Magazines, Jackson and Salinger

The heyday of the popular magazine short story in the United States was probably around the late 1930s just before the widespread adoption of television; and the king of all the popular story magazines was The Saturday Evening Post. Kurt Vonnegut has given an idyllic account of the role of the magazine short story in his own middle-class family: he comes home from school, picks up the Saturday Evening Post, thumbs through it, starts to read the story: ‘My high school troubles drop away. I am in a pleasant state somewhere between sleep and restfulness.’ A short while later his father comes home from work (‘or more likely from no work’) and picks up the same story: ‘His pulse and breathing slow down. His troubles drop away, and so on.’

But of all the mid-century magazines which published short stories (including Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine and Esquire, among many others) none was more sophisticated, successful and prestigious than that elegant mixture of seductive advertisements, metropolitan tabletalk, political commentary, witty cartoons and finely written fiction, The New Yorker.