Started in 1900 by William D'Alton Mann, the publisher of the society tattle sheet Town Topics, The Smart Set bore the subtitle, "The Magazine of Cleverness." While it had a steep newsstand price of twenty-five cents, it was a commercial success from the beginning because advertisers were eager to reach the highbrow carriage trade that read it. Mann wanted The Smart Set to be for the Four Hundred, but also by and about them. If the idle rich never wrote for the publication (ghost writers took on aristocratic names instead), they did embrace its innovative fiction, features, and design coverage. Looking to revivify the magazine in 1908, Mann recruited two of the most promising young men of letters in the nation, who met for the first time in the New York office of The Smart Set. George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken...