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In this fine book, Max Putzel captures the spirit and influence of the most important Missourian in the annals of literature, save perhaps for T. S. Eliot or Samuel Clemens, who, unlike William Marion Reedy, left the state while young men. As one reads Putzel's biography, there grows a strong desire to have known this remarkable human being. It is no wonder that he claimed friends from all walks of life in St. Louis and beyond. Politicians, financiers, lawyers, librarians, journalists, engineers, and folks from the streets sought him out. He lunched in the White House and called President Theodore Roosevelt his friend. He made annual trips to New York to enjoy entertainments and engage in literary discussions with leading writers. Known for his striking eyes, his hearty laughter, his deep learning, and his ready wit, William Marion Reedy comes alive in Putzel's treatment of his life and work.
Born on December 11, 1862, in the Irish neighborhood of Kerry Patch, Reedy attended public schools before enrolling in Christian Brothers College. After graduation, he continued his education with another group of Jesuits by completing a business degree at St. Louis University at the age of eighteen. His mother served as the chief encouragement for his academic achievement. With the influence of his policeman father, who worked the Bloody Third District, Reedy found employment on the Missouri Republican. During the next decade, he worked for the Globe-Democrat off and on and, at one discouraging time, sought a political post as commissioner of parks. A large man with a huge appetite for food and liquor, Reedy frequently felt the ire of the Globe's editor, Joseph McCullagh, for missing work because of his drinking. After one binge, Reedy awoke to find himself married to a prostitute. A divorce soon followed, and he married Miss Eulalie Bauduy, the daughter of a leading St. Louis physician, in 1897. By then he had turned his life around. She died in 1901, causing Reedy to experience deep depression. In 1909, he married a former madam of a house of ill repute named Mrs. Margie Rhodes, who had provided him with rooms after the death of his second wife. Although many criticized Reedy for his choice of a mate, the marriage lasted until the editor's death on July 28, 1920.
While still in the newspaper business, Reedy and a partner began a magazine called the Sunda~ Mirror in 1891. The little gossip sheet evolved into a magazine of opinion and literature over the next few years and eventually became known as Reedy's Mirror. Extant copies date from February 25, 1894, and continue until the magazine ceased publication t;venty-seven years later, only five weeks after Reedy's death. ReeQy's first marriage and divorce, plus his support of William McKinley in the 1896 presidential election, led to a decline in circulation and bankruptcy for the magazine. James Campbell, a financier and friend, purchased it on the courthouse steps and gave it back to Reedy with enough operating capital to keep it in business. By 1898, with Reedy opposing intervention in Cuba, circulation reached 32,250, when circulation figures for the Dial stood at 5,000; for the Nation at 12,000; and for the Atlantic at 7,000. The magazine's popularity declined from that peak, and poor financial management placed the publication in jeopardy again in 1907. Mrs. Rhodes saw that five thousand dollars made it into the till, and James Campbell supplied another one thousand dollars to bail the magazine out again. By then, cessation of publication would have eliminated one of the most important voices in American literature.
Reedy and his magazine had become an important literary vehicle for debate and for the introduction of readers to new writers. Putzel not only brings to life the personal Reedy but, even more important, places Reedy in the context of the literary world that he influenced so significantly. Full chapters are devoted to Reedy's relationships with Theodore Dreiser, Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, and Edgar Lee Masters. Reedy's role in introducing readers to Zoe Akins, Sara Teasdale, and Masters is made clear. It was the Mirror that published in serial form Masters's Spoon River Anthology. Putzel discusses such literary movements as decadence and naturalism as well as the writers who contributed to them with such clarity that any reader can understand them. In addition, Reedy gave new standing to overlooked and underestimated writers such as Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Alice French, and Ambrose Bierce. Putzel even places Reedy in the context of other critics such as Percival Pollard and James Gibbons Huneker. By 1917, Reedy's national standing in poetry circles was clear, when he was chosen along with Bliss Perry of Harvard and Jessie B. Rittenhouse of the Poetry Society of America to select a book of poetry to win a cash award dispensed by Columbia University along with the first Pulitzer Prizes. The prize went to Sara Teasdale, whom Reedy first published in the Mirror in 1907.
Harriet Monroe, founder and publisher of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, who competed with Reedy and found herself disagreeing with him more often than not, wrote this upon his death: "He could have held his own in the Mermaid Tavern, or across the table from Dr. Johnson, or under the dialectics of Socrates or at the Gargantuan feasts of Rabelais. Indeed, his spirit really belonged to more spacious times." It is this man and mind that Putzel captures in these pages. 
Foreward Copyright 1998 by the Curators of the University of Missouri
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