The Little Review
Vol. II
JUNE-JULY, 1915
No. 4
Literary Journalism in Chicago
Lucian Cary
Nothing succeeds like an indiscretion. I was indiscreet enough last winter to speak my mind (a little of it) about The Little Review, The Dial, Poetry, The Drama, and the audience to which these papers appeal. The result is that I have been flattered or intimidated into speaking it ever since. In the present instance both methods have been used most charmingly—and shamelessly. You see, Miss Anderson and I live in the same village. And yet I said nothing, and have nothing to say about any paper except what everybody knows.
Everybody knows that The Friday Literary Review of The Chicago Evening Post under Mr. Francis Hackett and, later, under Mr. Floyd Dell gave us the most alert, the most eager, the most intelligent, and the best-written discussion of literature in the United States. That eight-page supplement did what had hardly been done west of England before: it made book reviews worth reading. There was almost as much difference between the Friday Review and The Dial as there is between Mr. George Bernard Shaw and Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler, almost as much difference between the Friday Review and The New York Times Literary Supplement as there is between M. Anatole France and Mr. Henry Van Dyke. There was good writing in the Friday Review and good thinking behind it. It was almost never dull; and if it was young it was not wholly unsophisticated; and if it was sometimes dead wrong it was not stupid. If there were half as many persons interested in the discussion of ideas as most of us like to believe the Friday Review would inevitably have continued. It would, that’s all. But as things are it was fated. Neither the mechanics nor the economics of daily journalism permitted it. The Post could not continue to give us—it quite literally gave us—eight pages of what so few of us wanted so much.
Everybody knows that if a weekly paper dealing not only with literature but with all the other arts in the spirit and with the journalistic competence of the Friday Review were established in Chicago everybody would have to read it.