This Day in Cultural History (“Saturday Evening Post” Releases Last Issue)

February 8, 1969—The venerable magazine The Saturday Evening Post, which at one time virtually embodied the mainstream American culture in literature and art, released its final issue, victimized by larger movements in the nation’s culture as well as by particular mistakes made by its management.

The magazine may now seem like a mossy relic from a faraway time, a middlebrow monolith whose passing is not something to be mourned. Yet I would argue that the magazine published the work of some of the nation’s most talented writers and artists; that its demise represented a milestone in the tightening of the short-fiction market; and that its death, hastened by a new medium, constitutes an eerie foreshadowing of the current equivalent of the Great Depression afflicting the media these days.

The artist most commonly associated with the Post, Norman Rockwell, had his last work for the magazine published in December 1963. The editors’ decision to move away from painted covers in favor of photographs did nothing to blunt the magazines’ old-fashioned image, and only turned off longtime readers.

It is certainly true that the magazine’s carefully implemented moral standards could result in a sameness in editorial content. (For example, see how its decision to soften the edges of Erle Stanley Gardner’s lawyer-sleuth Perry Mason resulted in a series far more formulaic than anyone expected.)

But over the years, the Post also published the work of some of the world’s greatest writers, including Willa Cather, Jack London, G.K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane.

My favorite among the magazine’s stable of writers also happens to be my favorite writer, period: F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Matthew J. Bruccoli noted in his edition of The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 65 of the novelist’s 160 published short fiction—approximately 40% of his output—were published in the magazine, including the fine story “The Last of the Belles” and the autobiographical “Basil and Josephine” stories.

Though the Post never had the cachet of, say, The New Yorker, its demise put a chill in writers looking to short fiction to survive. One harbinger of the magazine’s death was the fall of one of its main rivals in publishing short stories, Collier’s.

Over the years, the mass-market magazine market has become an increasingly inhospitable place to the short story. Even The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly have concentrated increasingly on nonfiction over the years. Short story writers are now forced to literary magazines and similar low-paying outlets.

One should also take note of the prominent illustrators whose work first appeared in the magazine, not just Rockwell but also J.C. Leyendecker, Harrison Fisher, James Montgomery Flagg, Steven Dohanos, and Mead Schaffer.

One particular factor in the serial’s demise was an adverse libel ruling resulting from a 1963 article which claimed that football coaches Paul “Bear” Bryant of the University of Alabama and Wally Butts of the University of Georgia had conspired to fix a game. Butts’ victory, in a case that ultimately wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court, resulted in a judgment against the magazine of more than $3 million—an amount that the magazine by this time could little afford to pay, given its decline in advertising revenues.

This past year has seen the demise of a number of magazines, including Radar and 02138. The recession and a hostile environment for print (increased by the Internet) has resulted in many casualties in the literary market. That same assault on old-time media was, in a way, prefigured in the late Sixties and early Seventies, when several major well-loved magazines—not only the Post but also Life and Look—fell by the wayside, victimized by the rise of television.