Revival

In Richmond, Va., 103 years ago, a struggling 64-page magazine called the Southern Literary Messenger, then a year old, published a short story called Berenice. It was by an unknown 26-year-old writer named Edgar Allan Poe, who had been recommended to the editor, as "very clever with his pen . . . highly imaginative and a little terrific." Shortly afterwards, at a salary of $10 a week, Poe became editor of the Messenger.

Seventeen months later, the publisher was as "sick of his writings as I am of him." But before he was fired Poe had skyrocketed the circulation from 600 to 5,500, and the Messenger had become the most famed Southern literary magazine of all time. With such famed foreign contributors as Longfellow, Thackeray, John Quincy Adams, it survived until June 1864. (By that time the subscription price had jumped from $5 to $15 a year, Confederate money.) But when its printers were called to defend Richmond, the Southern Literary Messenger suspended publication.

Last week the Southern Literary Messenger was revived, in format a duplicate of its old self. Dedicated to "a renaissance in Southern literature," its new editor is Richmond-born Frieda Meredith Dietz, 34, who in childhood "listened for the echo" of Poe's footsteps in the old Messenger building, where her father ran a print shop. (Her brother, August Dietz Jr., 36, is publisher.)

Each issue of the new Messenger will print a resume of the old. The Lynchburg (Va.) Advance thinks that "present day writing will suffer poignantly by contrast." But except for a sketch by Kentuckian Poet Jesse Stuart, the revived Messenger shows few signs of outraging the traditions of the old; on the contrary smells a little too strongly of lavender.

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