Donal Harris's On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines is a welcome addition to the fields of periodical and New Modernist studies, particularly in its consideration of modernism's vexed relationship with the mainstream. Harris is much indebted to Lawrence Rainey's influential work on “institutions of modernism” – in other words, the elite coteries of patronage, collecting, publishing, and distribution that established the legitimacy of certain forms of literary modernism.Footnote ¹ Harris, however, convincingly demonstrates that mass-market institutions, namely the commercial, style-driven “big magazines” he focusses on (McClure's, Crisis, Time, Life, and Esquire), also played a significant role in shaping the aesthetic of modernists and transmitting modernism to a growing reading public over the course of the first half of the twentieth century.

Chapters 1 through 3 center on the role of editorial work, magazine production, and office culture in shaping modernist literary styles and themes. In chapter 1, Willa Cather's experience as editor for the muck-raking McClure's is linked to key formal and thematic aspects of her writing: the ideal of authorial invisibility, erasure, and aesthetic autonomy (her version of “modernist impersonality” (37)). Chapter 2's concerns are with materiality – of the magazine and the textual and visual representation of the black body – in the African American periodical Crisis. W. E. B. Du Bois, Harris argues, believed that a successful race magazine depended on “technoprofessional and cultural acumen” (76), and Crisis’s exploitation of new print technologies and modern trends in graphic design and visual culture was a factor in its success. Chapter 3 takes up what might be considered the dark side of “modernist impersonality,” in a compelling consideration of the “corporate” editorial voice developed for Time, which shared high modernism's interest in compression and innovative style. The authors considered are James Agee and Kenneth Fearing, who, in different ways, engaged in their literary work with the problem of separating corporate from personal style. Chapters 4 and 5 change focus, moving from the relationship between magazine production and modernist style to the transmission and reception of modernism and the use of modernists as editorial content in mass-market magazines. Representations of T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and the reputation of modernism in the 1950s and 1960s are examined in the context of debates about the middlebrow and cultural decline.

The book is at its best when engaging with the Time Inc. publications (Time, Life) in chapters 3 to 5, which make the most original contributions to the field. Harris's detailed attention to the role that mass-market magazines played in institutionalizing modernism in the 1940s and 1950s differs from standard accounts that focus on the role of universities. As modernism saturated the market through the medium of the mass-market magazine, modernism became mainstream, but also, as Harris insists, the mainstream became modernist. Furthermore, as he shows in his chapters on Eliot and Hemingway, modernism became central to the construction of a postwar American identity. Because of the high quality of critical insight demonstrated in these chapters, it is disappointing to come across weaknesses in the early chapters, which seem to be included to expand the temporal frame and corpus of magazines under discussion and to bring a more interdisciplinary approach to the material. Harris is on less solid ground in treating Cather/McClure's and Crisis, and his critical acumen is stronger when engaged in literary analysis than when turned to the materiality of magazine print culture. It seems strange, for example, that in his consideration of Cather's work he focusses on book versions, rather than on magazine instantiations and contexts where these are available. The consideration of Frank Walts's covers for Crisis, meanwhile, is weakened by its assumption that Walts was African American. Harris is not the only scholar to perpetuate this notion, one not borne out by available public records, which identify Walts as white. Certainly, more research needs to be done on this obscure but important figure. Harris's consideration of visual culture is also not as strong as other areas of his research. The section on Walts was notably lacking a broader contextualization of his style in relation to trends in graphic art of the period. In addition, his discussion of Agee and Walker Evans's collaborative Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) gives no attention to Evans's images for the text.

Overall, however, there is much to praise in this lucidly written and ambitious book. It is highly engaging, with each chapter offering a fresh perspective and a different methodology through which to consider key figures and magazines of the era. Harris's work is pioneering, then, providing a series of models for the study of magazines, and it is sure to influence the direction of future scholarship in this field.