M'lle New York The New Fortnightly by FLEMING, Thomas

New York: Fleming, Schiller & Carnrick. unbound. Fleming, Thomas. Print. Color lithograph. Page measure 17" x 12". M'lle New York was an avant-garde magazine founded in 1895 by James Gibbons Huneker, a bohemian musician, and Vance Thompson, a Princeton graduate, both of whom had spent time in Europe and become enmeshed in fin-de-siècle literature, drama, and music. Struck by the tameness of New York magazines in comparison to their counterparts in France and London, they put together their pink-and-black-printed attack on American gentility with fiction, poetry, illustration, and decadent critiques--often published anonymously or with pen names--of what they saw as the lowbrow public. Despite the magazine's ridicule of democratic culture, it participated in introducing New Yorkers to the work of some important Modernists. Its editorial run only lasted four years, and while both men went on to continue their cultural crusade in other publications, M'lle New York stands out as as a manifesto of their anti-philistine perspective.