SOURCE: Hubbell, Jay B. “Southern Magazines.” In Culture in the South, edited by W. T. Couch, pp. 159-82. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935.

In the following essay, Hubbell documents the history of magazine publication in the nineteenth-century American South.

Not until the better American magazines were threatened with extinction did their history receive any considerable attention from our scholars. Frank Luther Mott's A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 was not published until 1930. In that year I learned that one of the oldest and best of the New York magazines was losing twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Some of the better magazines have ceased publication, and those which survive are in difficulties. Their troubles are not due merely to the depression; other causes are the radio, the moving picture, and the metropolitan Sunday newspaper with its numerous magazine features. The literary magazine can not command a large...