ABSTRACT
In between the “little” and “big” magazines of the early twentieth century there was another group for which it is harder to find a label. In America, they included The Smart Set, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The American Mercury and Esquire. Described collectively by Sharon Hamilton as “American humor magazines with serious literary pretensions” (“Mencken” 101), by George O. Douglas as “smart” (1), and in other contexts as “quality” or “slick,” these periodicals were influential taste-makers, and are intimately connected with the historical development of both modernism and celebrity culture. They traded extensively on the value of modernist signatures, and they also photographed and sketched modernists, speculated about their lives, analyzed their work, parodied them, mocked them and celebrated them. Their contributions to the fashioning of modernist careers are inflected by their complex attitudes towards both elite cultural capital and the operations of celebrity culture.
