 Cover of the August–September 1921 edition of The Double-Dealer | |
| Categories | Creative writing Poetry Non-fiction Fiction |
|---|---|
| Frequency | monthly |
| Founder | Julius Weis Friend (editor); Basil Thompson, Albert Goldstein, John McClure (associate editors) |
| Founded | January 1921 |
| Final issue | May 1926 |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New Orleans, La. |
| Language | English |
The Double Dealer was a short-lived but influential New-Orleans-based literary journal of the 1920s.
The Double Dealer was established in 1921 as a platform for contemporary Southern writers of a modernist bent. Its founders were cultural critic Julius Weis Friend (editor) and Basil Thompson, Albert Goldstein, and John McClure (associate editors). The magazine's title came from a William Congreve play of the same name that Thompson and Friend admired for its acute dissection of human nature. [1] They saw their ideal reader as someone with a tolerant understanding of "the devious ways of the world". [2]
Loyola University New Orleans preserves the personal papers of Basil Thompson which contain correspondence, manuscripts, and other materials related to the Double Dealer. [3]
With its subtitle A National Magazine for the South, The Double Dealer positioned itself to combat a popular stereotype of Southern literature as a provincial and second-rate "Sahara of the Bozart," as H.L. Mencken termed it in a notorious 1917 essay. In a piece entitled "New Orleans, the Double Dealer, and the Modern Movement in America," Sherwood Anderson laid out the editors' vision of a modernism that does not operate only at a national level but also embraces the cultural individuality of regions like the South. [4] In pursuit of its inclusive vision, The Double Dealer published African-American authors, and an unusually high proportion of its writers were women. [2]
The Double Dealer was published monthly from January 1921 to May 1926, during what has been called the first golden age of little magazines. [5] Described as "an incubator of local literary culture and a conduit of Modernism," [4] it featured work by a who's who of American writers, including William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Amy Lowell, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Carl Van Vechten, Babette Deutsch, Thornton Wilder, Hart Crane, and others. The magazine was one of the first to publish Faulkner (in 1922), and editor John McClure remained a Faulkner friend and sponsor for years after the magazine folded. [6] Although it only lasted five years, The Double Dealer influenced a number of later journals that took up the cause of championing Southern literature: The New Orleanian (established 1930), The Southern Review (est. 1935), Iconograph (est. 1940), and Double Dealer Redux (est. 1993 and published by the Faulkner Society). [2]
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Walker Percy, OblSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
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In the United States, a little magazine is a magazine genre consisting of "artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses", according to a 1942 study by Frederick J. Hoffman, a professor of English. While George Plimpton disagreed with the diminutive connotations of "little", the name "little magazine" is widely accepted for such magazines. A little magazine is not necessarily a literary magazine, because while the majority of such magazines are literary in nature, containing poetry and fiction, a significant proportion of such magazines are not. Some have encompassed the full range of the arts, and others have grown from zine roots.
George Washington Cable was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native New Orleans, Louisiana. He has been called "the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century", as well as "the first modern Southern writer." In his treatment of racism, mixed-race families and miscegenation, his fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner.
Southern United States literature consists of American literature written about the Southern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during the colonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period of slavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects. However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".
MM Roberts Stadium, also known as "The Rock", is an American football stadium located in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It is the home of The University of Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles football team.
Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterized by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
Grace Elizabeth King was an American author of Louisiana stories, history, and biography, and a leader in historical and literary activities.
Elizabeth Spencer was an American writer. Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She wrote a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir, and a play. Her novella The Light in the Piazza (1960) was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She was a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.
Samuel Louis Gilmore was a U.S. Representative from Louisiana.
Adrien Rouquette was a Louisiana Creole writer, poet, and Catholic missionary to the Choctaw Native Americans, among whom he was also known as Chahta-Ima.
James Nolan is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and translator. A regular contributor to Boulevard, his work has appeared in New Orleans Noir, Utne Reader, The Washington Post, Poetry, and Southern Review, among other magazines, anthologies, and newspapers. He has translated the work of Spanish-language poets Pablo Neruda and Jaime Gil de Biedma. Nolan is a fifth-generation native of New Orleans and lives in the French Quarter.
John William Corrington was an American film and television writer, novelist, poet and lawyer.
New Orleans Review, founded in 1968, is a journal of contemporary literature and culture that publishes "poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, photography, film and book reviews" by established and emerging writers and artists. New Orleans Review is a publication of the Department of English at Loyola University New Orleans. Lindsay Sproul is the current editor-in-chief.
John Peebles McClure was an American poet and one of the founding editors of The Double Dealer literary magazine.
The literature of Louisiana, United States, includes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Representative authors include Kate Chopin, Alcée Fortier, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, Anne Rice and John Kennedy Toole.
Hubert Horton McAlexander is a scholar of Southern literature and culture and a Josiah Meigs Professor Emeritus in the University of Georgia’s department of English. In addition to numerous articles on William Faulkner and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southern authors, he wrote biographies of Sherwood Bonner and Peter Taylor and edited a collection of critical essays on Taylor and a volume of interviews with Taylor. He has also published books and articles on regional history, especially the region of northern Mississippi that inspired William Faulkner’s fiction.
Ida Weis Friend (1868-1963) was a suffragist, philanthropist and lifelong advocate for progressive causes in New Orleans. In 1920, she became the first woman from Louisiana to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
William Kenneth Holditch was a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Orleans. He was one of the pre-eminent scholars of the American playwright Tennessee Williams. Notably, he co-founded the Tennessee Williams Literary Festivals in New Orleans; Columbus, Mississippi; and Clarksdale, Mississippi, and he served on the advisory board of the festival in Provincetown, Rhode Island. His published works include Tennessee Williams and the South and The World of Tennessee Williams with Richard Freeman Leavitt as well as co-editor with Mel Gussow for the Library of America's Tennessee Williams Plays 1937-1955.