When William Riley Parker became the secretary of the MLA in 1947, the position also included the role of editor of PMLA. Parker revamped the journal and set a new editorial tone, introducing the column “For Members Only” early in his tenure. The column ran for over twenty years, until the independently published MLA Newsletter became the main communication space for the MLA, in 1969.

“For Members Only” was an instant hit with MLA members, whose many testimonials published in the column include the following: “I find your ‘For Members Only’ column quite delightful and I read it immediately upon receiving my copy. In fact, that is usually more thoroughly digested by me than all of the rest of the publication” (vol. 65, no. 4, June 1950); “The ‘For Members Only’ section adds both warmth and light to PMLA” (vol. 65, no. 6, Dec. 1950); and “I approve every change and advancement initiated by the new editor and hope that he will not be bullied out of his genuine humanism” (vol. 65, no. 2, Mar. 1950).

While the rest of the journal got more than its share of criticism—for sometimes publishing obtuse articles, for rejecting articles that should have been published, for being too conservative, for lack of transparency and accountability in the review mechanisms, for being too specialist and narrow, for being a journal for no one since it tried too hard to be a journal for everyone (that is, for not being narrow enough), for publishing too few articles on German, or French, or Italian literature and too many on English literature—the only criticism that the “For Members Only” column seems to have received was one letter that advised, “Don’t overdo ‘gossip’!” (vol. 65, no. 2, Mar. 1950).

Reading those columns today reveals how much has changed since the fifties and sixties. Parker’s columns, for instance, almost always presume that all MLA members are men (even though there were a number of women members by then), and they almost never engage with questions of racial, ethnic, or any other kind of diversity. Those discussions would come much later, in the MLA Newsletter.

Parker’s columns varied between the lighthearted and the serious. One column displayed a photograph Parker had received of an eleven-month-old child “reading” “For Members Only” (vol. 66, no. 4, June 1951), and there were a couple of humorous columns about making spaghetti! But Parker fully intended to use his platform to shape member choices and collective decision-making about the directions in which scholarly publishing should go. Frustrated with the erratic styles of different authors, he decided, on the basis of questionnaires sent to a number of journals in the field, to devise the first MLA style sheet. Some “For Members Only” columns contain his efforts at creating the style sheet and the debates that they prompted (e.g., vol. 66, no. 3, Apr. 1951). (The style sheet was a huge success—within a year of its publication it had sold thirty thousand copies).  He persistently advocated for more reader-friendly prose and fewer footnotes, and he insisted that unless MLA members started producing more publicly engaged scholarship, the association and its work would lose public (and government) support (e.g., vol. 67, no. 1, Feb. 1952; vol. 67, no. 1, Dec. 1952). In some cases, his prodding the membership to change seems to have worked. In a later column, his successor, John Fisher, wrote, “Hail to the Parker secretariat . . . ! Those who have read every article in Vol. 71 of PMLA have had to duck heads to footnotes only 2,024 times. Ten years ago those who performed the same thorough perusal of Vol. 61 ducked their heads 4,013 times” (vol. 72, no. 1, Mar. 1957).

There are many gems in these columns for anyone interested in the institutional history of the MLA in the fifties and sixties. Whatever faults members found in the more scholarly articles in the journal, they seem to have all appreciated Parker’s attempts to give the journal a new life. In recognition of his service to the journal, the MLA Executive Council named an annual prize in his honor, the William Riley Parker Prize, awarded to an author for an outstanding article published in PMLA. Parker himself had long before announced his deep affiliation with the journal—he named his newborn daughter Pamela.

Links to the PMLA archive:

“For Members Only.” PMLA, vol. 65, no. 2, Mar. 1950.

“For Members Only.” PMLA, vol. 65, no. 4, June 1950.

“For Members Only.” PMLA, vol. 65, no. 6, Dec. 1950.

“For Members Only.” PMLA, vol. 66, no. 3, Apr. 1951.

“For Members Only.” PMLA, vol. 66, no. 4, June 1951.

“For Members Only.” PMLA, vol. 67, no. 1, Feb. 1952.

“For Members Only.” PMLA, vol. 67, no. 7, Dec. 1952.

“For Members Only.” PMLA, vol. 72, no. 1, Mar. 1957.