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Youth's Companion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Youth's Companion (1827-1929) was a popular American children's magazine while it was published. Its first publishers, Nathaniel Wills and Asa Rand, stated that it was created to encourage "virtue and piety, and... warn against the ways of transgression". Its sales reached peak in the 1893s, and it began to target adults as well as children with its pieces done by writers including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Booker T. Washington, and Jack London. Its early issues were centered around religion, as most years the circulation didn't reach 5,000, but when it increased one-hundredfold in the 1890s, it centered around entertainment. It had a children's section, which included short poems and puzzles, and a medical column for older readers. In fact, it was advertized in 1897 as "An Illustrated Family Paper", as, as one person said of it, it "did away with childish things". But, going back to its beginnings, the Youth's Companion did not mention drugs or alcohol, and did not use politics much. When it did, it usually used them in a humorous way.
The Companion was published for over one hundred years until it finally merged with American Boy in 1929. From 1892 until then it promoted the Pledge of Allegiance, as a staff member, Francis Bellamy, wrote it.