With its subtitle A National Magazine for the South, The Double Dealer positioned itself to combat a popular stereotype of Southern literature as a provincial and second-rate "Sahara of the Bozart," as H.L. Mencken termed it in a notorious 1917 essay. In a piece entitled "New Orleans, the Double Dealer, and the Modern Movement in America," Sherwood Anderson laid out the editors' vision of a modernism that does not operate only at a national level but also embraces the cultural individuality of regions like the South.Kennedy, Richard S., ed. Literary New Orleans in the Modern World. LSU Press, 2006. In pursuit of its inclusive vision, The Double Dealer published African-American authors, and an unusually high proportion of its writers were women.
