The magazine was privately printed on poor quality paper with offset lithography. As a result, copies are quite difficult to locate and, as a consequence of this scarcity, prices tend to be expensive. Be that as it may, it well worth seeking out for its poetry, artwork and short stories.
rate, they are sought by collectors and by university libraries. Steen Hinrichsen approached Starrett with an offer to edit his proposed Journal of arts and letters, The Wave. Hinrichsen, one of Chicago's Danish community, did not lack enthusiasm or persuasiveness but, unfortunately, there was a dearth of funding behind this proposed literary newcomer. After furious work, involving many late nights, the first edition was eventually brought together and included some woodcuts by Hinrichsen himself, an excerpt from Arthur Machen's The Secret Glory, unpublished at that time, plus poetry from Haniel Long, Thomas Kennedy and Mitchell Dawson, amongst others. Two of the contributors were Edgar Savage and Stephen Huguenot - both Starrett pseudonyms. "The first number really was an eclectic gathering and a section lifted from the Editorial sums it up 'we shall print what pleases us, hoping that it will please you'. Subsequent issues were much like the first. That is to say, they were a medley of original contributions by young writers of the period, pilferings by the Editor from obscure English journals, and reprints of lost or forgotten items of prose and verse from the Editor's antiquarian files." (Born in a Bookshop). ~The struggling journal was, in hindsight, most likely doomed from its inception. The Wave had been intended to appear monthly and, in the first year, six issues were produced. Hinrichsen left Chicago and the final two issues were printed in Copenhagen, minus any input from Vincent Starrett, and the project would up in 1924. In total, eight issues were printed. Starrett seemed to enjoy the work, on the whole, even though is had frustrations and involved copious amounts of hard work. Excerpts from his excellent autobiography, Born in a Bookshop, tell the story: "our advertisements were an odd lot and could not have brought in much revenue ... it was a weird miscellany from first to last, I suppose, but an interesting one, and it was not fault of our contributors that The Wave was ultimately caught in the undertow ... there was a charming little creature - I always though of her as little, although I never met here - named Annie Higgins who sent me a handful of poems that I still remember with pleasure. They were fresh, original and altogether captivating. If they suggested the work of any previous poet, it was that of Emily Dickinson. I printed them all and never hear from her again [What became of Annie Higgins? I should still like to know. She had the making, I thought, of a fine poet.] " he U.S. Postal Service refused to post the final issue, in June 1923, until a nude female outline on the back cover was suitably redone to include a bathing suit!
"Too much has been written about that old article by H. L. Mencken proclaiming Chicago to be the 'literary capital of the United States'. Nevertheless, it is probably the most conspicuous date (1919) associated with the movement. Mencken's recognition of the phenomenon was the city's first assurance that a literary renascence was in progress; without it, we might never have known that our epidemic of books and writers was anything other than a normal development. 'A literary movement, said the witty George Russell (A.E.). consists of five or six authors who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.' That appears to define a literary 'movement' with a certain accuracy, but in what does a literary 'capital' consist? It is not just a matter of authors, five or six or a dozen who live in the same town. It is also a matter of publishers, and bookshops and literary magazines and book supplements. It is a fortuitous junction of all these, plus an enthusiasm growing out of the situation itself - a hubbub that incites established writers to competition, draws new writers into its orbit, and infects the public with a lively awareness of its own importance in the cultural scheme of things. In this state of affairs all the other arts, of course, will flourish similarly. And all these factors are constants, not 'sometime' things. The movement ended, as far as Chicago was concerned, simply and solely because most of the writers who gave it significance went away. No sooner had they been made aware of their excellence by Mencken's flattering proclamation than, one by one, they vanished from the scene of their triumphs in quest of further honours and emoluments. With the departure of most of the principals, the movement as a phenomenon naturally ended and city began to live on its memories. This did not happen all at once, of course, but by 1925 (at latest 1926) the exodus was all but complete."
"It should be noted that Mencken himself did not long hold his high opinion of the Chicago group. As early as 1923, when Hansen published his Midwest Portraits, Mencken used the book as a violent springboard for a violent essay on the Chicago writers, including Sandburg and Anderson; and a few years later he inspired an article by Sam Putnam that was intended to be the coup de grace. Putnam, a Paris minded aesthete, who had been contributing art and literary criticism to the Evening Post was an ideal hatchet man for the job. 'Why don't you do an article for the Mercury showing up those phonies out there?' Mencken suggested: and Putnam, nothing loath - he, too, disliked the local cultural scene by that time - wrote
Richard Harding
Davies
The August 1926 edition of The American Mercury which contained Putnam's infamous Chicago: An Obituary.
Chicago: An Obituary ," which appeared in the American Mercury in August, 1926. The uproar that followed this mischievous piece, in which Sam served up the heads of his Chicago colleagues on a gridiron convinced the brash young man that the city was quite as
provincial as he had supposed it to be, and shortly thereafter he too departed - for Paris - on the heels of the "expatriate movement" of the twenties. Mencken was pleased....we were all outraged by Sam's "obituary", of course, and Preston (when he spoke of it to me) was almost purple in the face. I got off lightly, for some reason, as an amiable dilettante concerned principally with advancing the American fame of Arthur Machen." (Excerpts from Born in a Bookshop).
The decade between 1917 and 1927 was the busiest of Starrett's life. Aside from his prodigious output, he also edited The Wave, helped edit Oak Leaves and the Ausintine, reviewed books for Llewwllyn Jones, wrote a monthly letter to the Double Dealer and, allied to all this, supervised a short story class at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Furthermore, he contributed to approximately one dozen pulp magazines to supplement his income. Although Starrett never felt comfortable with public speaking, he thoroughly enjoyed his tenure at Medill School, with lasted for two winters and helped eased his financial situation. The exercise was not entirely unproductive, especially considering that one of his students was Jack Woodford, a commercially successful writer who wrote to Starrett "I thought you might like to see how your pupil turned out[If you had any idea you'da shot me long ago in class?] - got yet another book on writing coming out presently - it is in very bad taste. I'm sorry as all hell. You wouldn't give me a sentence for the jacket would you, something like: "I knew Woodford so well once I could have poisoned him." (An Exhibition from the Vincent Starrett Library, 1989). It is incredibly difficult to grasp the association between a cultured figure like Starrett and Woodford, whose output included such rubbish as The Hard-Boiled Virgin and Three Gorgeous Hussies.
Arthur Machen, A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin was Starrett's first book, published in 1918, by Walter M. Hill in a limited edition of some 250 copies. It received fulsome critical acclaim and James Branch Cabell wrote "you have performed a task important in itself, to have loaned to the performance admirable grace and dexterity.....in fine, you have written a brilliant criticism with such sympathy as makes me long some day to be dissected with the same scalpel" (The Last Bookman). Cabell's endorsement allied to favourable press reviews certainly gave Starrett a welcome stimulus. Estrays (1918), a collaboration of verse with Thomas Kennedy, George Steele Seymour and Basil Thompson was published in the same year by The Camelot Press. Each of the authors was required to contribute $25 for the privilege of having their work in print and Starrett described the results as an "ugly little pamphlet" and "perhaps the less said about it the better." Literary work continued unabated through a series of leaflets and pamphlets, which were generally issued as Limited Editions. These are described in more detail in the Bibliography.
In 1919, a literary group, The Bookfellows, which had been founded by George Steele Seymour, published a large collection of poems entitled In Praise Of Stevenson, An Anthology. They also published a revised hardback edition of Estrays (1920), a much more attractive volume than the original. Further works included Ambrose Bierce (1920) and The Unique Hamlet (1920). This latter is a difficult title to locate and is incredibly expensive to acquire. During the next few years, he produced Stephen Crane, A Bibliography (1923) and three volumes of verse; Ebony Flame (1922), Banners In The Dawn (1923) and Flame And Dust (1924). He had been pressurised by Covici-McGee to produce several books of poetry and was particularly displeased with Flame and Dust which he described as "weak". It was basically composed of verse which he had considered unsuitable for his earlier books of poetry. He was also persuaded to write an Introduction for, and edit, Sins Of The Fathers, And Other Tales by George Gissing in 1924. This work consisted of four abysmal tales which were written by Gissing during a visit to Chicago in 1877, when he was twenty years of age. Gissing had succeeded in selling these four stories to the Tribune where they first appeared in print. Subsequently, they were totally forgotten until being resurrected for this volume. Starrett described them as being "miraculously bad."
Unknown and obscure writers, whom Vincent Starrett believed to be worth attention, would be contacted and, in many cases, many years of mutual correspondence would endure. In 1923, Buried Caesars was published by Covici-McGee and is a wonderful compendium relating to the works of authors as varied as Haldane McFall (another of Starrett's "discoveries"), Opie Read James Branch Cabell, Arthur Cosslett Smith, Walter Blackburn Harte, Robert Neilson Stephens, amongst others. Of course, Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane were also represented. He always considered Buried Caesars to be amongst his best work. Following the success and critical acclaim resulting from Buried Caesars, Starrett wrote Coffins for Two (Covici-McGee, 1924) which he left was his best collection of short stories. Like Buried Caesars, it had been refused by a platitude of publishers and its final appearance must have seemed to him as a vindication of his efforts.
"For some time, Pascal Covici had been eager to publish a book by Arthur Machen and I had no difficulty in persuading him to bring out a selection of Machen's uncollected tales and essays aimed at the Machen collectors, who were then fairly numerous. I typed madly for weeks, copying out the contents of the volume I was to edit, drawn from my personal collections, as I had no intention of trusting my originals to the printers. The result was a formidable volume called The Shining Pyramid, taking its title from one of the essays it contained. It was a handsome volume, well printed and well bound, with a stunning frontpiece by Wallace Smith - in all respects a well intentioned production - but somewhere along the line there had been a slip up, for when the edition was delivered to the publishers it was discovered that the spines were blank. In this pass Stanley Szukalsky, one of the company's aesthetic advisers suggested a green paper label and that is the way the book ultimately appeared some time in 1923. The weird confection sold at ten dollars, a prohibitive price, and did no business worth mentioning. It had been my intention to surprise Machen with a handsome check, knowing it would be welcome, but in the circumstances no check was forthcoming, an embarrassing situation. Undaunted, I tried again and in 1924 Covici published another collection of taes and essays called The Glorious Mystery, which similarly failed to make the author any money. I had Machen's full permission to edit and publish the materials brought together in both volumes, but naturally he expected to be paid for them." (Born in a Bookshop).
Stephen Crane: One of the authors whom Starrett championed, culminating in an extensive and authoritative Bibliography.
Immediately after the publication of the second of these books, Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publishing firm, issued an open letter to the trade, basically accusing Starrett and Covici-McGee of pirating the work of Arthur Machen. Vincent Starrett had been the sole champion of Machen's literary output and was to the forefront of bringing him to the notice of a greater U.S. reading public. There had been many years of cordial correspondence between the two men, but this unsavoury incident soured the relationship permanently. When Knopf had become Machen's U.S. publisher, exception was taken to the production