MIDWEST LITERARY LEAGUE

BOX 400

DES MOINES, IOWA

Temporary Committee

RAYMOND KRESENSKY
RUTH STEWART
OPAL SHANNON
WILLIAM PILLIN

Temporary Committee

DALE KRAMER
MARY HUDSON
JAY DU VON
ROLAND WHITE

This flyer is the second item of literature sent out by the Midwest Literary League. Perhaps you saw the other, a letter stating our purposes. If not, the major part of it—call it our credo— is printed on the other side of this leaflet.

Since that first letter two things have occurred. Jack Conroy, the novelist, and Joe Jones, the painter, delivered vital lectures before a large audience of midwest writers and artists in Des Moines. That is one event. The other is even more important. A new, greatly enlarged issue of HINTERLAND will soon go to the printer.

This number is the first under direction of the Midwest Literary League's editorial board. It is a great number, pointing the way to fuller co-operation between midwest writers. And a big order will be placed with the printer; to do otherwise considering the response to the first call for membership would be foolish.

Dues are $1.00 a year. That includes a subscription to the magazine. Of course, one may subscribe without becoming a member. Or single copies may be purchased at 20c each. Incidentally, the first issues of HINTERLAND, published in Cedar Rapids in 1934, are very rare. The magazine in its new form and under the editorship of the League will also undoubtedly become a collector's item. Your membership should begin with the next issue.

We quote a few responses from writers, editors and readers:

"I'm all for the midwest, and the new league."
—Sonora Babb.

"I am very glad indeed to enclose check for membership in the Midwest Literary League."
—Florence W. Bowers, E. P. Dutton & Co.

"I am interested in what you are planning to do. And I shall help in every way possible." —John Rood, editor MANUSCRIPT.

"We here in Kansas City are very much interested." —Clarence Decker, editor Kansas City University REVIEW.

"Herewith $2, one for myself, and the other for some luckless young intransigent . . ." —E. Douglas Branch.

"Thanks for the invitation to join the Midwest Literary League. You will find one dollar . . ." —Alfred Morang.

"I think your letter about the Midwest Literary League is splendid." —Meridel LeSueur.

"I certainly am in favor of your new movement." —George Dixon Snell.

"I am always with you." —John C. Rogers.

"It sounds good. I am enclosing my check, . . ."
—Carroll D. Coleman.

"Hurrah for the Midwest Literary League." —Jack Conroy.

WHY THE LEAGUE?

Ever since the turn of the century the Middle West has been the scene of sporadic literary and art renaissances. From 1910 until well into the 1920's, Chicago made valiant attempts to establish it-self as a cultural center, independent from the east, and expressing the particular native flavor and bias deriving from its position in the middle of a great agricultural region. THE LITTLE REVIEW was begun; POETRY MAGAZINE took up the challenge. In Davenport George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, Floyd Dell and Arthur Ficke dreamed of a "new Athens" beside the Mississippi.

The fate of these movements could be traced in the itinerary of their members. Recognition meant New York, a gradual seeping away of the best talent to the east where larger audiences and greater appreciation awaited them. These writers were at once making an audience and being made by their audience. Their subject matter, the treatment of their material, all recommended them to the east. The cultural and economic compulsions were stronger than their artistic integrity and their regional footholds.

More recently there has been a healthy manifestation of literary resurgence in the publication of "little magazines". These have sprung up in Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, Muscatine, Iowa City, Davenport, Peoria, Moberly, Lincoln and St. Paul. While most of them have met the early death, which is their most outstanding characteristic, the mere fact that they came into existence in the first place demonstrates the currents slowly developing and here and there breaking into the light.

Middlewestern writers are undergoing an increasing awareness of their cultural homogeneity. Their roots in the land, and their regional background, give them common cause and common interest. They are coming to appreciate their heritage in the problems and ways of life of their own people, realizing that the validity of their work is to be proved in its acceptance by their contemporaries who are a part of their own milieu, here and now, in the streets of Des Moines, Chicago and St. Louis, in the farm houses and fields of the middle west.

John Cowper Powys has written: "This (the Middle West) is the real America, that is—let us hope!—the America of the future; this is the region of what may, after all, prove to be, in Spongylerian phrase, the cradle of the next great human 'culture'."

It is to crystallize this heritage of tradition and strength, to canalize this river of energy, to direct and concentrate these expressions throughout the region, that a group of middlewestern writers recently formed an organization known as the Midwest Literary League. Its purposes are to bring about an increased awareness of the regional, agrarian basis of our "culture" and the identity of our interests as writers with that economic background. It is upon our conscience as writers — as the articulate and sometimes forewarned conscience of the people of whom we are a part, to fight against every attack which is made upon it, either through war, for which we can recognize no possible justification, or through fascism which is opposed to everything which we believe in and respect.

It is only through organization that we can make ourselves heard, that we can become an effective factor at this time. Through organization we can meet on a common ground of mutual problems and can arrive at a program which represents our interests as a whole.

The Midwest Literary League has taken over the publication of the magazine HINTERLAND, which espouses the cause of agrarian literature, and will edit the magazine through an editorial committee. The first number with forty pages and a new format will be published soon, and will appear bi-monthly thereafter. Its policy will be as broad as that of the League, publishing stories, poetry, articles, and an editorial department which will act as the voice of the organization.