Salvatore: Historical Context: The Literary Magazine & Short Fiction Pieces

One of the most popular mediums for fiction throughout much of the 20th century was the literary magazine. Better known today as literary journals, these magazines were filled with short stories, poetry, serial fiction, and other genres of literature, interspersed with advertisements. Although it began as a general-interest family magazine in the late 1800s, Cosmopolitan shifted its focus to literature and became a favorite place to publish among several popular writers like H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton. In 1923, an editor at Cosmopolitan read some of Maugham's short pieces about China and commissioned him to write several short stories that could fit on the front and back of a single page for the magazine. Maugham wrote the original six stories he had been hired for and continued to write very short stories until 1929, explaining that he viewed them as exercises that allowed him to experiment with many different writing techniques because of the sheer volume and brevity of stories he created.

Maugham's body of work is characterized by an economy of language that he likely refined during this era when he crafted very short stories regularly. The magazine became so synonymous with very short stories that many people referred to them as "Cosmopolitans," and Maugham's own 1938 collection of short stories is titled Cosmopolitans. Also called short shorts, micro-fiction, and later coined flash fiction in the mid-1990s, very short stories are recognized as a unique genre of prose and are still popular with readers today. Cosmopolitan remained one of the leading places for writers to publish fiction until the mid-1960s when it shifted its focus to women’s lifestyle and fashion.

Despite the tremendous changes that have occurred in magazine publishing during the past several decades, literary magazines remain a popular and important source for new short stories today. Probably the most popular and best-known literary magazine today started in 1925—The New Yorker. Some of the best-known short stories that were originally published in The New Yorker are Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948), Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” (1998) Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999).

Other well regarded current literary magazines include Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, and Ploughshares.