The Seven Arts

The Seven Arts was a short-lived but influential American magazine, published monthly from November 1916 through October 1917.

It was edited by Van Wyck Brooks , Waldo Frank and James Oppenheim , other authors were Randolph Bourne , Louis Untermeyer , Harold Stearns and Paul Rosenfeld. These authors, often summarized under the term Young Intellectuals or Young Americans , were united by the call for a cultural purification and renewal of American culture, which they regarded as materialistic and culturally still in the 19th century. The paper also published texts by avant-garde writers such as Eugene O'Neill , Robert Frost , Henry L. Mencken , DH Lawrence , Sherwood Anderson , John Dos Passos and Amy Lowell , making it one of the leading papers of the dawn of modernism in New York .

The Seven Arts was also avowedly a political paper and, in view of the much-discussed possibility of the USA entering the war in Europe, took a radical pacifist line and printed sharp attacks on war advocates like John Dewey . But this radical position ultimately brought about the end of the magazine; the patron Annette Rankine stopped her financial donations in autumn 1917; shortly afterwards she committed suicide.

literature

• Casey Nelson Blake: Beloved Community. The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, & Lewis Mumford. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC et al. 1990, ISBN 0-8078-4296-6 .

Web links

• Complete online archive on the pages of the digitization project The Modernist Journals Project (operated by Brown University and the University of Tulsa).