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JOURNAL OF ILLINOIS  HISTORY

The Man in the Mirror: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine

By Max PUTZEL. Foreword by LAWRENCE O. CHRISTENSEN.  Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Pp. xviii, 351. Paper, $19.95. (Originally published by Harvard University Press, 1963.)

Spoon River poet Edgar Lee Masters once averred that St. Louis editor William Marion Reedy (1862-1920) was the "literary boss of the Middle West"—and indeed he was, for a time (page 7). Had Reedy done nothing more than discover Masters, he would have enjoyed a permanent, if minor, footnote in American letters, but he also published, popularized, and encouraged a good many other turn-of-the-century authors, so many that by the time one finishes Max Putzel's The Man in the Mirror, it is clear that Reedy's impact on twentieth-century writing should be reevaluated.

This attractive reprint focuses on Reedy and St. Louis from the end of the Civil War through  World War I and its aftermath. St. Louis was at its zenith during several of those years, its national and international significance heralded by its Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Reedy was often at the center of his city's doings.

Educated in public and parochial schools, Reedy graduated from St. Louis University and began his writing career on St. Louis newspapers before founding a weekly magazine of current  opinion and literary happenings that came to be known as Reedy's Mirror. Reedy guided the magazine from 1891 until his death, and he helped shape twentieth-century American writing as he became "the nation's most respected authority on modern poets" (page 6).

In addition to Masters, Reedy featured poets Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, and other artists—more than fifty in all—including  novelist Theodore Dreiser and playwright Zoe Akins. Reedy also dusted off the literary remains of earlier writers, such as poet Emily Dickinson and novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he helped with their posthumous recognition as major writers.

Reedy altered American literary history by helping to obliterate "the genteel tradition" in literature, the tendency of earlier authors to skirt controversial issues (page 51).  As author Putzel phrases it, "Literature for Reedy had to be in touch with life," and life was not all  puritanism and happy endings (page 151). Reedy himself was intimately aware of this fact, as he discovered on the morning he awoke from a particularly rough bender and found himself married to a St. Louis prostitute.

At its peak, Reedy's Mirror enjoyed a national circulation of 32,250 at a time when other leading journals of the day had far fewer readers. The Dial had a circulation of only 5,000, The Atlantic 7,000, and The Nation 12,000.

Unfortunately, Reedy's zest for life and large appetites for food, liquor, and women meant that his magazine suffered from financial instability. It was twice saved by infusions of money from associates, the first time by a St. Louis businessman and later by a St. Louis madame who was Reedy's third wife. When Reedy died in 1920, his magazine survived him by barely a month.

The Man in the Mirror is easy reading, and scholars from numerous disciplines  will enjoy Putzel's command of his subject. Literary scholars in particular will benefit from being reminded that in the Midwest, it was not the prim spinster Harriet Monroe at Chicago's Poetry magazine who first lent a shaping influence to poetry of the new century, but rather it was William Marion Reedy working out of his rough-and-tumble environment in turn-of-the-century St. Louis.

       —Herbert K. Russell, Journal of Illinois History, Winter 1998