The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1245]
Many thanks for your kind wishes. I hope the time is not far distant when they may be realized. I am making earnest although secretexertions to resume my project of the “Penn Magazine”, and have every confidence that I shall succeed in issuing the first number on the first of January. You may remember that it was my original design to issue it on the first of January 1841. I was induced to abandon the project at that period by the representations of Mr Graham. He said that if I would join him as a salaried editor, giving up, for the time, my own scheme, he himself would unite with me at the expiration of 6 months, or certainly at the end of a year. As Mr G. was a man of capital and I had no money, I thought it most prudent to fall in with his views. The result has proved his want of faith and my own folly. In fact, I was continually laboring against myself. Every exertion made by myself for the benefit of “Graham”, by rendering that Mag: a greater source of profit, rendered its owner, at the same time, less willing to keep his word with me. At the time of our bargain (a verbal one) he had 6000 subscribers — when I left him he had more than 40,000. It is no wonder that he has been tempted to leave me in the lurch.
I had nearly 1000 subscribers with which to have started the “Penn”, and, with these as a beginning, it would have been my own fault had I failed. There may be still 3 or 4 hundred who will stand by me, of the old list, and, in the interval between this period and the first of January, I will use every endeavor to procure others. You are aware that, in my circumstances, a single name, in advance, isworth ten after the issue of the book; for it is upon my list of subscribers that I must depend for the bargain to be made with a partner possessing capital, or with a publisher. If, therefore, you can aid me in Alexandria, with even a single name, I shall feel deeply indebted to your friendship.
I feel that now isthe time to strike. The delay, after all, will do me no injury. My conduct of “Graham” has rendered me better and (I hope) more favorably known than before. I am anxious, above all things, to render the journal one in which the true,in contradistinction from the merely factitious,genius of the country shall be represented. I shall yield nothing to great names — nor to the circumstances of position. I shall make war to the knife against the New-England assumption of “all the decency and all the talent” which has been so disgustingly manifested in the Rev. Rufus W. Griswold’s “Poets & Poetry of America”. But I am boring you with my egotism.
May I hope to hear from you in reply?
I am with sincere respect & esteem,
Yr Obt Sert
Edgar A Poe.
Danl Bryan Esqre
P.S. I have not seen the “attack” to which you have [re-]ference.
Could it have been in a Philadelphia paper[?]
Daniel Bryan to Edgar Allan Poe — July 11, 1842
My dear Sir
I am very much gratified to learn that you are determined to “resume your project of the Penn Magazine,” and I am highly pleased with the independence and elevated ground on which you are resolved that it shall be conducted. — We stand in need of a literary journal of the character which you propose to give to yours; a character based on principles uninfluenced by selfish monoploising cliques, and stamped with the impress of justice and truth regardless of sectional partialities and the indiscriminate puffery and exclusiveness of a combination of self-constituted critics. — m Prudence, however, will require that you shall not rouse the hostility of this combination by intimations which may alarm their selfishness, and array their batteries against you before your arrangements are matured, and a substantial patronage obtained. — I am convinced that you occupy a very favourable position