The Century Magazine
US publication 1880s-1930s
The Century Magazine was an illustrated monthly magazine first published in the United States in 1881 by The Century Company of New York City, which had been bought in that year by Roswell Smith and renamed by him after the Century Association. It was the successor of Scribner's Monthly Magazine. It was merged into The Forum in 1930.
History
The initial editor was to have been Scribner's editor and co-owner Josiah G. Holland, but he died prior to the appearance of the first issue. He was succeeded by Richard Watson Gilder, the managing editor of Scribner's, who would go on to helm The Century for 28 years. Gilder largely continued the mixture of literature, history, current events, and high-quality illustrations that Holland had used at Scribner's.
The magazine was very successful during the 19th century, most notably for a series of articles about the American Civil War which ran for three years during the 1880s. It included reminiscences of 230 participants from all ranks of the service on both sides of the conflict. According to an author writing in The New York Times, the publication of The Century "made New-York, instead of London, the centre of the illustrated periodicals published in the English language…" The magazine was also a notable publisher of fiction, presenting excerpts of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884 and 1885 and Henry James' The Bostonians.
Upon Gilder's death in 1909, Robert Underwood Johnson replaced him as editor.
“The Century Magazine” enters the record as uS publication 1880s-1930s. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Century, Magazine and publication can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2471002. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1881, 1930, 1884 and 1885.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Century Magazine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.