An Index to the First Thirty-Three Volumes of the Yale Literary Magazine

This is a key to a literary time capsule. Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg's index catalogs every piece of prose, verse, essay, and illustration published in the Yale Literary Magazine across its first three decades (1836-1868), a period that saw American literature transform from Romantic experimentation into the cusp of Realism. For historians and literary scholars, this isn't mere bibliography, it is a detailed map of what ambitious young writers at America's oldest collegiate literary institution were thinking, feeling, and arguing about during a tumultuous era of national expansion, sectional tension, and cultural reinvention. The index reveals the magazine's architecture: its regular contributors, its recurring subjects, its shifts in taste and tone across thirty-three volumes. Whether you seek early work by writers who later became famous, or simply want to understand the intellectual world that shaped America's literary elite, Bagg's index is the essential starting point. It is a reference work, yes, but one that opens doors into a rich, underexplored corner of 19th-century American letters.