The Double Dealer (magazine)

The Double Dealer was established in 1921 as a platform for contemporary Southern writers of a modernist bent. Its founders were cultural critic Julius Weis Friend (editor) and Basil Thompson, Albert Goldstein, and John McClure (associate editors). The magazine's title came from a William Congreve play of the same name, which Thompson and Friend admired for its acute dissection of human nature.^[1] They saw their ideal reader as someone with a tolerant understanding of "the devious ways of the world".^[2]

Loyola University New Orleans preserves the personal papers of Basil Thompson, which contain correspondence, manuscripts, and other materials related to The Double Dealer.^[3]

With its subtitle A National Magazine for the South, The Double Dealer positioned itself to combat a popular stereotype of Southern literature as a provincial and second-rate "Sahara of the Bozart," as H. L. Mencken termed it in a notorious 1917 essay. In a piece entitled "New Orleans, The Double Dealer and the Modern Movement in America",^[4][5] Sherwood Anderson laid out the editors' vision of a modernism that operates not only at a national level but also embraces the cultural individuality of regions like the South.^[6] In pursuit of its inclusive vision, The Double Dealer published African-American authors, and an unusually high proportion of its writers were women.^[2]