Eight years after Caroline Kirkland had first received critical acclaim for her novel A New Home--Who'll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), she was asked to serve as editor of the newly founded Union Magazine of Literature and Art. The publisher of the Union, Israel Post, wanted Kirkland's name to lend credit to his new enterprise; he also wanted her literary connections to facilitate soliciting contributions from famous authors such as William Cullen Bryant, William Gilmore Simms, Evert A. Duyckinck, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and Lydia H. Sigourney--all of whom were to publish in the Union during the one and a half years of Kirkland's editorship. Indeed, Kirkland strove hard to "elevate" the Union so as "to make the magazine more purely literary," as she phrased it. Nevertheless, the magazine had to remain marketable and therefore differed only slightly from the host of mid-nineteenth-century periodicals. Kirkland's own...