursing royalties and subsidiary payments, Porter would also partake in framing the cultural mission of the magazine as one of “literary hospitality.” Porter expressed this mission in a short essay printed in the April 1952 debut issue. Porter writes that “most young writers, working as they do in solitude, are unaccustomed, in the early stages of their careers, to literary hospitality—that is to a publisher’s interest in their work.” (311) Instead, the New World Writing toasts the little magazines “whose taste, insight, and devotion have done the most to encourage new writing.” (312) As a statement of intent, the endorsement of “literary hospitality” underpinned the magazine’s openness to different aesthetic sensibilities, as well as its instrumental function as a shopfront on the literary marketplace and a stepping-stone for budding writers.
Released in April 1952, the debut issue of New World Writing was printed at a circulation of over 100,000 copies, and benefited from the full thrust of New American Library’s promotional and distributional capacities. [3] The magazine was marketed to colleges and educators—with special promotions appearing in bookstores, advertising in newspapers and general interest magazines—and was distributed widely, capitalizing on Weybright’s links with the State Department and cultural attaches to reach international export markets. The front cover was designed by Ernst Reichl, the designer of the infamous Random House edition of Ulysses, linking New World Writing with a heritage of modernist production.Its status as a prestige paperback was further reflected in the price: as the first 50¢ edition on the 35¢ Mentor list, New World Writing introduced the higher price to New American Library’s college imprint, reframing the mass-market paperback as a somewhat more exclusive commodity. The debut issue featured writing by Christopher Isherwood, Alain Locke, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Frank O’Hara, and William Gaddis, and was reviewed positively, with reviewers remarking on the debt to the esteemed in-house journal of Penguin Books, Penguin New Writing, as well as influential anthologies like Martha Foley’s and Whit Burnett’s Story. As an ostensibly open and “hospitable” outlet, the magazine also served a more acquisitive function, with many of the authors printed in its pages going on to appear in New American Library editions. As the publisher’s note reads at the beginning of the issue, in New World Writing “writers have a showcase, a position in a literary bazaar, where their work may be viewed by critics, agents, and publishers, as well as by sensitive readers.” (ii) Perhaps most striking is the inclusion of a four-page directory of little magazines and literary presses, embodying Porter’s call for “literary hospitality,” a resource for writers and concrete record of goodwill between actors throughout the industry. The directory itself became a site of exclusion and prestige, with Anglophile Weybright lobbying for greater representation of British journals like Encounter and The London Magazine. Representatives from little magazines would eagerly contact New American Library for inclusion, bolstering the magazine’s utility as a promotional vehicle and mid-twentieth-century cultural index.
The attempt to bolster the publisher’s literary brand would also shape the content of New World Writing in more implicit ways. To underline the variety and prestige of the paperback format, Victor Weybright commissioned an essay by Charles J. Rolo, literary editor of Atlantic Monthly. (180) Titled “Simenon and Spillane: The Metaphysics of Murder for the Millions,” Rolo’s essay investigates the works of American pulp author Mickey Spillane in tandem with the detective stories of popular French novelist George Simenon. Crucially, both authors would appear in New American Library reprints. In particular, Spillane, whose Mike Hammer novels were among the most aggressively merchandised in the United States, was synonymous with the more salacious end of the paperback market. Published in December 1951—the same month as the launch party of New World Writing—Spillane’s The Big Kill enjoyed a first printing of 2.5 million copies, at that stage the largest in paperback history. (180) Throughout the essay, Rolo holds the signature pulp category of the murder mystery to scholarly analysis, writing of the genre as a “metaphysical success story,” adopting the mystery formula to satisfy deep human needs. (236) For Rolo, the sensational violence of Spillane’s Hammer mysteries plays into readerly urges for the exaction of divine violence while Simenon’s novels foreground psychological depth and complex motivation, refining the logic of the “whodunnit” into the “whydunnit.” (242) By joining money maker Spillane to Simenon’s dense psychological mysteries, New World Writing unifies the drive for profit with the trans-Atlantic aura of sophistication on the mass-market.
By projecting “literary hospitality,” New World Writing galvanized the institutional role of the paperback magazine, shaping both its currency and function as a publishing genre through the 1950s and beyond. The magazine was largely successful in reorientating the cultural prestige of the paperback, anticipating the rise of the “quality paperback” as a ubiquitous marketing category later in the decade. [4] In part, the New World Writing promised an investment in the future health of the literary market, advertising that “today’s New World Writing is tomorrow’s Good Reading for the Millions.” By 1959, New World Writing was discontinued, with the magazine’s archive transferred to Yale University, and rights to the periodical sold to trade publisher J.B. Lippincott. Reissued in a scaled-down production as a “quality” paperback, the first issue of the new run would be dedicated to Arabel J. Porter. Throughout the following decade, periodicals like Evergreen Review, Amistad, and New American Review each offered unique perspectives on the enduring legacy of New World Writing and the impact of the paperback magazine as a publishing instrument. Writing in 1967 in the first issue of New American Review—released by New American Library, initially as an attempt to revive the New World Writing for the 1960s—editor Ted Solotaroff praised the publisher’s “pioneering role” in marketing “a paperback literary magazine for a relatively mass audience.” (1) Reinventing the little magazine for the mass market, the New American Library continued to influence notions of social value and corporate practice in American publishing throughout the twentieth century.
[1] In Dwight MacDonald’s infamous essay “Masscult and Midcult,” he gestures towards the proliferation of high circulation little magazines as a peculiar “midcult” phenomenon: “they should perhaps be called ‘big–little magazines’ since they aspire to the broader circulation of the quality paperback.” Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York: New York Review of Books, 2011), 55.
[2] Bonn explains how Victor Weybright’s “missionary-like messages” attempted to narrow the gulf between New American Library’s softcover program and hardcover publishing philosophies. Thomas L. Bonn, Heavy Traffic & High Culture: New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 10.
[3] The circulation of New World Writing steadily declined, from a height of 150,000 at the close of 1952 to about 65,000 by the end of the decade.
[4] The “quality paperback” is synonymous with the introduction of Anchor Books by Jason Epstein at Doubleday in 1953.
This essay has been substantially informed by a research trip to the “New World Writing records” housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Thanks go to the Irish Research Council who funded my visit to this archive.
James Baxter is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow based at Trinity College Dublin, where he is undertaking a 2-year project on the ‘big-little magazine’ in the post-war United States. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Reading and is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction: Problems in Postmodernism (Palgrave, 2021).
Edited by Thomas Cryer
Featured Image: Aerial view of Manhattan and Queens, New York, photographed by Angelo, Rizzuto December 1952, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Anthony Angel Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsca-69575.
