The Harvard Monthly was a literary magazine of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, beginning October 1885 until suspending publication following the Spring 1917 issue.
Formed in the latter months of 1885 by Harvard seniors William Woodward Baldwin, Thomas Parker Sanborn, Alanson B. Houghton, George Santayana, William Morton Fullerton, and George Rice Carpenter, the magazine proposed to afford "...a medium for the strongest and soberest undergraduate thought of the college...".The Harvard Crimson, October 22, 1885, is available on line at These six men comprised the Monthly's initial staff, with Houghton as editor, Baldwin as business manager and the others acting as editors.Baldwin, W.W. The Founding of the Harvard Monthly, The Harvard Monthly, Vol. 21, October 1895. The initial October 1885 issue includes works by Sanborn, Santayana, Houghton, Fullerton the magazine's faculty adviser, Barrett Wendell, among others. Some of the essays in this issue which may have been felt controversial have no stated author. In regard to this issue, The Harvard Crimson observed that "The unique form and general typographical make-up of the new monthly is extremely pleasing; it is quite a departure from the form of any magazine we have seen. The table of contents consists of stories, sketches, criticisms, poems, editorials and book reviews, choice morsels for the most delicate palate. It was announced that a feature of each number would be an article from the pen of some prominent alumnus."The Harvard Crimson October 22, 1885, is available on line at
The Monthly ceased publication in 1917, due to issues involving the First World War, and The Harvard Advocate, a literary publication of Harvard College since 1866, became the primary source of essays, fiction, and poetry for the Harvard community.
History
Founding and subsequent years
For thirteen years, President Charles William Eliot had been attempting to transform Harvard from a provincially famous institution into a nationally recognized and admired leader in higher education. He believed that to do so, Harvard needed to attract students who came from all over the country, not just from Boston—and not just the wealthy. The academic curriculum needed to cater not just students in the liberal arts, but also ones who saw higher education as a path towards upward mobility, and as a way to pursue non-humanist studies. "The 1880s was in a sense the 'last gasp' of the leisured gentlemen, the last time they would dominate the university's academic and social structure."Miller, Dan, Harvard, We Have a Problem: Santayana and the New University is on line at What seemed a mass movement toward practicality and specialization that would drain the university of the aestheticism and humanism frustrated the young men who would eventually found the Monthly; each was involved with one or more of the other Harvard literary publications—the Lampoon, the Advocate, and the Crimson, which didn't offer the creative outlet they felt necessary. Toward the end of their junior year, W.W. Baldwin and T.P. Sanborn brainstormed in the latter's room in Grays Hall, proceeding to A.B. Houghton's room in Holyoke and, after gathering W.M. Fullerton and G.R. Carpenter, assembling in Santayana's room in Hollis Hall, where they agreed to move forward with a plan for a true literary magazine. They vowed their work would not bespeak the scrupulous consciousness of John Bunyan's Puritan Pilgrim, but rather the doubting scrutiny of William Dean Howells' Silas Lapham who, in Howells’ story, prevails over the empty, hypocritical norms of proper Boston society.Clark, Tom Foran, The Significance of Being Frank: The Life and Times of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, (Kindle Location 4323), Houghton was elected editor-in-chief. "The title, 'Harvard Monthly', was adopted... instead of 'Harvard Literary Monthly'... lest it might be called the Harvard Lit and thus bring us up for comparison with Yale's sombre-hued institution."Baldwin, W.W., The Founding of the Harvard Monthly, The Harvard Monthly, Vol.21, October 1895.
The new magazine was announced in the Crimson as being published the third Wednesday of each month from October to July for the price of twenty-five cents. The second issue featured an article by Harvard alumnus, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, father of editor Thomas Sanborn, titled Harvard in the Struggle for Emancipation.; The magazine continued to include the works of Harvard staff and prominent graduates including Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Phillips Brooks, Crawford Howell Toy, Albert Bushnell Hart and Andrew Preston Peabody By its second year, the staff of the Monthly had grown from six to eleven, and included Bernard Berenson. The roots of what Santayana would later develop into a full-fledged philosophical disassociation with things American can be found in his undergraduate writings, particularly in those submitted to the Monthly George Santayana would remain involved with the magazine while a professor at Harvard, submitting material until 1903.
On the magazine's second anniversary, the Boston Daily Advertiser recounted its brief history and proclaimed the magazine was "vastly superior to any other college journal", that the literature was "absolutely and inherently good," and that some articles had even garnered favorable comment from abroad.
Those who subsequently served the Monthly include Bernhard Berenson, William Vaughn Moody, Norman Hapgood, Henry Milner Rideout, Philip Henry Savage, Trumbull Stickney, Robert Herrick, John Reed, Charles Macomb Flandrau, Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, Clifford Herschel Moore, Robert Morss Lovett, Hermann Hagedorn, M.A. DeWolfe Howe, Thomas W. Lamont,The Cambridge Tribune Vol 23, Number 18, July 2, 1910 is available on line at Lucien Price, John Hall Wheelock, Bliss Carman, Edwin Arlington RobinsonMorison, Samuel Eliot, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936, Harvard University Press, p.430. Conrad Aiken,Butscher, Edward, Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale, University of Georgia Press, pp. 82-83.Joseph Auslander, Malcolm Cowley, Scofield Thayer, Robert Hillyer, Gilbert Seldes, John Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings.Kirsch, Adam, The Rebellion of E.E.Cummings, The Harvard Magazine, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March–April 2005 is available on line at
Demise
The Harvard Monthly ceased publication with Volume 64, in May 1917, with the following words within black bordering: "The editors of the monthly regret that existing circumstances compel the suspension of publication during the immediate future." The "circumstances" involved World War I and a campus gearing-up for war, with passionate disagreements erupting among Monthly staff members, as described years later by Malcolm Cowley in an on-line biography of his friend, Monthly editor E.E. Cummings. "[Cummings] took no part in the debate over preparedness for war, one which shook the country in the winter of 1916-17 and which, as a minor effect, disrupted the board of The Harvard Monthly. Four of the editors were pacifists, the other four were superpatriots, all eight were impractical, and they couldn't agree on what to print. In April 1917, when Congress declared war, The Monthly disappeared from Harvard, but not from memory."Cowley, Malcolm, E.E. Cummings: Poet and Painter, "Notable American Unitarians", is available on line at No clear reason for the journal's cessation was provided either by the Monthly itself or in the Crimson, where the May 5, 1917 issue states, "The present issue [of The Harvard Monthly] is of peculiar interest as it is the last number of the Monthly to appear before the temporary suspension of publication. This, to whatever "existing circumstances" it may be due, is a great misfortune.No Timidity in Current Monthly, The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 5, 1917 is available on line at The Monthly was never resurrected, and the Harvard Advocate became Harvard's only literary publication, possibly subsuming the sort of material which had differentiated it from its sister-journal, which may have been due to a tradition of being different. Monthly alumnus Malcolm Cowley offered the following insight in his biography of E.E. Cummings: "There were two such magazines at Harvard in those days [just prior to WWI], The Monthly and The Advocate, and they looked down on each other—-or, to be accurate, they nodded to each other coldly from the facing doors of their respective sanctums on the dusty third floor of the Harvard Union. The Monthlies thought that the board of The Advocate, which then appeared fortnightly, was composed of journalists, clubmen, athletes, and disciples of Teddy Roosevelt, a former editor, with not a man of letters among them. The Advocates suspected that the Monthlies were aesthetes (as indeed most of them came to be called), scruffy poets, socialists, pacifists, or worse. It was for The Monthly that Cummings chose to write."
Significance
The Harvard Monthly met the intentions of its founders and within ten years was said to have improved the quality of writing and thereby strengthened the English Department at Harvard. "The Monthly has always had a close relation to the English department, the growth of which was the direct cause of its appearance, and it furnishes the best record of the literary standards and ambitions of the undergraduates who make English their chief interest. It is the expression of the growth of a special academic tendency towards the study of literary form and of literary and general criticism."The Harvard University Register, 1911. Within ten years of its beginning, The Monthly was known to have published the best literary work done by undergraduates; its series of graduate articles has included many of exceptional value and interest; its influence in the college world has always been in the direction of earnestness and seriousness. Seeking only to reflect "the strongest and soberest undergraduate thought", The Monthly provided "a medium of communication between students and graduates" which had not existed in any other of Harvard's periodicals.Orcutt, William Dana and William Lurns Wolffe, The Harvard Club Book 1894-95. By the magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary, it was described as "proof... of the undergraduate cultivation of creative, critical and persuasive letters that still distinguishes the university...from most other in America." That "proof" may best lie in the fact of The Harvard Monthly's many graduates, who went on to make significant contributions to the world.