St. Nicholas Magazine

St. Nicholas Magazine was a popular monthly American children's magazine, founded by Scribner's in 1873. The first editor was Mary Mapes Dodge, who continued her association with the magazine until her death in 1905. Dodge published work by the country's best writers, including Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Twain, Laura E. Richards and Joel Chandler Harris. Many famous writers were first published in St. Nicholas League, a department that offered awards and cash prizes to the best work submitted by its juvenile readers. Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. B. White, and Stephen Vincent Benet were all St. Nicholas League winners.

St. Nicholas Magazine ceased publication in 1940. A revival was attempted in 1943, but only a few issues were published before St. Nicholas folded once more.

In 1870 Roswell Smith, cofounder of the magazine publishing company Scribner & Company, contacted Mary Mapes Dodge to inquire if she would be interested in working for a projected new children's magazine. At the time Dodge was an associate editor of the weekly periodical Hearth and Home, as well as the author of children's novels, including the best-seller Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates.

Dodge had specific ideas about what a children's magazine should and shouldn't be. She felt it must not be "a milk-and-water variety of the periodicals for adults. In fact, it needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the other.... Most children...attend school. Their heads are strained and taxed with the day's lessons. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor petted. They just want to have their own way over their own magazine."

The first issue of St. Nicholas: Scribner's Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys was dated November, 1873. It had 48 pages and a press run of 40,000 copies. Although St. Nicholas never reached the high circulation numbers of some other magazines (in the 1890s The Youth's Companion had 500,000 subscribers compared with St Nicholas's 100,000 in Christmas 1883 ), within a few years it had acquired numerous competing children's periodicals. Magazines that merged with St. Nicholas were Our Young Folks and The Children's Hour in 1874, The Schoolday Magazine and The Little Corporal in 1875, and Wide Awake in 1893.

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