Our Mission Serious literature is not meant for the masses. When I was an undergraduate at UCLA, I took a course called "19th Century Popular Literature," reading authors I never heard of and books no one opens today. In general, popular literature has a short shelf life. We read Melville's travel books today mainly because he also wrote Moby Dick, and yet this American classic was a failure when it appeared, Melville's audience for the travel books abandoning him. Very few copies sold in his lifetime, and Melville died thinking himself a failure. (Moby Dick was "rediscovered" in the 1920s.) Some writers and artists aspire to greater things than a brief moment of fame and possibly fortune. They do their work in order to learn something about themselves and the human condition. Not too long ago, this was widely considered to be an honorable thing to do. Before the takeover of the publishing industry by large corporations, "literary fiction" was considered by many publishers to be the payoff for selling all those genre books; reputations were made by publishing the quality literary books, not the best-sellers. The cross-over book was rare and considered a happy surprise. But the recent megacorporate takeover of publishing and the arts has changed everything. Today serious readers have a hard time finding books that aspire to and belong in the tradition of "literature." A similar market transformation has happened in all the arts, a consequence of the emerging redefinition of mankind as Homo Consumerus. Ironically enough, all this is happening at a time when there are more writers and artists in America, and probably in the world, than ever before. Graduate schools turn out writers and artists in great numbers. What are these people to do? Many of them, unable to make a living from their art, turn to teaching, training and releasing still more writers and artists into the world, who also can't make a living doing what they want to do. There are not enough publishers and galleries and concert halls to accommodate them. But at least a new home for their work has emerged -- the Internet. The Internet brings both high and low art into a dynamic, chaotic environment in which they must co-exist as neighbors. If you look hard enough and long enough, you can find just about anything you are looking for on the net. I'm starting Oregon Literary Review in order to gather together work I admire (from new and more established writers alike) and also to provide another home for writers, artists, composers and readers who share my conviction that serious work is worth doing and sharing, even if it cannot find a home in the commercial marketplace. Who knows which contemporary writers readers born a century or two from now will be reading? According to the historical pattern, many will be writers whose work we ignore today. Oregon Literary Review is also founded with a sense of tradition, an electronic version of the literary magazines in which I began my writing career almost 40 years ago in journals like Prism International, The Literary Review, The Colorado Quarterly, The Mississippi Review and Northwest Review. These print quarterlies still exist, of course, but they cannot make room for all the voices that deserve to be heard. Some of these voices, writing in hypertext, demand the electronic environment. OLR, like other literary magazines on the net, exists to give some of these voices a home. Charles Deemer Editor April 26, 2005