Ellery Sedgwick

“New York is a goldfish bowl where everybody follows the same narrow round.” That was the opinion of Editor Ellery Sedgwick, who used to say that the reason both he on the Atlantic and Lorimer on the Saturday Evening Post did so well as editors was that neither lived in New York. If your job was in Boston or Philadelphia, the people that really mattered would seek you out, whereas in New York you were so surrounded by cranks they couldn’t get at you.

But whether or not this was the reason—and some successful New York editors will vehemently deny it—Ellery Sedgwick certainly made a go of the Atlantic. When he took it over (lock, stock, and barrel) in 1908, it was, along with the Transcript, a highly respectable prop of the Boston brahmin, but out of the shadow of Beacon Hill it was regarded as stuffy if not provincial and its circulation was snobbishly small. Sedgwick infused it with life. Though a gifted writer himself, he preferred to remain behind the scenes and exploit the gifts of others. He was called an impresario who could inspire writers to surpass themselves or non-writers to tell their own stories in readable words. Indeed, much of the success of the Atlantic under Sedgwick’s direction came from the publication of accounts by amateur authors of exceptional experiences.

Before and during the First World War, the Atlantic exerted an important influence on public opinion through its support of Woodrow Wilson. This naturally aroused much controversy—especially among isolationists—but, as we look back on Sedgwick’s position then, he appears as a champion of internationalism ahead of his time.

Sedgwick was a vigorous fighter against the forces of censorship—particularly strong in Boston. Under his leadership a victory came to the cause of literary freedom when, in 1929, the Massachusetts law was altered so that the judgment of obscenity in a book could be made only on the work as a whole rather than on passages out of context.

Although the Sedgwick ancestral home is in Stockbridge, Ellery was born in New York. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in 1894. For a while he taught at Groton, then he became associate editor of The Youth’s Companion. For five years after 1900, he was editor-in-chief of Leslie’s Monthly Magazine. After that he was successively with the American Magazine, McClure’s Magazine, and D. Appleton and Company. Editorship of the Atlantic had been, however, a boyhood ambition and this he was able to gratify by buying the periodical and thus becoming its undisputed dictator.

He used to say that twenty years was the normal life span of a magazine editor; that after that, his magazine would become repetitive and stale. He held to that conviction and resigned in 1938. In the next year he sold his controlling interest in the magazine in what was said to be the most profitable cash transaction in late publishing history.

Immediately after his retirement, he aroused wide controversy by two articles in the New York Times in praise of Franco’s regime in Spain. These were based on a Spanish visit which included an interview with the dictator.

His visits to New York usually included an hour or so at the Century, for which he had great affection. He continued to come to the club even after his long, progressive arthritic trouble required the use of a wheel chair.

Ellery Sedgwick was one of the dominant figures in the transition period of American literature. He saw the late Victorian style decline into the feeble romanticism that characterized our writing at the turn of the century and he welcomed the revival of the 1920’s. To such authors as Ernest Hemingway he offered the hospitality of the Atlantic when all other doors were closed to them. At least until the coming of the New Deal he was anything but conservative. His first vote was for Bryan in 1896 and he was a staunch defender of Al Smith. In the New Deal years, as a liberal friend expressed it, “hardening of the political arteries set in.”

Roger Burlingame
1961 Century Association Yearbook