ATLANTIC MONTHLY, THE

monthly journal of literature and opinion, published in Boston, one of the oldest and most respected of American reviews. The Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857 by Moses Dresser Phillips and Francis H. Underwood. It has long been noted for the quality of its fiction and general articles, contributed by a long line of distinguished editors and authors that includes James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1869, The Atlantic Monthly created a magazine sensation when it published an article by Harriet Beecher Stowe about Lord Byron and his salacious personal life. She intended the article to arrest Byron's influence upon the young, but it fascinated young readers, whose outraged parents cancelled 15,000 subscriptions. In the early 1920s, The Atlantic Monthly expanded its coverage of political affairs, featuring articles by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Booker T. Washington. The high quality of its literatureincluding serialized novels, best-sellers among themand its literary criticism have preserved the magazine's reputation as a lively literary periodical with a moderate world view. In the 1970s, increasing publication and mailing costs, far outstripping revenues from subscriptions and its meagre advertising, nearly shut the magazine down. It was purchased in 1980 by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The magazine is often referred to as The Atlantic, and issues from April 1981 to October 1993 carry that name.