Introduction
NOT MANY YEARS AGO A NEWLY HIRED ADDITfON TO THE ATLANTIC S
advertising staff， in an orientation session with one of the magazine s edi-
tors， asked with innocent seriousness why The Atlantic \"bothered\" to publish
fiction at all.
From the start， in 1857， The Atlantic Monthly has been a magazine of
politics， art， and literature. Fiction was always among its staples， though
for many years Atlantic authors were not identified by name--why call
attention to mere personality when the point， after all， s Art? A thorough
chronicle of Tbt Atla，tic s early years， however， would show that Bret Harte，
Mark Twain， Jack London， and other rough-hewn frontier types chimed
space in the magazine s early edit ons， and the more refined sensibilities of
Henry James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman graced the magazine s pages in
its turn-of-the.century maturity The Atlantic s first editors believed that the
pleasures of imaginative fiction enhanced lives otherwise taken up with the
unyielding imperatives of family and fortune， that no one could pretend to
have embraced Culture who did not engage the narrative tradition that
dramatizes our past while examining both our present and our uneasy
future.
I said to that new advertising
salesman， who surely wanted to be
C. MICHAEL CURTIS persuaded， that we bothered to pub-
lish fiction because we couldn t imag-
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