March

This month’s 1923 is a full short story, front to back: “Milk Bottles,” by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson had rocketed to fame four years earlier with the short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, and published somewhat prolifically throughout the early 1920s. Horses and Men, the story collection which includes “Milk Bottles,” was one of two books he put out in 1923. It’s available in full from Google Books.

The image on the front cover is a portrait of Anderson shot by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and modern art promoter married to Georgia O’Keeffe. Anderson was friends with the couple; a letter he wrote to Stieglitz just before the publication of Horses and Men is available online. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the cover image and others, and a whole Stieglitz collection.

For some levity, I included images from a USDA publication called “Educational milk-for-health campaigns.” Because it’s a government publication, it would have been in the public domain from its creation—so, not completely on brand for this publication—but I found it interesting and compelling and it was a surprising source of information about the cultural significance of milk at the time Anderson was writing.