WE print below part of a letter received lately, thinking it
may interest our Alumni readers and those who are soon
to become such: •
To the Editor of Tim FREE LANCE.
Dear Sir: We invite your attention to a literary enterprise
which we think may interest you and all men of State College,
connected at present or in the recent past with undergraduate
literature. George S. Hellman and William Aspenwall Bradley,
members of '99 (College) of Columbia University, recently
editors-in-chief of " The Columbia Literary Monthly " and of
" The Morningside," respectively, intend starting, next autumn,
a magazine to be called " East and West."
It is the wish of the Editors to make " East and West " a gate
through which college men may enter the field of literature. Our
experience at Columbia, and a careful examination of the under
graduate publications throughout the country, have led us to be
lieve that a large amount of work meriting the attention of the
general reading public, is being done by college men. Though
we recognize that eventually the best writers will, in any 'case,
receive the hearing that they deserve, it is nevertheless our belief
that such recognition is slow to come, and that the difficulty and
delay in obtaining it, keep the majority of men from continuing
their writing after they leave college. We hope, therefore, to
afford that impetus and stimulus to the pursuit of literature by
young graduates, which is at present lacking.
Again, it is a generally recognized fact that in nearly all our
periodicals, pure literature is receiving less space and attention,
bacause of the journalistic and pictorial tendency now so con
spicuous. The magazines are filled largely with articles of a re
portorial nature, with pictures, and with the work of political and
scientific specialists. Verse occupies for the most part, in maga
zines that print poetry at all, the subordinate and unworthy place
of stop-gap, and the fiction is not infrequently recommended
rather by the name of the author than by any real merit it may
possess. Although we appreciate the fact that the modern maga-