Paris Review

Paris Review
Title	Paris Review
Founder	Harold L. Humes; Peter Matthiessen; George Plimpton
Firstdate	1953
Country	United States
Based	New York City
Language	English
Frequency	Quarterly

Paris Review The Paris Review is a quarterly literary magazine founded in 1953 that has published fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews by prominent writers and intellectuals. Rooted in a transatlantic milieu associated with Paris, New York City, and the postwar expatriate scene, the magazine became influential through connections with figures from the Beat Generation, the Confessional poetry movement, and the postwar avant-garde. Its reputation rests on long-form textual work and an interview series that recorded conversations with leading authors, editors, and cultural figures.

History

The magazine was established in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton, emerging amid networks that included Graham Greene, James Jones, and expatriate circles in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Early issues featured work by members of the Lost Generation tradition alongside contemporaries such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. In the 1960s and 1970s the publication intersected with figures from the New York School, T.S. Eliot's legacy, and editors connected to The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Subsequent decades saw editorial stewardship that engaged with voices from Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and Vladimir Nabokov-era modernism, while institutional locations shifted between Paris and New York City and later affiliations with university collections and archives such as those at Princeton University and Columbia University.

Editorial Policy and Contributors

Editorial policy has historically emphasized discovering emerging talent while soliciting established authors. Contributors have included a wide range of figures: novelists like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro; poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery; essayists and critics including Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Harold Bloom; playwrights and screenwriters like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; and international voices such as W.G. Sebald, Isabel Allende, Orhan Pamuk, Chinua Achebe, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Editorial leadership has included figures associated with publishing houses like Random House and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and collaborations with cultural institutions including Library of Congress programs and festival circuits such as the Hay Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The Art of the Interview

The magazine is renowned for its long-form interview series, conducted with writers and cultural figures and often cited in studies of literary oral history. Interview subjects have included Ernest Hemingway-era figures, mid-century modernists, and contemporary authors: Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Samuel Beckett, Boris Pasternak, Pablo Neruda, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Fernando Pessoa, Italo Calvino, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Joan Didion, Karl Ove Knausgård, and George Saunders. Interviewers associated with the series have included journalists and editors linked to The Paris Review founders and successor editors with backgrounds at The New Yorker, Granta, and academic programs at Yale University and Columbia University, creating primary-source material used in literary biography and scholarship.

Notable Works and Publications

The magazine has published breakthrough pieces and excerpts that later appeared in major collections and won major prizes: early fiction by Philip Roth, poems by Sylvia Plath, short stories by Flannery O'Connor, and essays by James Baldwin. It serialized or premiered chapters and poems later included in books by Samuel Beckett, W. H. Auden, Rainer Maria Rilke translations, and contemporary novelists such as Don DeLillo and Ian McEwan. Special issues and themed sections have showcased national literatures—featuring writers from Argentina, Nigeria, Japan, and Russia—and translations of work by Jorge Luis Borges, Olga Tokarczuk, and Fiódor Dostoyevsky.

Awards and Recognition

Work published in the magazine has been nominated for and received major awards, connecting contributors to honors such as the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the Prix Goncourt, and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The magazine itself has been recognized by cultural bodies and cited in prize citations and retrospectives by institutions including The Modern Library, The Library of America, and national arts councils in the United States and France.

Controversies and Criticism

The publication has faced controversies common to high-profile literary magazines: debates over editorial decisions, representation and diversity among contributors, and disputes about archival ownership and donor influence involving university partners and private collectors linked to institutions such as Princeton University and philanthropic foundations. Critics have interrogated its perceived canon-building role relative to movements like the Beat Generation, debates over translation ethics involving works by Boris Pasternak and Jorge Luis Borges, and discussions about editorial transparency in the context of changing media economies dominated by conglomerates such as Condé Nast and Hearst Communications.

Category:American literary magazines Category:Quarterly magazines