For a little more than a year (December 1835 to January 1837), Edgar Allan Poe was the editor of this magazine. He was a staff writer from August through November of 1835, and a frequent contributor for years after he resigned the editorship. The first page of the December 1835 issue announces the feast to come in Volume II, and makes this particular promise: “Some of the contributors, whose effusions have received the largest share of praise from critics, and (what is better still) have been read with most pleasure by that larger, unsophisticated class, whom Sterne loved for reading, and being pleased ‘they knew not why, and care not wherefore’—may be expected to continue their favors. Among these, we hope to be pardoned for singling out the name of Mr. Edgar A. Poe; not with design to make any invidious distinction, but because such a mention of him finds numberless precedents in the journals on every side, which have rung the praises of his uniquely original vein of imagination, and of humorous, delicate satire.” This paragraph might have been written by Poe himself; it is the sort of thing that would amuse him.
For a time, the title was expanded to “The Southern and Western Literary Messenger and Review”; during the Civil War, it was sometimes contracted to “The Literary Messenger.”The later issues are a feast for students of Southern racial theories of the period immediately before and during the Civil War, which are horrifyingly Naziesque.
The Southern Literary Messenger, 1834–1864. By Benjamin Blake Minor, editor and proprietor from 1843 to 1847. New York and Washington: The Neale Publishing Company, 1905.
I. 1834-1835.Vol. 37, No. 3. March 1863.