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“True Stories from Real Life”: Hearst’s Smart Set, Macfadden’s Confessional Form, and Selective Reading

The Smart Set is known as a popular venue for modernist writers and cultural criticism, but upon Mencken and Nathan’s departure it became Hearst’s sensational confessional title. This article examines the confessional form for elements of populist empowerment, and in so doing questions periodical studies’ methodology of selective reading. In addition, this article argues that the Smart Set was always commercial, playing both sides of the cultural divide despite tendencies for modernist canonization on the part of critics. Ultimately, it is up to the literary historian to convey a realistic portrait of a magazine and up to the reader to decide how to interpret its cultural stance.