The New York Review of Books

• 1. Introduction

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  The New York Review of Books was born in the middle of a newspaper strike. It was February 1963, and New York City's presses had gone quiet. Robert Silvers, Barbara Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and A. Whitney Ellsworth saw an opening. They asked writers they admired to deliver three thousand words in three weeks, to show what a book review could actually be. They did not mention money. Almost everyone came through.

  The first issue sold out its entire printing of 100,000 copies. It prompted nearly a thousand letters asking the editors to keep going. The New Yorker called it "surely the best first issue of any magazine ever." That was a high bar to clear for what started as a crisis publication, assembled during a labor dispute. What the editors had stumbled into was something that had not quite existed before: a venue where the review itself was a literary form, not just a verdict on someone else's work.

  This is the story of a magazine that was never supposed to outlast a newspaper strike, and ended up shaping intellectual life in the English-speaking world for more than half a century.

• 2. The Founding Crisis

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  Elizabeth Hardwick had been building toward this moment since 1959. That year she published an essay in Harper's titled "The Decline of Book Reviewing", in a special issue edited by Silvers himself. She called the American book reviews of that era "lobotomized" - brief, passionless pieces that offered "blandly, respectfully" nothing but praise. What she wanted instead was a venue for "the unusual, the difficult, the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting."

  When the 1962-1963 New York City newspaper strike silenced The New York Times and several other papers, Hardwick's husband, the poet Robert Lowell, and Jason Epstein, a vice president at Random House and editor of Vintage Books, recognized what the moment offered. Publishers had nowhere to advertise their new books. That meant they would pay to appear in a new publication. The economics, suddenly, made sense.

  The editorial network that Silvers and Barbara Epstein assembled for that first issue was extraordinary. Salon later compared it to "a 'shock and awe' demonstration of the intellectual firepower available for deployment in mid-century America." The founding group understood they had a narrow window. Silvers and Epstein sent out the books, set the deadline, and waited. The result was an issue that, as contributor Mark Gevisser later described it, made the book review form into "an essay in itself" - something that could be "exciting" and "provocative" in a way that startled even the people who read it.

• 3. The Editors

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  Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein ran the Review together for more than forty years, from its founding in 1963 until Epstein's death in 2006. Epstein had previously edited Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl at Doubleday, and had worked at Dutton, McGraw-Hill, and Partisan Review before joining Silvers at the new magazine. Silvers had been at The Paris Review and Harper's. The collaboration was, by most accounts, unusually selfless.

  Former contributor Sigrid Nunez described the pair as "these two people who were at the top of everything, who had no interest in anything except doing this amazing job. They were strangely without ego." Another former intern and contributor, Claire Messud, noted the graciousness with which the editors engaged with writers - a "rhythm and tone" she called "incredibly precious now." Silvers himself described his editing philosophy as asking whether a point in any sentence could be clearer, while always respecting the writer's voice. No change was made without the writer's permission.

  Epstein died of cancer in 2006 at the age of 77. The National Book Foundation, presenting Epstein and Silvers with its 2006 Literarian Award, stated that they had "raised book reviewing to an art and made the discussion of books a lively, provocative and intellectual activity." Silvers continued alone until his own death in 2017. Ian Buruma succeeded him in September 2017, then left the post a year later following backlash over the publication of an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, who had been accused by 20 women of sexual assault. Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Emily Greenhouse were named co-editors in February 2019; Greenhouse became sole editor in February 2021.

• 4. The Art of the Caricature

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  David Levine joined the Review in 1963 and kept drawing for it until 2007, contributing more than 3,800 pen-and-ink caricatures of writers, artists, and politicians. He gave the publication a distinctive visual identity that lasted nearly half its existence. Levine died in 2009.

  John Updike, whom Levine drew many times, wrote that Levine's drawings offered "the delight of recognition" and comforted readers with "the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked." The New York Times described the caricatures as "macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering", full of exaggerated bad haircuts and grooming details designed to "make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg." Silvers said Levine "combined acute political commentary with a certain kind of joke about the person," and was "immensely sensitive to the smallest details - people's shoulders, their feet, their elbows."

  Levine's method was, in its way, perfectly matched to the Review's editorial sensibility: find the specific detail that reveals character, and follow it without sentiment. In later years, illustrators including James Ferguson of the Financial Times carried the visual work forward.

• 5. Politics and the Press

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  The Vietnam War was the first major test of the Review's political voice. The paper took a vocal role in contesting the conflict, and around 1970 began moving from left-wing radicalism toward a sturdier liberalism. One 1974 observer described the shift as a return to "a literary magazine on the British nineteenth-century model, which would mix politics and literature in a tough but gentlemanly fashion."

  The Review's political temperature rose again sharply after 2001. Writers at the paper charged into debate not only against the White House but against what they saw as a lethargic press corps and "liberal hawk" intellectuals. The Independent in Britain described the Review as "the only mainstream American publication to speak out consistently against the war in Iraq." Silvers, speaking in 2004, said the pieces published by writers including Brian Urquhart, Thomas Powers, Mark Danner, and Ronald Dworkin were "reactions to a genuine crisis concerning American destructiveness." He added that "the aura of patriotic defiance cultivated by the Bush Administration, in a fearful atmosphere, had the effect of muffling dissent."

  In November 2008, the Review's 45th anniversary issue opened with a posthumous piece by Edmund Wilson, who had written for the very first issue in 1963. The issue was dated the 20th of November 2008, and followed a 45th anniversary panel discussion at the New York Public Library on "What Happens Now" after the election of Barack Obama. Panelists included Joan Didion, Garry Wills, Darryl Pinckney, Michael Tomasky, and Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco.

• 6. Spinoffs and Satellites

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  During the year-long lockout at The Times of London in 1979, the Review founded a daughter publication: the London Review of Books. For the first six months it appeared as an insert inside the New York Review, then became independent in 1980. The Review repeated the move in 1990, founding an Italian edition, la Rivista dei Libri, which published for two decades until May 2010.

  The book-publishing arm, New York Review Books, was established in 1999. It operates under several imprints: NYRB Classics, The New York Review Children's Collection, New York Review Comics, NYRB Poets, NYRB Lit, and the Calligrams. The Classics imprint reissues books that have gone out of print in the United States, as well as translations. Critics have called it "a marvellous literary imprint... that has put hundreds of wonderful books back on our shelves."

  Since 2010, the journal has maintained a blog, which The New York Times described as "lively and opinionated." The Review also hosts podcasts, and since 2009 has published the NYR Daily, focused on news. The New York Public Library purchased the NYRB archives in 2015. In 2017, a bequest from the late Robert Silvers established the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, which gives annual Silvers Grants for long-form non-fiction projects and presents the Silvers-Dudley Prizes for achievements in journalism, criticism, and cultural commentary.

• 7. Fifty Years and Counting

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  Martin Scorsese spent a year filming a documentary about the Review's first fifty years, titled The 50 Year Argument. It premiered in June 2014 at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England, then screened at film festivals before appearing on BBC television and on HBO in the United States.

  The 50th anniversary issue, dated the 7th of November 2013, drew notice for the density of its contributors. The Washington Post described it as "gaudy with intellectual firepower", noting that four Nobel Laureates had bylines, that US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote on reading Proust, and that the issue contained the transcript of a long-lost lecture by T. S. Eliot. The year-long celebration had opened in February 2013 with a presentation by Silvers at The Town Hall in New York City, followed by a program at the New York Public Library in April and a reception in November at the Frick Collection.

  Asked what sustained him after fifty years, Silvers described the Review as a "unique opportunity... to do what one wants on anything in the world. Now, that is given to hardly any editor, anywhere, anytime. There are no strictures, no limits." In the anniversary issue itself, he returned to the question that had started everything: "An independent, critical voice on politics, literature, science, and the arts seems as much needed today as it was when Barbara Epstein and I put out the first edition of the New York Review fifty years ago - perhaps even more so." In 2023, the Review moved its headquarters to 207 East 32nd Street in Kips Bay, a townhouse it had purchased in 2020 from graphic designer Milton Glaser.