Atlantic Pilot

During its 80 years of continuous publication, the Atlantic Montlily has had eight editors. The first seven*served for the first 50 years. This month, the eighth, Ellery Sedgwick, gave up his title after 30 years.

Faithfully, Editor Sedgwick had carried into the 20th Century the progressive editorial traditions established in the 19th. Under his editorship, the Atlantic startled its readers with Ernest Hemingway's Fifty Grand, which volatile Ray Long had rejected as too much for his more popular magazines, and Gertrude Stein's unorthodox Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The Atlantic welcomed controversial essays from Woodrow Wilson. Alfred E. Smith, Felix Frankfurter, Arthur E. Morgan, Herbert Hoover. But never did it forget that it was essentially the literary trustee of its early Boston contributors like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier. Other Atlantic contributors who have made literary history include: Robert Browning, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Bret Harte, Samuel L. Clemens, Henry James Jr., Thomas Hardy, Lafcadio Hearn, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, John Galsworthy, Robert Frost.

Last winter, Editor Sedgwick, an inveterate globetrotter, visited Rightist Spain as the guest of the Franco Government--the kind of junket objective journalists usually turn down. When Guest Sedgwick reported that "the liberal spirit is clearly in the ascendant'' in Franco Spain, he brought upon himself unmeasured condemnation from dozens of liberal pro-Loyalist writers. Smartly, Mr. Sedgwick returned the blows. During Editor Sed-wick's recent travels, his place has been taken by wiry, effervescent Editor Edward Augustus Weeks Jr. La.;t week, 40-year-old "Ted" Weeks assumed the hallowed title of editor-in-chief; 66-year-old Ellery Sedgwick, still spry and still owner of the Atlantic, will continue to be its dominant editorial voice.

*James Russell Lowell, James Thomas Fields, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Horace Elisha Scudder, Walter Hines Page, Bliss Perry.

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