The Harvard Advocate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Harvard Advocate, the premier literary magazine of Harvard College, the undergraduate component of Harvard University, is the oldest continuously published college literary magazine in the United States. The magazine (published then in newspaper format) was founded by Charles S. Gage and William G. Peckham in 1866 and, except for a hiatus during the last years of World War II, has published continuously since then. Its current offices are a two story wooden-frame house on South Street, near Harvard Square and the University campus.
When the Advocate was founded, it adopted the motto Dulce est Periculum (Sweet is Danger) which had been used by an earlier Harvard newspaper, the Collegian. The magazine originally avoided controversial topics, lest it be shut down by university authorities; by the time the editors were making the then-radical demand for coeducation at Harvard -- "Alumni! the task is yours! See that this criminal exclusiveness is eradicated" -- the magazine had attracted the formidable support of James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and its life was less precarious.
The founding in 1873 of the Harvard Crimson newspaper (originally the Magenta), and in 1876, of the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, led the Advocate by the 1880s to devote itself to essays, fiction, and poetry.
Over the years, undergraduate editors of, and contributors to, the Advocate went to later fame literary and otherwise. Theodore Roosevelt edited the magazine in 1880. E. A. Robinson, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and T. S. Eliot all published their undergraduate poetry in the Advocate. Before the Second World War, undergrads who worked on the Advocate included Malcolm Cowley, James Agee, Robert Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein. James Laughlin (who got into trouble with local police for publishing a racy story by Henry Miller) and, last, but not least, Norman Mailer. Contributors in these days included Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Archibald MacLeish. In its tradition of publishing "the juvenilia of the great," the post-war Advocate has published undergraduate work by Richard Wilbur, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Frank O'Hara, Harold Brodkey, and Jonathan Kozol. During the same time, contributors from outside Harvard included Adrienne Rich (the first woman to publish regularly in the magazine), John Hawkes, Howard Nemerov, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Tom Wolfe, James Atlas, and Sallie Bingham whose story "Winter Term," a tale of steamy romance between undergraduate lovers, might be said to have established the unfortunate genre of the Harvard Square Sex Story. Some recent alumni of note include novelists Lev Grossman, Benjamin Kunkel, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan; poets Stephen Burt and Jane Yeh; and writer and video game developer Austin Grossman.
