Albion W. Tourgée's career as a magazinist grew out of his success as a writer. Tourgée's first periodical, Our Continent (1882-1884), began on the heels of A Fool's Errand: By One of the Fools (1879) and Bricks without Straw: A Novel (1880), his popular novels fictionalizing Southern Reconstruction. Similarly, his second periodical, the Basis: A Journal of Citizenship (1895-1896), was an outgrowth of Tourgée's popular column "A Bystander's Notes" which appeared in the Chicago Inter Ocean. Although Tourgée is remembered primarily as a novelist, his brief experiences in magazine editing marked important stages in his varied and colorful career.

Throughout his life, Tourgée was a man of causes. His experiences in North Carolina as a judge and radical Republican from 1865 until 1879 molded both his thinking and his career. Labeled a carpetbagger early on, Tourgée was an outspoken critic...