A State’s Magazine

A Publication of the Indiana Historical Society .

Don’t expect to see much editorial space eaten up by debates over the etymology of Hoosier in this journal. The magazine’s subject is largely Indiana’s underreported artistic heritage. A recent issue contained an elegant essay about censorship, libraries, and the written word, by William Styron, whose first novel was published, minus some controversial language, by the Indiana firm of Bobbs-Merrill. There is an accompanying profile of his editor Hiram Hayden, a Midwesterner who left what he called the “flatland of bigotry and nasal infelicity” only to devote his professional life to the Indiana publisher, for whom he secured the young Styron’s manuscript with a hundred-dollar advance. Other issues have featured the accomplished Hoosiers Hoagy Carmichael and Joseph Moore Bowles, founder of the nineteenth-century magazine Modern Art . Articles on Indiana sculpture, the state’s wonderful hickory furniture, and its impressive arts-and-crafts movement have filled in much that we didn’t know. The magazine’s design is sleekly imaginative, its stories told with intelligence and verve.