The Stylus

The Stylus, originally intended to be named The Penn, was a would-be periodical owned and edited by Edgar Allan Poe. It had long been a dream of Poe to establish an American journal with very high standards in order to elevate the literature of the time. Despite attempts at signing up subscribers and finding financial backers and contributors, the journal never came to be.

Though Poe thought of creating the journal as early as 1834, he first announced his prospectus in June 1840 immediately after leaving Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. Originally, Poe intended to call the journal The Penn, as it would have been based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the June 6, 1840, issue of Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post, Poe purchased advertising space for his prospectus: "PROSPECTUS OF THE PENN MAGAZINE, a Monthly Literary Journal, to be Edited and Published in the city of Philadelphia, by Edgar A. Poe." Many were looking forward to the magazine, including Connecticut-born journalist Jesse Erskine Dow, editor of the Index, who wrote: "We trust that he will soon come out with his Penn Magazine, a work which, if carried out as he designs it, will do away with the monopoly of puffing and break the fetters which a corps of pensioned blockheads have bound so long around the brows of young intellects who are too proud to pay a literary pimp for a favorable notice in a mammoth six penny or a good word with the fathers of the Row, who drink wine out of the skulls of authors and grow fat upon the geese that feed upon the grass that waves over their early tomb stones".

Poe soon realized he needed to "endeavor to support the general interests of the republic of letters, without reference to particular regions — regarding the world at large as the true audience of the author".Georgia poet Thomas Holley Chivers claimed he suggested it to Poe. It was renamed The Stylus, a pun on the word "Penn" ("pen") and specifically "the Pen with which the Greeks used to write".

F. O. C. Darley signed a contract on January 31, 1843, to create original illustrations for The Stylus. The contract requested at least three illustrations per month, "on wood or paper as required," but no more than five. Darley would have earned $7 per illustration. The contract was through July 1, 1844. Shortly after this contract was put in place, Darley illustrated Poe's tale "The Gold-Bug". On February 25, 1843, another announcement for The Stylus was made which took up an entire page. In it, Poe's status as a poet was emphasized and it included the first published image of Poe; Poe wrote of it, "I am ugly enough God knows, but not quite so bad as that."

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