"Among our literary scenes,
Saddest this sight to me,
The graves of little magazines
That died to make verse free."

Conroy goes on to say in the same introduction

"Historically, the small literary periodical has been edited by a person or a group in rebellion against the stultifying formalisms imposed by those organs of expression finding it necessary or expedient to tread warily lest they step on sensitive and corn-encrusted toes of conservative readers or potential advertisers."

Both of these magazines were printed in the Minnesota cow barn of Ben Hagglund. Hagglund was a part time farmer, part time printer, and part time poet. He also printed Rebel Poet magazine, The Northern Light magazine, and the poetry of H.H. Lewis. Lewis was self-described as the Plowboy Poet of the Gumbo. He spent his entire life as a farmer in S. Arkansas who wrote radical poetry in his youth and middle age.  He delighted in giving his politico/literary views a barnyard flavor--

"Here I am, hunkered over the cow-donick, earning my dollar per and realizing with the goo upon overalls how environment works up a feller's pants-legs to govern his thoughts."

Hagglund himself was forced to work out on railroad crews and on hay bailing crews to make ends meet. He managed to publish his own poems as "Hay bailing Poems". The editorial functions of such magazines were accomplished largely by mail using circular letters, passed on from one staff member to another--not unlike today's user group emails--"Everything had to be arranged and done via the then slightly more efficient United States Post Office. It was exchange of letters, consequently, that brought about an agreement between me and Hagglund." In 1936, Conroy obtained a position with the Missouri Writers Project. Later on he went to work for the Illinois Writers Project. Out of these experiences came important associations. Conroy met Black novelist Arna Bontemps ,with whom he collected Black history and labor experiences. They later collaborated together on They Seek a City and Anyplace but Here. He also worked with Nelson Algren, who was at that time hanging around East St. Louis bars with a group of socialistic mill workers and petty hoodlums who were called "the Fallonites", named after their literary minded leader--Bud Fallon. Algren would later use these colorful characters as material for his own fiction, such as The Man with a Golden Arm and Walk on the Wild Side. Will Wharton, former business manager of The Anvil would entertain the bar rooms with humorous barbs aimed at the Communist Party establishment:

"I got a leanin' toward Lenin these days
They tell me a leanin' like that really pays
Though Lincoln and Landon are great names to utter
It's lays about Lenin that bring in the butter."

While working on the Writers Projects, Conroy also met John T. Frederick, who has formerly been editor of Iowa's Midland magazine. This publication existed from 1918 to 1929, and inspired Conroy in some of his folk tale research and writings. Conroy's own collection of Midwest folk humor was even called "Midland Humor".

After 1940, Conroy took a job in Chicago as a literary editor of the American Peoples Encyclopedia. He also did book reviews for the Chicago Tribune, St Louis Post Dispatch, and Kansas City Star. For a time he also wrote a column for the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper. Douglas Wixon described this period in his introduction to Conroy's The Weed King and Other Stories--"Conroy was a familiar personality in Chicago's literary circles in those years, his name appearing frequently in literary columns. Anyone visiting the long-vanished North Clark Street tavern district would have met traveling actors, itinerant workers, bums, gamblers, musicians, and Conroy and his close friend Algren." Young Chicago writers such as Harry Mark Petrakis and Gwendolyn Brooks both acknowledged the encouragement Conroy gave them at this time.

In 1966, he returned to Moberly, where he edited Writers in Revolt--the Anvil Anthology and his own collection of short pieces The Weed King and Other Stories. Conroy also wrote two novels--The Disinherited (1933) and A World to Win (1935).

In his 1973 introduction to the Anvil collection, Conroy discusses the influence he has on later generations when he quotes Jack Miller in the first issue of Minnesota`s North Country Anvil in 1972:

"While we hope to introduce some important writers and break a little literary ground of our own, we're starting from point zero and hardly expect to carry on into the blue from the heights "The Anvil" reached. But I'll tell you this: we do claim to be in the tradition, literary and human, of Jack Conroy."

"Imagine Utne Reader without yuppies, four-color ads, or woo-woo feel goodism. Imagine City Pages with a wholistic (sic) agrarian angle and comprehensive dairy-goat raising directions. Imagine The Nation with eco-pacifist etchings and poetry. Imagine all the people, living for the day."

Rhoda Gilman, the 70-something-year-old editor of the North Country Anvil collection defines the trans-generational quality of such publications--"There was always the hope it would catch on bigger. For that generation, the revolution was always around the corner."

Jack Conroy died in 1990, and was buried in the Sugar Creek Cemetery, next to his wife, his father, mother, and brothers. The cemetery is about all that remains of the former locality known as the Monkey's Nest, which once included a school, a church, various ramshackle houses and a hobo jungle. As Conroy wrote about the people of the Monkey Nest and this cemetery: "They are all gone, some enlarging the Sugar Creek Graveyard, so much so that the graves encroach upon the old churchyard."

Conroy's gray granite stone spits death in the eye with a quote from John Donne: "Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so."