By MIKE MAGEE

When I asked my brilliant literary agent, Jill Kneerim, when I would know that my book proposal  was ready for submission, she replied directly, “It will be ready when I say it is ready.” Eleven months later, in April, 2018, she finally green lit the project, and two weeks after that, in an orchestrated two-round public auction, it “sold” to Grove/Atlantic Press.

I passed over the highest bidder in choosing to earn the opportunity to be associated with a literary and cultural publication – The Atlantic Monthly– that dates back to November, 1857, when it “quickly became known for the quality of its fiction and general articles, contributed by a long line of distinguished editors and authors that includes James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

Their book publishing arm, the Atlantic Monthly Press, was incorporated in 1917. A merger in 1993 with Grove Press gave birth to Grove/Atlantic. Grove was no slouch when it came to social activism. Founded in 1951, it purposefully republished D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Complete and Unexpurgated, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer as a challenge to U.S. obscenity laws at the time. And in 1965, they were the original and first publisher of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

The Atlantic Monthly’s name change to The Atlantic officially occurred in 2007 and signaled a broader and more modern editorial platform, a digital presence and engagement with multi-platform modern media. At around this time, corporate offices were moved to Washington, D.C., and the magazine focused down on politics featuring a longtime journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg. A decade later, noted philanthropist, Laurene Powell Jobs, purchased a majority stake in the growing empire, and Goldberg was elevated to editor-in-chief.

Now a decade later, with America’s 250th birthday upon us, the very same Jeffrey Goldberg penned an opening editorial – “America’s Promise” – in the July, 2026 edition. Meant to provoke, it opens with “It is quite interesting, and somewhat chastening, to realize that the most important piece of journalism published across the 169-year history of this magazine was not journalism at all, but a poem…”

That poem appeared on page 10 of Vol. IX – February, 1862. -No. LII. It had five stanzas, and no title when it was submitted. The author, an abolitionist poet and pacifist, Julia Ward Howe was a contributor and friend to then editor, James J. Fields. In November, 1861, while visiting Washington, D.C. with her husband Samuel, she was drawn to a group of Union soldiers who had joined voices to sing a familiar tune titled “John Brown’s Body” with the original hymn credited to John William Steffe, a South Carolina born Philadelphia bookkeeper in 1856, and lyrics added five years later by Mass 2nd Infantry Battalion.