Information about The Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic Monthly
December 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. December 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
Editor	James Bennet
Categories	literature, political science, foreign affairs
Frequency	10 per year
Circulation	425,000
Publisher	The Atlantic Monthly Group
First issue	1857
Country	United States
Language	American English
Website	www.theatlantic.com
ISSN	1072-7825

The Atlantic redirects here; for the ocean, see Atlantic Ocean.

The Atlantic Monthly (also known as The Atlantic) is an American literary/cultural magazine founded in Boston in 1857. Its creators were a group of writers that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell (who would become its first editor). The current CEO and group publisher is John Fox Sullivan.^[1]

Format and periodicity

Originally a monthly publication, the magazine, subscribed to by 480,000 readers, now publishes ten times a year and features articles in the fields of political science and foreign affairs, as well as book reviews. In 2005, The Atlantic announced that it would cease including short stories in its regular issues, but rather in a single annual special edition.

There are also articles on other intellectually challenging topics, e.g., the ongoing computer-related and Asian-society writings by James Fallows.

Literary history

The Atlantic Monthly was the first to publish Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (on February 1, 1862), and William Parker's "The Freedman's Story" (in February and March 1866). It published Charles W. Eliot's "The New Education" (a call for practical reform) that resulted in his appointment to Presidency of Harvard University in 1869. It also published some of Charles Chesnutt's tales before they were collected for The Conjure Woman. In August 1963, the magazine published Martin Luther King, Jr.'s defense of civil disobedience in "Letter from Birmingham Jail". The magazine was a point of connection between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson; having read an article in the Atlantic by Higginson, Dickinson asked him to become her mentor. It has also published many of the works of Mark Twain, including one that managed to escape publication until 2001. Its best known current writers are James Fallows, Mark Bowden, Corby Kummer, and Caitlin Flanagan.

The magazine has also published speculative articles that inspired the development of whole new technologies. The classic example is the publication of Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" in July 1945, which inspired Douglas Engelbart and later Ted Nelson to develop the modern workstation and hypertext technology.

In April, 2005, the Atlantic editors decided to cease publishing fiction in regular issues in favor of a newsstand-only annual fiction issue.

Ownership

For all but its recent existence, The Atlantic has been known as a distinctively New England literary magazine (as opposed to Harper's and later The New Yorker, both from New York), and by its third year was published by the famous Boston publishing house of Ticknor and Fields (later to become part of Houghton Mifflin). The magazine was purchased by its then editor, Ellery Sedgwick, during World War I, but remained in Boston.

In 1980, the magazine was acquired by Mortimer Zuckerman, property magnate and founder of Boston Properties, who became its Chairman.

On September 27, 1999, ownership of the magazine was transferred from Zuckerman to David G. Bradley, owner of the beltway news-focused National Journal Group. Although Bradley had promised that no major changes were in store, the magazine's publishers announced in April 2005, that the editorial offices would leave their long-time home at 77 North Washington St. in Boston to join the company's advertising and circulation divisions in Washington, D.C. apparently due to the high cost of Boston real estate.^[2] Later, in August, Bradley told the New York Observer, cost cutting from the move would amount to a minor $200,000–$300,000 and those savings would be swallowed by severance related spending. The reason, then, was to create a hub in Washington where the top minds from all of Bradley's publications could collaborate. Few of the Boston staff agreed to relocate, allowing Bradley to embark on an open search for a new editorial staff.^[3]

Trivia

• The magazine has one of the longest-running cryptic crosswords, compiled by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon. Since March 2006 the Puzzler, as it is known, is only published online.
• The magazine was also where Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" was first published.

List of editors

• James Russell Lowell, 1857–1861
• James Thomas Fields, 1861–1871
• William Dean Howells, 1871–1881
• Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1881–1890
• Horace Elisha Scudder, 1890–1898
• Walter Hines Page, 1898–1899
• Bliss Perry, 1899–1909
• Ellery Sedgwick, 1909–1938
• Edward A. Weeks, 1938–1966
• Robert Manning, 1966–1980
• William Whitworth, 1980–1999
• Michael Kelly, 1999–2002
• Cullen Murphy, interim editor, never named editor-in-chief, 2002–2006
• James Bennet, 2006—

References

External links

• Official website
• The American Idea: The Best of The Atlantic Monthly
• Online archive of Atlantic Monthly (earliest issues up to December 1901)
• magazines at Project Gutenberg
• A History of The Atlantic Monthly