A History of American Magazines
by Frank Luther Mott
Summary
Frank Luther Mott's history of the American magazine began as doctoral research at the University of Iowa in the late 1920s and grew into a project that occupied him for the rest of his life. The two volumes honored by this prize, covering 1850 to 1865 and 1865 to 1885, follow the trade as it moved from a scattered handful of literary and religious periodicals into a genuine industry, one shaped as much by postage rates, paper costs, and advertising revenue as by the writers and editors whose names survived. Mott profiles individual magazines almost as characters in their own right, tracing which ones caught a national readership, which folded within a season, and how each one reflected the tastes, politics, and controversies of the Americans who read it.
Mott approaches magazines as a genuine window onto national life rather than a footnote to literary history, treating a periodical's circulation figures and advertising columns with the same seriousness other historians reserved for congressional votes. The volumes read less like a single argument pressed from cover to cover than like a reference work built for return visits, dense with names, dates, and the specific quarrels and fashions that moved readers a century earlier. Mott, who later became an early advocate for the study of photojournalism as its own field, brings the same instinct for a medium's practical business conditions that shaped his own journalism classroom to the page, treating a magazine's survival or failure as a business, not just its editorial content, as genuinely revealing history. It suits a reader drawn to the mechanics of how ideas actually reached nineteenth century Americans, through the specific pages, editors, and business decisions that put a magazine on a table, rather than through the abstraction of print culture in general.
Historical Context & Significance
These two volumes won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for History; no finalists were named that year, since the category did not begin publishing them until 1980. The prize recognized volumes II and III specifically, published together in 1938, not the full run of what eventually became a five volume series stretching from 1741 into the twentieth century; a later volume in the same series won the Bancroft Prize in 1958, a separate honor for a separate installment.
Mott spent his career building journalism into a serious academic discipline, first at the University of Iowa and then as dean of the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, and his textbook on American newspaper history became a standard classroom resource. He died before finishing the magazine series past 1905; a fifth volume of supplementary sketches appeared posthumously. The completed volumes remain the foundational reference for the history of American periodical publishing.