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US magazine

The American Mercury was an American magazine published from 1924 to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States through the 1920s and 1930s. After a change in ownership in the 1940s, the magazine attracted conservative writers, including William F. Buckley. A second change in ownership in the 1950s turned the magazine into a far right and virulently anti Semitic publication. It was published monthly in New York City. The magazine went out of business in 1981, having spent the last 25 years of its existence in decline and controversy.

H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had previously edited The Smart Set literary magazine, when not producing their own books and, in Mencken's case, regular journalism for The Baltimore Sun. With their mutual book publisher Alfred A. Knopf Sr. serving as the publisher, Mencken and Nathan created The American Mercury as "a serious review, the gaudiest and damnedest ever seen in the Republic", as Mencken explained the name (derived from a 19th century publication) to his old friend and contributor Theodore Dreiser:

What we need is something that looks highly respectable outwardly. The American Mercury is almost perfect for that purpose. What will go on inside the tent is another story. You will recall that the late P. T. Barnum got away with burlesque shows by calling them moral lectures. From 1924 through 1933, Mencken provided what he promised: elegantly irreverent observations of America, aimed at what he called "Americans realistically", those of sophisticated skepticism of enough that was popular and much that threatened to be. (Nathan was forced to resign as his co editor a year after the magazine started.) Simeon Strunsky in The New York Times observed that, "The dead hand of the yokelry on the instinct for beauty cannot be so heavy if the handsome green and black cover of The American Mercury exists." The quote was used on the subscription form for the magazine during its heyday. The January 1924 issue sold more than 15,000 copies, and by the end of the first year the circulation was over 42,000. In early 1928, the circulation reached a height of over 84,000, but declined steadily after the stock market crash of 1929. The magazine published writing by Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, W. J. Cash, Lincoln Ross Colcord, Thomas Craven, Clarence Darrow, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Fante, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Halper, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Sinclair Lewis, Meridel LeSueur, Edgar Lee Masters, Victor Folke Nelson, Albert Jay Nock, Eugene O'Neill, Carl Sandburg, William Saroyan, and George Schuyler. Nathan provided theater criticism, and Mencken wrote the "Editorial Notes" and "The Library", the last being book reviews and social critique, placed at the back of each volume. The magazine published other writers, from newspapermen and academics to convicts and taxi drivers, but its primary emphasis soon became non fiction and usually satirical essays. Its "Americana" section—containing items clipped from newspapers and other magazines nationwide—became a much imitated feature. Mencken spiced the package with aphorisms printed in the magazine's margins whenever space allowed.

Mencken retired as editor of the magazine at the end of 1933. His chosen successor was economist and literary critic Henry Hazlitt. Differences with the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf Sr., however, led Hazlitt to resign after four months. The American Mercury was next edited by Mencken's former assistant Charles Angoff. At first, the magazine was considered to be moving to the Left. In January 1935, The American Mercury was purchased from Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., by Lawrence E. Spivak. The magazine's longtime business manager, Spivak announced that he would take an active role as publisher. Paul Palmer, former Sunday editor of the New York World, replaced Angoff as editor, and playwright Laurence Stallings was named literary editor. He changed the magazine's name to The New American Mercury. Ryan was the financial angel for Ulius Amoss, a former Office of Strategic Services agent who specialized in operating spy networks behind the Iron Curtain to destabilize Communist governments and the publisher of International Services of Information in Baltimore; his son Clendenin Jr. was a sponsor of William F. Buckley Jr. and the Young Americans for Freedom. Ryan transformed The American Mercury in a conservative direction.

William Bradford Huierefn|William Bradford Huie should not be confused with Bradford L. Huie, which is an apparent pseudonym of the author of a 2013 American Mercury article that has been widely distributed on white nationalist Internet forums. In 1956, George Lincoln Rockwell was hired as a writer, and later became the founder of the American Nazi Party. Between 1957 and 1958, William LaVarre served as editor. In January 1959, Maguire published an American Mercury editorial supporting a theory that there was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. Another new ownership for the troubled magazine was announced in the autumn of 1979, and the spring 1980 issue celebrated Mencken's centennial, and lamented the passage of his era, "before the virus of social, racial, and sexual equality" grew in "fertile soil in the minds of most Americans". The last issue concluded with a plea for contributions to build a computer index — with information about the 15,000 most dangerous political activists, actual or alleged, in the United States.