The Harvard Advocate

The Harvard Advocate, the premier literary magazine of Harvard College, 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 wood-frame house at 21 South Street, near Harvard Square and the University campus.

History

When the "Advocate" was founded, it adopted the motto "Dulce Periculum" (Danger is Sweet) 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.

Undergraduate Diaspora

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, the undergraduate editors of and contributors to the "Advocate" have gone on to later fame, literary and otherwise. Theodore Roosevelt edited the magazine in 1880. Edwin Arlington 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 Norman Mailer.

Post World War II

The Advocate suspended publication during the years of World War II, and resumed publication with its April 1947 issue. Editors after the War included Daniel Ellsberg. In its tradition of publishing "the juvenilia of the great," the post-war "Advocate" published undergraduate and/or graduate work by Richard Wilbur, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Frank O'Hara, John Hawkes, Harold Brodkey, Kenneth Koch and Jonathan Kozol as well as illustrations by Ed Gorey, then calling himself Edward St. J. Gorey. Contributors from outside Harvard during this time included Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Archibald MacLeish.

Other contributors after World War II 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 Peter Gadol, Lev Grossman, Benjamin Kunkel, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan; poets Carl Phillips and Jane Yeh; journalist Timothy Noah, and writer and video game developer Austin Grossman.

External links

* [http://www.theharvardadvocate.com "The Harvard Advocate"]
* [http://www.theharvardadvocate.com/about.html Historical note on the "Advocate"]
* [http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/poems/eliot-harvard-poems.html Text of T. S. Eliot's printed in the "Advocate"]