1952 – Provincial Review

Provincial Review 1952 — Top row: Coleta Eck, John Pearson, Robert Seyendal Bottom: David Wright, Jim Lyle, Loren Frickel

About Provincial Review

In 1952, seven years after the end of World War II, the United States was experiencing an economic boom that promised a bright future. The nightmares of the Depression and the War were past, but there was a fear of what might lie ahead. The Atomic Bomb, the Cold War, the Communist Conspiracy, and the Korean War were an obsession. An instinctive demand for security, enforced through conformity, took over. Being normal, and happy, and unquestioning were necessary. Society wanted its youth to be “a Silent Generation” that would not rock the boat.

The Writers Club at the University of Wichita was an appropriately dilettantish, sanctioned, and “safe” organization that produced a yearly magazine of unquestioning fare that threatened no one. The magazine’s name, Carrousel, was quite apt: childish, colorful, and blandly entertaining.

A group of students, fledgling writers and artists, took over the club, installed its own members as officers, and set about putting together a publication of its own. The group had, however, inherited debts to a printer that would not be not covered by the standard grant from the Board of Student Publications. To cover the debt, the students sold most of the stacks of copies of unsold Carrousels and convinced the printer to take a loss on the rest of the bill; they then made advanced sales to true believers and applied for a loan from the Board of Student Publications to finance their own magazine.

But the Board was suspicious of the new group. They had “reputations”, and though the faculty sponsor vouched for their talent and seriousness, the Board wanted to see what was being published before it went to the printers.

Before this issue could be settled, various members of the group found themselves at odds with one another through a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, and the magazine, Provincial Review, was never published. By the next school year, some group members had wandered away, some had graduated–and the magazine receded from memory.

But Lee Streiff had kept the artwork and the bundled manuscripts, and 44 years later, he and Bruce Conner made the decision to finally publish the magazine after all. People were contacted, if possible; editorial decisions made, and appropriate advertisements of the period were included. The intent of this edition has been to reproduce the magazine as closely as possible to the way it would have been published in 1952. The typeface, page size (similar to the Partisan Review), format, ads, artwork, and notes on the contributors are a document of the times. Although the works published in the Provincial Review may appear mild and unassuming by today’s standards, it is, however, a rare re-creation of a “literary little magazine” which would have been a unique event outside of the East Coast in its time.

for May 1952

Vol. 1 No. 1

Editor: Lee Streiff

Co-Editor: Bruce Conner

Blue Monday – Don Duncan
Two Poems – Mike McClure
Three Poems – Robert Constantine Seyendal
Five Poems – Dave Haselwood
Camilla – Coletta Eck
Four Poems – Loren Frickel
Three Poems – Bruce Conner
Tribute – Jim Lyle
The Arrow of Longing – Lee Streiff
Five Poems – David Wright
Contributors
Cover Bruce Conner
Drawings James Stearns
Mobile John Pearson

Editorial and publication offices, 2328 McAdam Drive, Wichita, KS, 67218.

All characters in stories and poems are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental and unintentional.

[2001 Note: the original is out of print and is not being offered for sale.]