DIRECTION
Volume 1, Number 1: December 1937
John Hyde Preston, Thomas Cochran, Harriet Bissell,
M. Tjader Harris [Editors]
John Hyde Preston, Thomas Cochran, Harriet Bissell, M. Tjader Harris: DIRECTION. Darien, CT: Volume 1, Number 1, December 1937. Original Edition. Slim Quarto. Stapled thick printed wrappers. 32 pp. Cover design by Wallace Putnam. Wrappers lightly worn and toned at edges, but a very good copy.
8.25 x 10.75 saddle-stitched magazine with 32 pages of fiction, social commentary and art. First issue of the legendary Progressive journal that chronicled the troubles of its times through the prisms of fiction, photography, music, art, drama and humor.
- Frontis by Louis Adolphe Souter
- Foreword by Theodore Dreiser
- When the Cathedrals were White by Le Corbusier. First English-language appearance of Corbusier's essay subtitled "Voyage to the Land of the Timid," preceding the book publication by a decade.
- Wheels: Photo-page
- Tin Can Tourist by John Dos Passos
- WPA Art Project: Photo-page
- The Writer and Social Change by John Hyde Preston
- Youth International: Photo-pages
- What About Technocracy? By Walter M. Hinkle
- Henry Billings: Paintings: Arrest No. 1 and Arrest No. 2
- Consuela Kanaga: Photographs
- Musicians' Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy
- North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy: Pablo Picasso illustration.
- Peter the First: Photo-pages
- Helmi by Caroline Vane
- Stage by John W. Gassner
- Personalities: Art News (Thomas Mann's new magazine "Measure and Value"; Mies van der Rohe visits America; a new Bauhaus opens in Chicago with Moholy Nagy as director; and more.)
- To the German Workers: A Poem by Maurice English
- Editorial Page: Subscription Blank
Edited by William Gropper, et al, including contributing editors Richard Wright, Kenneth Burke and Edwin Seaver. A dynamic, frequently visually striking, consistently left of center journal of literature and the arts, drawing on the foundations left by the WPA for much of its brilliance. A substantial roster of contributors appeared through its tenure, including Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Le Corbusier, Erskine Caldwell, Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Wright, Kees, Larsson, Abel, Kemp, Anderson, Herbst, Scott, Brown, Art Young, Halper, Komroff, Macleod, Margaret Bourke White, Burke, di Donato, Woody Guthrie, Seldes, Lorentz, Hughes, Maltz, Chaplin, Sandburg, R. Lowry, Ellison, Morris, et al. A major 20th century American periodical which is increasingly difficult to acquire in decent condition.
Marguerite Tjader (1901 – 1986) was born in New York City, the daughter of Richard Tjader, a big game hunter, explorer, and evangelist, and Margaret (Thorne) Tjader, daughter of the financier Samuel Thorne. She attended Bryn Mawr College and Columbia University, where she received the A.B. degree in 1925. Her marriage to Overton Harris ended in divorce in 1933. Their son, Hilary (1929-1999), became a documentary filmmaker, receiving an Oscar in 1962 for his direction of 'Seaward the great ships'. From 1937 until 1945 Mrs. Harris edited 'Direction', the left-wing journal of the arts she founded with the support of Theodore Dreiser. She had met Dreiser at a dinner party in 1928 and their intimate relationship continued off and on until 1944 when he finally married Helen Patges Richardson, his companion of almost 30 years. In 1944 Mrs. Harris and her son moved to Los Angeles where she became one in a long succession of Dreiser editorial assistants. In addition to typing and editing drafts of his work she acted as a sort of 'spiritual advisor' to Dreiser while he completed his penultimate novel 'The bulwark', published posthumously in 1946. Marguerite Tjader Harris is probably the model for the title character of 'Lucia', one of the fictional sketches in Dreiser's 'A gallery of women', published in 1929. During the 1930's, presumably after the dissolution of her marriage, Mrs. Harris, who had been raised a Baptist, converted to Roman Catholicism. In the 1950's she helped Mother Elisabeth Hesselblad establish the U.S. foundation of of the Order of the Most Holy Saviour of Saint Bridget (Bridgettines) by donating Vikingsborg, her family's summer home in Darien, Conn., to the order. She died on April 7, 1986 in East Windsor, Conn.