When Faulkner Was in Vogue: The American Women's Magazine Fashioning a Modernist Icon

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article tracks how American Vogue mediated William Faulkner and his works to its readers from 1927 to 1962, under the editorship of Edna Woolman Chase and Jessica Daves. In so doing this study sheds light on the hitherto overlooked role of American Vogue in promoting, popularizing, and publicizing modernist literature. Using the intersection of Faulkner and Vogue as an exemplary case of the affiliation between literary modernism and popular magazines, this study demonstrates that the postwar canonization of modernism was a joint product of cultural intermediaries choreographed by the New York-based print industry.