About The American Boy

The American Boy

The American Boy was a monthly magazine for boys published by the Sprague Publishing Company of Detroit, Michigan, from November 1899 to August 1941. At its height it was the largest magazine for boys in the United States, with a circulation of about 300,000, and it filled its large-format pages with action stories, adventure, sports, science, scouting and advertising aimed at young readers. Founded by William C. Sprague, it was built into a national institution by Griffith Ogden Ellis, who merged it in 1929 with its even older rival, The Youth's Companion. It survived the Depression under new ownership but ceased publication in August 1941, on the eve of America's entry into the Second World War.

Few magazines document the reading life of American boys in the first four decades of the twentieth century as completely as The American Boy. The University of South Florida's children's literature collections, which preserve and describe its issues, show a magazine that followed its readers' world year by year: warfare and scouting during the First World War, movie production and gold prospecting in 1919, motorcycles, hunting and science in the 1920s, and a steady diet of heroism, humour and the outdoors throughout.

Founding in Detroit in 1899

The American Boy was first issued in November 1899 by the Sprague Publishing Company of Detroit. Its founder was William C. Sprague of the Detroit-based company; one widely used reference dates the formal founding of the publishing venture to 1900, the year after the first issue appeared. Detroit was a deliberate base: the magazine was a Midwestern production, published far from the older Eastern children's periodicals, and it grew up with the industrial city around it.

The magazine was a monthly, and its physical format was striking. It measured 16 inches high by 12 inches wide, a bedsheet-like page far larger than a modern magazine, which gave its illustrators and advertisers unusual room. It was priced for boys' pockets and family budgets. In 1911 a single copy cost ten cents, and a year's subscription cost one dollar.

Growth and the Ellis Takeover of 1908

In 1908 Griffith Ogden Ellis took over as president and editor of the magazine, beginning a tenure of more than three decades that shaped its character. The officers around him in that period included J. Cotner Jr. as secretary and treasurer, H. D. Montgomerie as managing editor, and Clarence Budington Kelland as assistant editor. Under Ellis the magazine consolidated its position as the largest boys' magazine in the country, reaching a circulation of 300,000.

That circulation figure was reported by Time magazine in August 1929, in coverage of the magazine's merger with The Youth's Companion, and it represents the scale the Detroit monthly had achieved by the end of the 1920s: a national readership of boys, reached from a Michigan publishing office, at a time when a boys' magazine competed with school, chores, radio's first spread and the first generation of mass-market children's books.

Clarence Budington Kelland and the Editorial Ladder

The most famous editorial name associated with the magazine's growth is Clarence Budington Kelland. Kelland, born in Portland, Michigan, and educated in Detroit public schools, had earned a law degree from Detroit College of Law in 1902 but practised law for less than a year. From 1903 to 1907 he worked at The Detroit News as a reporter, political editor and Sunday editor. In 1907 he returned to Detroit to work for The American Boy, beginning, by his own later account, as a proofreader, and moving up to become editor.

The results were measurable. Circulation grew from 90,000 at the beginning of Kelland's tenure to 360,000 in 1915, when he left the magazine — a figure even higher than the 300,000 reported for the end of the following decade. From 1913 to 1915 Kelland also lectured on juvenile literature and writing at the University of Michigan, an appointment that shows how seriously the magazine's craft was taken: the editor of a Detroit boys' monthly was invited to teach the writing of literature for the young at a major university. Kelland went on to a long career as a popular novelist and short-story writer, but his apprenticeship and first editorship belonged to The American Boy.

What Boys Read: The Contents

The magazine featured action stories and advertising for the young boy, and the issue-by-issue descriptions preserved by the University of South Florida's children's literature collections show how broad that formula was. The August 1917 issue included stories about sports, warfare, adventure, animals and scouts. The January 1918 issue carried stories of exploration, scouting, warfare, innovation, farming and science. The September 1919 issue mixed action, adventure, movie production, science, medicine, Indigenous people, sports, gold prospecting and scouting.

The pattern continued into the 1920s. The May 1920 issue focused on action, adventure, humour, sports, outdoor activities, science and heroism, and the February 1922 issue combined stories, articles and humour with advertisements on boys, adventure, science, hunting and animals. Adventure, sport and practical knowledge were the constants; the settings changed with the news. In wartime the magazine brought its readers warfare and scouting, and after the war it brought them the movies and the continuing romance of prospecting and the outdoors. Humour ran through the magazine alongside the action, keeping the tone companionable rather than purely instructional.

The Youth's Companion Merger of 1929

In 1929 Ellis merged The American Boy with its rival, The Youth's Companion, and the older magazine ceased to be a separate publication. The Youth's Companion had been published in Boston by the Perry Mason Company and had existed for more than one hundred years; in its later years it was known simply as The Companion, for all the family. The combined magazine appeared under titles joining the two names, and period copies from 1933 show the bedsheet format continuing at about 14 inches by 10 and three-quarter inches, with full colour cover art, including a June 1933 cover painting by Orson Lowell.

The merger was a landmark in American children's publishing. The Companion had been a fixture of American family reading since the nineteenth century, attracting contributors of the stature of Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Helen Keller and Theodore Roosevelt during its long life, and its absorption into a Detroit boys' magazine marked the end of an era. For The American Boy, the merger brought an inherited readership and an honoured name, and it was significant enough to be covered by Time in August 1929 under its press coverage of boys' magazines.

The Grierson Sale and the Final Years

In 1939 Ellis sold his interest in the magazine to his business manager, Elmer Presley Grierson, a transaction also covered by Time, in March 1939. The magazine's managing editor in its last phase was Franklin M. Reck, who held the post from 1936 to 1941. On November 1, 1940, George F. Pierrot, who lived from 1898 to 1980, a former managing editor and a well-known traveller, became half-owner and co-publisher of the magazine.

Those changes of ownership in 1939 and 1940 were the last chapter of the magazine's history. The American Boy ceased publication with its issue of August 1941, ending a run of nearly forty-two years. It had begun in the year after the Spanish-American War and it closed a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor transformed the world of its readers. The boys who had read its First World War scouting stories in 1917 and 1918 were, by 1941, the fathers of the boys reading its final issues.

Place Among American Boys' Magazines

The American Boy belonged to a competitive field of American boys' periodicals, and it outlasted or absorbed most of its rivals. Its great competitor for a century-old audience, The Youth's Companion, ended as an independent title inside its pages in 1929. Another boys' magazine of the era, The Open Road for Boys, published from 1919, eventually took the combined name American Boy and Open Road in 1953, more than a decade after the Detroit magazine itself had closed, which testifies to the commercial value the American Boy name still carried.

Within that field, the Detroit magazine's distinction was scale and longevity under one publishing house. The Sprague Publishing Company's flagship reached circulations, first of 300,000 and at its Kelland-era peak a reported 360,000, that made it the largest magazine for boys in the United States. Its entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and the preservation of its issues in university children's literature collections, reflect a standing that goes beyond nostalgia: historians of children's literature treat it as a primary source for what American boys were offered to read between 1899 and 1941.

Preservation and Legacy

The magazine survives in library and digital collections. The University of South Florida's digital commons preserves issues of The American Boy as part of its children's literature collections, describing their contents issue by issue, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History preserved the magazine's advertising record. A contemporary account of the magazine's own history, titled The Story of the American Boy, appeared in The Writer in June 1930, while the magazine was still being published, which gives historians a near-contemporary source for its self-understanding at its peak.

The American Boy's legacy is the record of a complete editorial world for boys: action and adventure fiction, sport, science, scouting, farming, exploration and humour, sold for a dime a copy and a dollar a year, printed on pages a foot wide and sixteen inches tall in Detroit. From William C. Sprague's founding in November 1899, through Griffith Ogden Ellis's thirty-year direction, Clarence Budington Kelland's circulation-building editorship, the 1929 absorption of The Youth's Companion, and the final Grierson and Pierrot years, it remained a single continuous title for almost forty-two years. When it closed in August 1941, the largest boys' magazine in America closed with it.