Before a novelist has a shelf of books, there’s usually a stack of rejection slips and, if things go well, one editor who says yes. Small magazines have long played that role, often with tiny budgets and big convictions.
Many of the writers we now treat as fixtures first appeared in these pages as unknowns. Three magazines stand out for how clearly their archives show it.
The Paris Review
George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen and Harold Humes founded The Paris Review in 1953. It built its name partly through its long interviews with writers, but it also took chances on new fiction. In 1958 it ran Philip Roth’s story “The Conversion of the Jews,” when Roth was still a young writer without a book.
That story was soon collected in Goodbye, Columbus, published in 1959. The book won the National Book Award for fiction in 1960, and it launched one of the major careers in American fiction. The Paris Review also printed early work by Jack Kerouac, including “The Mexican Girl” in 1955, which shows how the magazine gave space to voices that mainstream outlets weren’t yet ready for.
The Little Review
Margaret Anderson started The Little Review in Chicago in 1914, and Jane Heap later joined her as co-editor. Ezra Pound served as foreign editor and steered much of the modernist material toward it. The magazine is best remembered for serializing James Joyce’s Ulysses, which began in 1918.
Ulysses led to a New York obscenity trial in 1921 over its Nausicaa episode, and Anderson and Heap were fined. Joyce was already established by then, but the magazine also printed younger writers. Ernest Hemingway’s short, spare early pieces appeared in its pages in 1923, before his first major novels made him famous.
Story Magazine
Whit Burnett and Martha Foley launched Story in Vienna in 1931, then moved it to New York in 1933. Its idea was simple and unusual for the time: publish short fiction by writers nobody had heard of, and judge the work alone. Carson McCullers made her debut there in 1936 with “Wunderkind,” years before The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
J. D. Salinger’s first published story, “The Young Folks,” also ran in Story, in 1940. Salinger had studied under Burnett at Columbia University, so the magazine was close to his early development as a writer. Decades later, The Catcher in the Rye would make his name, but the first step was this small, fiction only magazine.
