Current edition of The Strand Magazine.
By ThomasShess.com--Founder--PillartoPost.org daily online magazine style blog:
Most magazines regard the past as an archive. The Strand Magazine treats it as an active crime scene. Somewhere inside a university library, an author’s estate or a carton of forgotten papers, there may be an unpublished story waiting for someone patient enough to recognize it. Under managing editor Andrew F. Gulli, The Strand has become remarkably adept at finding those literary strays, establishing their authenticity and returning them to readers.
Its latest rescue is Edith Wharton’s “The Men Who Saved the World,” an unfinished short story believed to have been written in 1918 and preserved among Wharton’s papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The story appeared for the first time in Issue 78 of The Strand, more than a century after Wharton set it aside.
The discovery was substantial enough to attract coverage from The New York Times. and the international press. NPR’s All Things Considered program interviewed Gulli about the story, which places an American nurse at an elegant dinner in a French château close enough to the First World War front for artillery to rattle the windows. The household is attempting to restore the rituals of polite society at the same table once used for battlefield amputations.
That is pure Wharton territory: privilege arranging the flowers while suffering waits outside the door.
The manuscript does more than add another title to the Wharton bibliography. It extends our understanding of a writer too often confined to the drawing rooms of old New York.
Wharton lived in France during the WWI, organized assistance for refugees, established charitable operations and traveled close to the front. In this newly published work, she turns the moral vision of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence toward the comfortable people capable of hearing the guns without comprehending what they mean.
Finding such work has become one of The Strand’s defining pursuits. In recent years the magazine has brought forward forgotten, unpublished or rarely seen writing by Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Truman Capote, James M. Cain, Rod Serling and G.K. Chesterton.
Earlier recoveries included work by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Tennessee Williams and H.G. Wells.
The magazine does not merely raid famous filing cabinets for marketable names. At its best, it restores a missing angle of vision. A newly found Graham Greene ghost story shows the grave political novelist enjoying the playful machinery of supernatural fear.
A John D. MacDonald noir uncovers an early version of the moral uneasiness that later marked his crime fiction.
Chandler’s strange autobiographical nightmare exposes uncertainties concealed beneath the public armor of the hard-boiled professional.
These are not always abandoned masterpieces. Some were unfinished, withheld or simply lost in the administrative rubble that accumulates around a writing life. Their importance lies elsewhere. They let readers enter the workshop. We see great writers experimenting, doubting, failing, amusing themselves or approaching familiar subjects from an unexpected direction.
That makes The Strand part magazine, part literary detective agency and part public archive.
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The publication carries an imposing inheritance. Publisher George Newnes founded the original British Strand Magazine in 1890, with its first issue dated January 1891. Its offices were just off the Strand, the historic London thoroughfare connecting the City of London with Westminster. Hence the name.
Newnes envisioned an affordable, heavily illustrated magazine for a broad family readership—famously seeking a picture on every page.
Its most consequential early decision was publishing Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Sidney Paget’s illustrations helped give Holmes the physical form generations still recognize, while the stories transformed both the detective hero and the magazine.
At its height, the original Strand reached hundreds of thousands of readers each month and became one of Britain’s most influential homes for popular fiction. It continued until 1950.
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The present American-based Strand was revived in 1998. It honors the old magazine without embalming it. Alongside archival discoveries, it publishes contemporary fiction, interviews, reviews and work by established and emerging mystery writers. Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Connelly, Walter Mosley, Sophie Hannah, Jeffery Deaver and many others have appeared in its pages.
That balance is essential. A magazine devoted only to reverence becomes a museum catalog. One interested only in the new becomes another disposable product. The Strand maintains a conversation between writers living and dead.
PBS NewsHour has previously reported several of the magazine’s recoveries, including lost work by Hemingway, Steinbeck and J.M. Barrie, and covered its publication of Mark Twain’s “The Undertaker’s Tale” as far back as 2009. The current Wharton discovery has renewed that wider national attention, with The New York Times., the Associated Press, NPR and publications abroad recognizing that this modest literary quarterly continues to produce genuine cultural news.
Much of the credit belongs to Gulli, whose editorial curiosity appears to be accompanied by the less glamorous virtues required for archival work: persistence, skepticism and a willingness to ask one more librarian, scholar or literary executor what might still be sitting in a box.
The result is a magazine with a purpose larger than nostalgia. At a moment when publishing increasingly measures success by immediate attention, The Strand practices a slower faith. It believes a story may remain valuable even when its author is gone, its original market has vanished and its pages have lain unread for a hundred years. It also understands something every writer hopes is true: A manuscript may be forgotten without being finished with us.
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