Thousands of little magazines existed across North America by the close of the 20th century, most not fully supporting themselves and subsidized by state or federal grants and endowments from universities, colleges, and foundations, sometimes with unpaid staff.
The desire for low-budget publications brought an on-line revolution to little magazines at the turn of the 21st century. Firstly embracing blogs, they have diversified to Twitter, Facebook, and many other on-line publication channels. The on-line revolution also raised possibilities for content in the form of podcasts and audio-visual content not possible in a purely printed format.
In the Southern United States
In the U.S. South, postbellum little magazines had non-commercial ends, generally seeking to inform and influence their readers, rather than being marketed for profit, a skill that their amateur editors generally lacked. English professor Bes E. Stark Spangler traced four main phases of the postbellum pre-World-War-Two little magazine in the South. Immediately after the Civil War they mainly covered Southern topics and the works of Southern authors, changing at the turn of the 20th century into more critical views of Southern letters and life by new young scholars, becoming voices for the advent of modernism in the 1920s, and finally in the 1930s entering into the debate over the future economic prosperity of the South on the side of agrarianism, having heated debates with what they viewed as Southern "liberals".
Examples of the first phase, which were a significant factor in keeping the genre of Southern letters alive for the two decades after the Civil War, include Daniel H. Hill's 1866–1869 The Land We Love, which widened its readership by including agriculture and military history alongside the literature; W. S. Scott's 1865–1869 Scott's Monthly Magazine; Moses D. Hodge's and William Hand Browne's 1866 Eclectic (later to be the 1869 New Eclectic after its absorption of The Land We Love and finally changing to Southern Magazine in 1871); De Bow's Review, an ante-bellum magazine revived briefly in 1866; Albert Taylor Bledsoe's 1867–1869 Southern Review; Mrs Cicero Harris's 1872–1882 The South Atlantic, which, like The Land We Love, augmented literature with science and art coverage; and the 1882–1887 Southern Bivouac, which was one of the last little magazines to be devoted to the Lost Cause.
The second phase, which was a reactionary movement amongst young scholars in Southern colleges and universities that was critical of the South, and which was discussed in the contemporary essays of John B. Hennemann, is exemplified by William P. Trent's 1892 Sewanee Review (which Hennemann was later to edit), which would influence John Spencer Bassett to found the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1902. Both Trent and Bassett were professors, at the University of the South and at Trinity College, respectively, and Bassett in particular was risking his job by publishing, as his magazine directly addressed racial issues in the South and reform, something that his successor toned down, editor Edwin Mims.
The early years of the third phase saw The Westminster Magazine founded in 1911 and affiliated with Oglethorpe University; Stark Young's Texas Review affiliated with the University of Texas, which relocated to Southern Methodist University in 1924 and changed the name to Southwest Review under the editorship of Jay B. Hubbard; the 1921–1926 The Double Dealer; and John Crowe Ransom's and Robert Penn Warren's 1922 The Fugitive published by the Vanderbilt University Group. Other influences for the Southern Renascence were The Lyric and The Nomad, both of which had brief lifetimes in the 1920s.
As young writers from Vanderbilt, the Double Dealer, and others later took up postings in other universities, they would in turn found or edit other magazines, Crowe going on to edit The Kenyon Review, and Ransom together with Cleanth Brooks to found another (1935) Southern Review.
In the final phase, both established magazines like Sewanee Review and the new 1930s little magazines debated whether the South should remain agrarian or embrace industrialism. Also in the 1930s they were associated with New Criticism.
Sewanee Review is now the oldest Southern literary magazine, with other long-lived magazines dating from the 20th century, including Southwest Review (1915), Virginia Quarterly Review (1925), The Southern Review (1935–1942, then from 1965), Georgia Review (1947), Carolina Quarterly (1948), Shenandoah (1950), Nimrod (1956), Southern Poetry Review (1958), Massachusetts Review (1959), Crazyhorse (1960), Southern Quarterly (1962), Hollins Critic (1964), Greensboro Review (1966), Cimarron (1967), Southern Humanities Review (1968), New Orleans Review (1968), and The South Carolina Review (1968).
Many little magazines continued to be founded in the South in the last three decades of the 20th century, from Appalachee Quarterly in 1971 through The Chattahoochee Review in 1980 to Five Points in 1997, still devoted to the core little magazine subject of literature, including short fiction, poetry, book reviews, and creative non-fiction. As The Land We Love did in the 19th century, 20th-century little magazines still received vastly more unsolicited literary contributions than they published, the Atlanta Review for example reporting in 1997 that it received 12,000 submissions for every 100 pieces published.
