THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO 509
the position. Mrs. Starrett, who today conducts a school for girls in Chicago, teaches literature, and writes poetry for an accredited New York publisher, gave many interesting sug- gestions on the period treated in this paper.
The files of the Western Monthly show an immediate improvement in its literary quality after its transference to Chicago. The Burlington (Iowa) Hawkey e, in the reviewers' comments, reprinted by the Western Magazine, said: "Mrs. Starrett is eminently qualified and will be to the western literary interests what Mary Mapes Dodge and other eminent lady editorial workers are to eastern literature." The same paper quoted the Chicago Tribune as declaring that the Western Maga- zine would be "the foundation of great things in the literary history of Chicago."
"A Welcome Suggestion," from a "Well-Wisher and Reader," which is most significant of the Chicago desire for a literary organ of metropolitan character, was published in the September, 1880, issue of the Western Magazine. It turned out that this anonymous suggestion had come from Frederic Ives Carpenter, now a professor of English literature at the University of Chicago, at that time a Chicago high-school boy. The contribu- tion said, in part:
Since the days of the Lakeside Monthly and the Chicago Magazine, it has seemed to many of the literary and semi-literary people of this city as though the day must be a long way off when Chicago might hope to have any exclusively literary organ of its intellectual interests.
Now, your magazine is the rising sun of our hopes. Will it be long before the Western Magazine is recognized as a worthy representative of our literary interests, before you allow it to become metropolitan?
Rushing, trade-maddened Chicago is well supplied with periodicals that uphold its myriad trade and labor and religious fields of activity. Yet not a sheet for its literature. Why should New York have its Scribner's and Harper's, Boston its Atlantic, Philadelphia its Lippincotfs and we only our dailies and the denominational religious weeklies?
The Western Magazine can make a career. Broaden your interests; admit fiction (the modern home of geniuses) and literary criticism; or at least, if we are not ready for that literary gossip. Do this for the sake of the cosmopolitan culture that any metropolis like this possesses, and which calls for this.
