The Double Dealer

The Double Dealer was a short-lived but influential New-Orleans-based literary journal of the 1920s. Founders The Double Dealer was established in 1921 as a platform for contemporary Southern writers of a modernist bent. Its founders were cultural critic Julius Weis Friend (editor) and Basil Thompson, Albert Goldstein, and John McClure (associate editors). The magazine's title came from a William Congreve play of the same name that Thompson and Friend admired for its acute dissection of human nature. They saw their ideal reader as someone with a tolerant understanding of "the devious ways of the world". Loyola University New Orleans preserves the personal papers of Basil Thompson which contain correspondence, manuscripts, and other materials related to the Double Dealer. Modernism With its subtitle A National Magazine for the South, The Double Dealer positioned itself to combat a popular stereotype of Southern literature as a provincial and second-rate "Sahara of the Bozart," as H.L. Mencken termed it in a notorious 1917 essay. In a piece entitled "New Orleans, the Double Dealer, and the Modern Movement in America," Sherwood Anderson laid out the editors' vision of a modernism that does not operate only at a national level but also embraces the cultural individuality of regions like the South. In pursuit of its inclusive vision, The Double Dealer published African-American authors, and an unusually high proportion of its writers were women.