The Harvard Monthly

The Harvard Monthly was a literary magazine of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, beginning October 1885 until suspending publication following the Spring 1917 issue.

Formed in the latter months of 1885 by Harvard seniors William Woodward Baldwin, Thomas Parker Sanborn, Alanson B. Houghton, George Santayana, William Morton Fullerton, and George Rice Carpenter, the magazine proposed to afford "...a medium for the strongest and soberest undergraduate thought of the college...". These six men comprised the Monthly's initial staff, with Houghton as editor, Baldwin as business manager and the others acting as editors. The initial October 1885 issue includes works by Sanborn, Santayana, Houghton, Fullerton the magazine's faculty adviser, Barrett Wendell, among others. Some of the essays in this issue which may have been felt controversial have no stated author. In regard to this issue, The Harvard Crimson observed that "The unique form and general typographical make-up of the new monthly is extremely pleasing; it is quite a departure from the form of any magazine we have seen. The table of contents consists of stories, sketches, criticisms, poems, editorials and book reviews, choice morsels for the most delicate palate. It was announced that a feature of each number would be an article from the pen of some prominent alumnus."

The Monthly ceased publication in 1917, due to issues involving the First World War, and The Harvard Advocate, a literary publication of Harvard College since 1866, became the primary source of essays, fiction, and poetry for the Harvard community.

For thirteen years, President Charles William Eliot had been attempting to transform Harvard from a provincially famous institution into a nationally-recognized and admired leader in higher education. He believed that to do so, Harvard needed to attract students who came from all over the country, not just from Boston—and not just the wealthy. The academic curriculum needed to cater not just students in the liberal arts, but also ones who saw higher education as a path towards upward mobility, and as a way to pursue non-humanist studies. "The 1880's was in a sense the 'last gasp' of the leisured gentlemen, the last time they would dominate the university's academic and social structure." What seemed a mass movement toward practicality and specialization that would drain the university of the aestheticism and humanism frustrated the young men who would eventually found the Monthly; each was involved with one or more of the other Harvard literary publications—the Lampoon, the Advocate, and the Crimson, which didn't offer the creative outlet they felt necessary. Toward the end of their junior year, W.W. Baldwin and T.P. Sanborn brainstormed in the latter's room in Grays Hall, proceeding to A.B. Houghton's room in Holyoke and, after gathering W.M. Fullerton and G.R. Carpenter, assembling in Santayana's room in Hollis Hall, where they agreed to move forward with a plan for a true literary magazine. They vowed their work would not bespeak the scrupulous consciousness of John Bunyan's Puritan Pilgrim, but rather the doubting scrutiny of William Dean Howells' Silas Lapham who, in Howells’ story, prevails over the empty, hypocritical norms of proper Boston society. Houghton was elected editor-in-chief. "The title, 'Harvard Monthly', was adopted... instead of 'Harvard Literary Monthly'... lest it might be called the Harvard Lit and thus bring us up for comparison with Yale's sombre-hued institution."

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