The Saturday Evening Post: Writers of Color and “Content Versus Context”

ABSTRACT This article explores the Saturday Evening Post’s problematic representation of writers of color and broader coverage of racialized, minoritized, and non-Western cultures. It argues that even in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—the post-Lorimer era of supposedly more progressive values—the Post presented work by writers of color in ways that contained or limited its impact. The first part of the article evidences this by employing a case-study approach that looks at how the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Carlos Bulosan, and Yoko Matsuoka was packaged by the Post in the 1940s and 1950s. The second part explores how, in the 1960s, other features of the Post, such as the juxtaposition of antithetical articles and “Speaking Out” columns and exclusionary advertisements, exhibited negative or biased representations of African Americans, the Ghetto Riots, and the assassination of Martin Luther King.