The Kenyon Review

The Kenyon Review
source
Title	The Kenyon Review
Discipline	Literary journal
Abbreviation	Kenyon Rev.
Publisher	Kenyon College
Country	United States
Frequency	Quarterly
History	1939–present

The Kenyon Review is a quarterly American literary magazine founded in 1939 at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. It has published poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism by a wide array of writers and cultural figures, and has played a significant role in 20th- and 21st-century literary networks in the United States and internationally. The review has been associated with various editors, contributors, and institutions that connect to broader literary movements, academic settings, and cultural awards.

History

Founded in 1939 under the editorship of John Crowe Ransom with support from Kenyon College, the journal emerged alongside figures linked to the Southern Agrarians, the New Criticism, and literary modernism including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Randolph associates and later connections to writers such as W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. Subsequent editors and periods involved interactions with editors and literary scholars associated with F. O. Matthiessen, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, I. A. Richards, and institutions like Kenyon College, Harvard University, Princeton University, Columbia University, and Oxford University. Postwar decades saw publication of works by figures connected to movements and contexts including Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs; postmodernists such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut; and contemporary poets affiliated with The New Yorker, Poetry (magazine), The Paris Review, Granta, and The Atlantic. Editorial shifts reflected interactions with grants and foundations including the Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, and cultural trends tied to festivals and conferences like Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Editorial Mission and Content

The journal’s editorial mission centers on publishing literary fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism, pursuing standards associated with editors and critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode. Content ranges from work by emerging writers linked to programs like the Michener Center for Writers, University of Iowa, and Brown University to established authors connected to publishers and presses including Knopf, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Penguin Books, HarperCollins, Random House, Harcourt Brace, New Directions Publishing, and Faber and Faber. The magazine’s pages have included translations and international contributions associated with translators and figures tied to Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova, and Fernando Pessoa. Editorially, the review interacts with award networks such as the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, Nobel Prize in Literature, and Truman Capote Award through the authors it publishes.

Notable Contributors and Publications

Over its history the journal has published work by a constellation of writers and critics including Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, Annie Proulx, Jhumpa Lahiri, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Nadine Gordimer, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, Michael Ondaatje, Haruki Murakami, Isabel Allende, A. S. Byatt, Ben Okri, Chinua Achebe, Nikos Kazantzakis, Octavia Butler, Stephen King, Shel Silverstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Carlos Williams, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. B. Yeats, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, Hanif Kureishi, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney (listed twice elsewhere but associated here), Czesław Miłosz, W. S. Merwin, Nadine Gordimer (also cross-linked), Michael Chabon, Ann Patchett, E. L. Doctorow, Anne Carson, Lorene Niedecker, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Many pieces have been reprinted in anthologies and cited in scholarship at institutions such as Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, and Stanford University.

Awards, Prizes, and Programs

The journal has established and hosted awards, contests, and programs linked to prizes and institutions including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, Poetry Society of America, NEA Literature Fellowships, Whiting Awards, PEN/Faulkner Award, PEN America, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and partnerships with workshops like the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and Iowa Writers' Workshop. It has supported emerging writers through contests and editorial initiatives that interface with university presses such as University of Chicago Press, Princeton University Press, Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, and with cultural centers like The New School, Lincoln Center, and writers’ colonies including MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Ucross Foundation.

Influence and Critical Reception

Critical reception situates the review within 20th-century literary history alongside journals such as The New Yorker, Poetry (magazine), The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Partisan Review, TriQuarterly, New England Review, Chicago Review, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, Chelsea, The Nation, The Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review. Scholars and critics from universities including Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, Duke University, University of Virginia, and Johns Hopkins University have traced its influence on poetic form, critical practice, and fiction publishing. Reviews and histories connect it to debates involving figures such as Harold Bloom, Raymond Williams, Lionel Trilling, Christopher Ricks, Helen Vendler, Frank Kermode, J. Hillis Miller, R. P. Blackmur, Northrop Frye, and literary movements tied to Modernism, Postmodernism, Confessional poetry, and the Black Arts Movement. The periodical’s legacy continues to be examined in scholarly work and university curricula across departments at Kenyon College, Boston University, University of Iowa, New York University, and University of California, Berkeley.

Category:Literary magazines published in the United States