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Contact: Elizabeth Hazelton
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This fall, The Atlantic Monthly celebrates its 150th year of continuous publication – an astonishing feat given the notorious fragility of American magazines. To commemorate this remarkable milestone, Doubleday will publish THE AMERICAN IDEA: The Best of The Atlantic Monthly; 150 Years of Writers and Thinkers Who Shaped Our History, edited by Robert Vare (Doubleday; October 16, 2007). More than a collection, this is a profound work of American history—bringing together seventy-eight of the magazine’s most acclaimed and influential articles, essays, humor pieces, stories, and poems by many of the literary, intellectual, and political giants who have defined our national life.

Organized thematically and enriched by comprehensive introductory head notes for each selection, this amazing anthology features such renowned essays as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking,” and Bernard Lewis’s “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” as well as the gripping narratives that made Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and William Langewiesche’s American Ground touchstones of American nonfiction. The collection also highlights some of The Atlantic’s finest moments in fiction and poetry—from the likes of Twain, Whitman, Frost, Hemingway, Nabokov, and Bellow—affirming the central role of literature in illuminating and challenging American society.

In The Atlantic’s very first issue, in 1857, the magazine’s founders – an illustrious group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell—declared that they would dedicate their new publication to monitoring the development, and advancing the cause, of what they called “the American idea.” And for the last century and a half, the magazine has been preoccupied with the fundamental subjects of the American experience: war and peace, science and religion, the conundrum of race, the role of women, the plight of the cities, the struggle to preserve the environment, the strengths and failings of our politics, and especially, America’s proper place in the world.

This landmark collection of writings by the celebrated contributors of The Atlantic Monthly provides both a fascinating window on American history and a one-of-a-kind education in the evolution of American ideas. Serious and comic, touching and tough, THE AMERICAN IDEA paints a revealing portrait of who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going.

About the editor:

ROBERT VARE is the editor at large of The Atlantic Monthly. He is a former editor at The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Magazine, where he edited the Pulitzer Prize-winning cover story “Grady’s Gift,” in 1991. In 2004, he was the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, a posthumously published collection of writings by Michael Kelly, the former Atlantic editor-in-chief who was killed while covering the war in Iraq. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he has taught nonfiction writing at Yale and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

THE AMERICAN IDEA: The Best of The Atlantic Monthly
Edited by Robert Vare
(Doubleday; On-Sale October 16, 2007; $35.00; 688 pages)

The Atlantic Monthly is celebrating its 150th anniversary this fall, making it the oldest continuously published general-interest magazine in America. How has The Atlantic managed to stand the test of time when the vast majority of magazines—good, bad, and indifferent—quickly fade into oblivion?

Magazine publishing is a notoriously challenging business. The life expectancy of a new magazine is something closer to 150 days—not 150 years.

I see several main reasons for The Atlantic’s remarkable longevity:

First, the magazine has been fortunate to have, right from the start, a succession of strong and devoted stewards—on both the editorial and the business sides. The fact that the magazine has had only fourteen editors-in-chief in fifteen decades is just one indication among many of the inherent stability of the institution.

A second factor is The Atlantic’s unusual genealogical tree. The magazine was founded by an illustrious group, representing some of the towering figures of nineteenth-century intellectual life: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. At the time of the magazine’s founding, these were the golden boys of American literature, science, and philosophy, and they set an unusually high standard for their successors to live up to.

Finally, I would point to a few words in the brief mission statement that the founders published in the magazine’s first issue. Almost buried within these few quiet sentences sketching out editorial goals and policies was an assertion that the magazine would be primarily dedicated to monitoring, exploring, and promoting something the founders called “the American idea.” With that simple, three-word phrase, the founders managed to give the magazine both an identity and a calling. They were making an implicit promise to their readers that The Atlantic would be taking on the large and perennially relevant questions of our national life: What does it mean to be American? What constitutes the national interest? What should America’s role be in the world?

What did the founders mean by “the American idea?”

It’s interesting that they never attempted to define the term in their mission statement—or anywhere else in their public utterances or private journals. We can only speculate about what they were talking about: Political democracy? Personal freedom? Social justice? Economic progress? It was probably some blend of all these things.

It’s intriguing that the founders put such emphasis on a term that was not in common use at the time. They seem to have had confidence that their readers would know instinctively what they had in mind. Because even if the term “the American idea” was not part of the lingua franca of the mid-1850s, Americans—deeply divided as they were over the issue of slavery and other regional antagonisms—were very much concerned about issues of national identity.

This anthology features many of the most glittering names in American literature, American journalism, and the history of American thought—from Emerson and Thoreau to Mark Twain and Henry James; from Walt Whitman and Robert Frost to George Kennan and Martin Luther King, Jr., from Flannery O’Connor and Saul Bellow to Robert Caro and E.B. White. How has The Atlantic succeeded over the years in attracting such a dazzling array of writers?

Again, I would go back to the circumstances of the magazine’s creation. Most magazines owe their start to editors, publishers, business people, or investors. The Atlantic is one of the few that was founded largely by writers, and it has always been, at its core, a writers’ magazine. What this means is that the magazine has always offered its writers a special kind of audience—one that is not only highly educated but is also willing and eager to spend unusually big blocks of time reading its articles, essays, columns, and poems. It’s a magazine that has consistently given its writers the time and space to tell their stories dramatically and in depth and to make their arguments in all their nuance and complexity. It’s a magazine that does not subject its writers to ideological litmus tests or voice-eviscerating editing.

You say in your introduction that you were surprised to find, in searching through the magazine’s archives, what a fascinating window it opened on American history and the evolution of American thought. But some of the articles in the anthology went well beyond the role of mirror-bearer and actually influenced and shaped American history and thought.

There are many examples of this kind of transformative piece in the book. The opening selection of the anthology is an endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president written by The Atlantic’s first editor-in-chief, James Russell Lowell. The Lincoln endorsement on the eve of the 1860 election came at a time when many abolitionists were deeply suspicious of him and of his views on ending slavery. The support of an important anti-slavery periodical was considered crucial to Lincoln’s victory.

Tell us about the decision-making process in putting together this anthology? With the huge amount of material to choose from, how did you go about making the calls on what would be in and what would be out?

It was definitely a challenge. Over the last 150 years, The Atlantic has published a total of about 150 million words in 1800 issues. Even in a 700-page anthology, many worthy candidates had to be left out. But I set some ground rules at the start that helped guide the search through the magazine’s archives. First, in order to reflect the magazine’s literary heritage, I wanted the anthology to include not just articles and essays but also fiction and poetry. Second, I wanted the anthology to reflect the magazine’s wide range of interests: politics and public affairs, race and religion, science and technology, war and the military, the business world and the environment, family life and humor. And finally, I wanted selections in the anthology that would not only appeal to contemporary readers but also bring to life and illuminate as many as possible of the watershed moments in American history.

Unlike a lot of other anthologies, The American Idea has a thematic organization rather than a strictly chronological one. Why did you choose to go this route?

I wanted to avoid the dull and plodding parade of pieces you often get from a chronological structure and to group the material into a series of what I hope are livelier thematic categories. The book is divided into ten sections, including “Firsts,” which is chock full of pieces that show the magazine’s being way ahead of the curve on a variety of national and global issues as well as on developments like evolution, photography, and the Internet, “Black and White,” which focuses on the magazine’s abiding preoccupation with race relations going back to its abolitionist roots, “Gods and Monsters,” which features profile-writing and essay-style portraiture, and “Behind the Scenes,” which showcases some of the magazine’s best moments in narrative nonfiction.

Each of the ten sections is defined by a subject, a genre, or an idea that has been important to the magazine over the past century and a half. By identifying the magazine’s principal and perennial areas of interest, this structure itself becomes a kind of narrative device for telling the story of the magazine and the parallel story of the world it has been covering for fifteen decades. And by enabling readers to immerse themselves in one subject at a time, it encourages them to make their own connections, to compare and contrast what different authors said in different eras about such topics as corporate chicanery, the challenge of race, and America’s proper place in the world.

This anthology is also unusual in its use of head notes. Each of the 78 selections is preceded by a detailed and comprehensive introduction that establishes its historical context, describes its immediate and long-term impact, and tells something about its publishing background. Why did you feel it was necessary to do these head notes?

Frankly, it always bugs me when I come across an anthology that prints its selections cold. It’s like saying to the reader, ‘Okay, you’re on your own. You don’t need any help from us in understanding why this article, short story, or poem is important.’ To me, anthologies without head notes are asking readers to engage in a bizarre exercise in flying blind. Unless they’re already expert on the piece or the issue or the era, they have little hope of understanding the full cultural and historical significance.

So I wanted this anthology to be the exception to the rule—to get readers intrigued and even excited about what they are about to dive into. I think it’s an added gift to the reader to tell them how, for example, Mark Twain became a regular contributor to The Atlantic, or how William Langewiesche succeeded, in the crazy days after 9/11, in persuading NYC officials to allow him to be the only writer with round-the clock access to the devastated World Trade Center site.

The research and writing of the head notes entailed a lot of work, but I had terrific help from a small group of past and present Atlantic staffers, especially from Daniel Smith, who was my editorial right hand on this project. The head notes are one of the things about the anthology that I’m most proud of.