The Harvard Monthly
[2] The initial October 1885 issue includes works by Sanborn, Santayana, Houghton, Fullerton the magazine's faculty adviser, Barrett Wendell, among others.
The table of contents consists of stories, sketches, criticisms, poems, editorials and book reviews, choice morsels for the most delicate palate.
The aim of the Monthly is primarily to preserve, as far as possible, the best literary work that is produced in college by undergraduates.For thirteen years, President Charles William Eliot had been attempting to transform Harvard from a provincially famous institution into a nationally recognized and admired leader in higher education.
The academic curriculum needed to cater not just students in the liberal arts, but also ones who saw higher education as a path towards upward mobility, and as a way to pursue non-humanist studies.
"[4] What seemed a mass movement toward practicality and specialization that would drain the university of the aestheticism and humanism frustrated the young men who would eventually found the Monthly; each was involved with one or more of the other Harvard literary publications—the Lampoon, the Advocate, and the Crimson, which didn't offer the creative outlet they felt necessary.
Carpenter, assembling in Santayana's room in Hollis Hall, where they agreed to move forward with a plan for a true literary magazine.
[9] Those who subsequently served the Monthly include Bernhard Berenson, William Vaughn Moody, Norman Hapgood, Henry Milner Rideout, Philip Henry Savage, Trumbull Stickney,[6] Robert Herrick, John Reed, Charles Macomb Flandrau, Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, Clifford Herschel Moore, Robert Morss Lovett, Hermann Hagedorn, M.A.
"[Cummings] took no part in the debate over preparedness for war, one which shook the country in the winter of 1916-17 and which, as a minor effect, disrupted the board of The Harvard Monthly.
The Monthlies thought that the board of The Advocate, which then appeared fortnightly, was composed of journalists, clubmen, athletes, and disciples of Teddy Roosevelt, a former editor, with not a man of letters among them.
"[17] Within ten years of its beginning, The Monthly was known to have published the best literary work done by undergraduates; its series of graduate articles has included many of exceptional value and interest; its influence in the college world has always been in the direction of earnestness and seriousness.
Seeking only to reflect "the strongest and soberest undergraduate thought", The Monthly provided "a medium of communication between students and graduates" which had not existed in any other of Harvard's periodicals.
Such a spirit, only too rare in our land of gigantic uniformities, and almost non-existent in our colleges, gave one hope that here at least a leaven was working which would ultimately transform American thought from the flabby courageless thing it is into something new and liberating.
