Overview

"American novelists and poets who came of age in the early twentieth century were taught to avoid journalism ""like wet sox and gin before breakfast."" It dulled creativity, rewarded sensationalist content, and stole time from ""serious"" writing. Yet Willa Cather, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, James Agee, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway all worked in the editorial offices of groundbreaking popular magazines and helped to invent the house styles that defined McClure's, The Crisis, Time, Life, Esquire, and others. On Company Time tells the story of American modernism from inside the offices and on the pages of the most successful and stylish magazines of the twentieth century. Working across the borders of media history, the sociology of literature, print culture, and literary studies, Donal Harris draws out the profound institutional, economic, and aesthetic affiliations between modernism and American magazine culture. Starting in the 1890s, a growing number of writers found steady paychecks and regular publishing opportunities as editors and reporters at big magazines. Often privileging innovative style over late-breaking content, these magazines prized novelists and poets for their innovation and attention to literary craft. In recounting this history, On Company Time challenges the narrative of decline that often accompanies modernism's incorporation into midcentury middlebrow culture. Its integrated account of literary and journalistic form shows American modernism evolving within as opposed to against mass print culture. Harris's work also provides an understanding of modernism that extends beyond narratives centered on little magazines and other ""institutions of modernism"" that served narrow audiences. And for the writers, the ""double life"" of working for these magazines shaped modernism's literary form and created new models of authorship."

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Reviews

On Company Time alters forever an old story about literary modernism by showing that writers did not just take a paycheck from the big magazines. This rich and substantial consideration of the complex relations between major writers and mass-market publications shows how several modern styles were developed in collaboration by the magazines and the writers they employed. Donal Harris's account of this collaboration expands our notions of what American writing is and changes the history of how it came to be. -- Michael North, University of California Los Angeles Writing in response to both classic and recent scholarship that represents modernism as an insulated coterie endeavor, Donal Harris convincingly and compellingly establishes that modernist authors were engaged with and appeared in mainstream magazines from the start. On Company Time enriches and expands our understanding of the dialectic between modernism and mass culture, revealing that what has frequently been seen as an antagonistic relationship was really a close collaboration that determined both the career arcs of major modernist authors and the design of mainstream magazines. Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, On Company Time is an eminent example of the New Modernist Studies. -- Loren Glass, University of Iowa Donal Harris's fascinating On Company Time is the book we've been waiting for to help us think through the significance of the commercially popular big magazines that dominated the print cultural landscape of modernity. Guiding us through magazine offices, showing us print technologies, publishing strategies, and periodical styles along the way, Harris deftly traces the mutual influence of modernism and the commercial magazines. Compelling, imaginative and entertaining, this book provides an exhilarating new view of modern print culture. -- Barbara Green, University of Notre Dame Drawing our attention to a set of major institutions that have until now remained hidden in plain sight, On Company Time makes an extraordinarily rich and persuasive contribution to the study of American literary modernism. It is also a work of relentlessly lively intelligence and writerly charm. -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University

Author Information

Donal Harris is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Memphis. His work has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, Criticism: A Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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