Everybody’s Magazine
That word “Everybody’s” is the watchword of Everybody’s fiction. And what it means is simply that in choosing stories the editors of Everybody’s bear in mind an audience of “regular folks,” with a large variety of tastes and with tastes for different things at different times. We are not thinking specifically of business men. Nor specifically of professional men. Nor of women merely as club members. Nor of women merely as housewives. We are thinking of the splendid average of folks, with normal human interests and normal human emotions. And we take stories with a view to offering in each number a well-balanced ration of these interests and emotions, stories of love, adventure, business, sentiment, children, humor, sport; of city and country; of rich and poor.
The only types of stories that are barred are those that lack wide contact with the average human experience—that depict fantastic or morbid or unreal motives or isolated emotional reactions. This does not necessarily bar an occasional use of morbid experience, soundly based—such as “The Wrists on the Door,” by Horace Fish, a horror story, strange and fantastic in atmosphere, with a big truth at the bottom of it.
It is our guess that the largest group of people reads for sheer entertainment, and with two motives—unconscious, perhaps; either to gain a heightened sense of their own situations, their own personalities through reading stories of their own sort of life; or to be transported by reading as by magic from their own environment into another world. And we have a notion that, as the worry and perplexity of life increase, the eagerness to gain escape through reading increases too. That is why Everybody’s has stressed stories of adventurous action—such as Charles Saxby’s “In Camera,” Clarence B. Kelland’s “Cheese in the Trap,” David Churchill’s “Igor’s Trail,” Edison Marshall’s “The Elephant Remembers.” That is the reason for an intensification of the search for humor—for Dorothy De Jagers’ cheerful New York stories and for Samuel Hopkins Adams’ “Cab Sir?” reprinted in this volume as a story on which Everybody’s readers expressed themselves with cordial approval.
At the same time—paradoxical as it may seem—Everybody’s has not barred war stories. We do not believe it is possible to ask real writers to shut the doors on the most tremendous experience of their lives—and still do their best work. We hold a high standard for war stories, but the story itself is the test and such a piece of work as James Hopper’s “The Scoop of Charles Hamilton Potts” goes over as easily as a love idyll.
As for length, there is no rigid requirement. Short stories are preferred, in order to make possible the maximum of variety in each number, but ten thousand words won’t kill a story of our sort that is worth—ten thousand words.
Cleanness is a requisite—cleanness without priggishness or sentimental dishonesty; open-eyed wholesomeness that strengthens one’s faith in human nature.
Virginia Roderick.
Everybody’s Magazine.
Spring and Macdougal Streets,
New York City.