Word: smarted
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Those two American redoubtables, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who several years ago rescued the Smart Set from the devastating popularity it suffered as an all fiction magazine, have recently thrown it back to the masses who feed on fiction with this parting sting: "The Smart Set becomes an all-fiction magazine as it was when America's most popular monthly...
Their fountain pens are not done jabbing, however. Under the protecting wing of Alfred A. Knopf who has befriended and encouraged many to whom smug society turned a deaf ear and an unseeing eye, they have started a new magazine, The American Mercury. While in the Smart Set, perhaps to keep a fire in the editorial office, they were forced at times to pander to the tastes of readers who demanded undisturbing fiction, in their newest venture with a publisher like Knopf behind them they need serve neither fiction nor soothing copy of any kind, but may scratch and sting...
...them with some bone to pick with "nice people"--have contributed to the first number. Although the magazine will be a review, according to its editors "like every other monthly review the world have ever seen," it will be a review, as was the Repetition Generale in the Smart Set, seen through and colored by the editor's glasses. Indeed, a warning to this effect is given in the foreword: "the nobility and gentry are cautioned that they are here in the presence of no band of passionate altruists . . . The editors are committed to nothing save this--to keep...
...with the orange coat of its English namesake, The London Mercury?Alfred A. Knopf presented for the first time The American Mercury with H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Messrs. Mencken and Nathan have produced a different product, but of a sort allied to their last magazine The Smart...
Messrs. Mencken and Nathan were co-editors of The Smart Set until they began their new undertaking. Presumably The Smart Set is the "popular magazine" referred to above. In its January number The Smart Set has abandoned the Mencken-Nathan type of pyrotechnics and returned to pure fiction. The announcement of this fact is carried on the cover in words that might well be those of one of its former editors?that is, if the latter part of the announcement were in italics: WITH THIS ISSUE THE SMART SET BECOMES AN ALL-FICTION MAGAZINE AS IT WAS WHEN AMERICA...