Poetry Of 'The Double Dealer', January-December 1922

This is a literary time capsule from a crucial year in American letters. The Double Dealer, published from New Orleans during the 1920s Southern Renaissance, gathered 117 poems across its 1922 issues, creating a snapshot of modernist poetry as it was being written and debated. The collection includes work from writers who would achieve lasting fame, Jean Toomer's spare, experimental verses; John Gould Fletcher's lush imagism, alongside voices that history largely silenced, Southern writers who died before 1970 and two who would later find fame as novelists. What emerges is not a greatest-hits album but a genuine literary magazine, full of experimentation, regional pride, and the cross-currents of expatriate modernism flowing into the American South. The magazine's editor, Julius Weis Friend, cultivated a space where the cosmopolitan and the deeply regional coexisted, where New Orleans provided a crucible for voices that might otherwise never have found each other. For readers interested in how modernism actually looked on the ground, in the pages of a small, ambitious regional publication rather than in the canonical anthologies, this collection offers something rare: the messy, vital reality of a literary moment being made.