The Atlantic began at a five-hour Boston dinner with Emerson and Longfellow
In 1857 a Boston publisher invited Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and a few other luminaries to dinner. They sat from three until eight. By the end he had pitched a new magazine, conceding that each guest out-thought him but insisting none knew American readers better. The Atlantic Monthly was born.
Moses Dresser Phillips hosted that meal at the Parker House Hotel, and the first issue appeared in November 1857, with James Russell Lowell as editor. Harriet Beecher Stowe skipped the dinner because wine was served, yet she signed the founding manifesto and is still counted among its founders. From the start the magazine argued for the abolition of slavery. It first printed Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic in 1862, and Lowell endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
Its pages repeatedly caught history in motion. Ernest Hemingway's story Fifty Grand ran in 1927. Vannevar Bush's July 1945 essay As We May Think imagined a desk-sized knowledge machine and inspired Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson toward modern workstations and hypertext. In August 1963, at the peak of the civil rights struggle, it published Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Ownership changed many times. Editor Ellery Sedgwick bought it in 1908, and a book arm launched in 1917. The property magnate Mortimer Zuckerman took over in 1980, then sold it in 1999 to David Bradley, who recast it for serious national readers and in 2005 moved the editorial staff from Boston to Washington. In 2017 Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective acquired a majority stake. The magazine dropped Monthly from its cover in 2004, having cut back to ten issues a year, and returned to monthly publication in 2025.
The business nearly faltered: in one year it lost $20 million and laid off 17 percent of staff. By 2024 it had passed one million subscribers and turned profitable. A 2025 Pew study found it had the most highly educated audience of 30 major American outlets, with 62 percent of readers holding at least a bachelor's degree.
Source: The Atlantic
