The Paris Review

• 1. Introduction

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  The Paris Review was born in a city still sorting itself out from the wreckage of war. Paris in 1953 was cheap, electric, and far from the gatekeepers of New York publishing. Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton founded the magazine there that year, planting a quarterly journal in the same postwar scene that had lured writers on the G.I. Bill. William Styron set out the magazine's purpose in that first Spring 1953 issue: the Review would welcome the good writers and poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders, and it would push criticism off the throne it occupied at most literary magazines. What would come of a journal run by three young Americans in a small room of a Parisian publishing house? The answer turned out to involve a CIA operative, a Thames River grain carrier anchored on the Seine, a $10,000 prize delivered with an engraved ostrich egg, and an interview archive that one critic called one of the most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world.

• 2. Paris and Its People

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  The magazine's first office fit inside a small room of the publishing house Editions de la Table ronde. The founding editors also included William Pene du Bois, Thomas Guinzburg, and John P. C. Train. Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan served as the first publisher. Du Bois, who took on the role of art editor, designed an icon that carried quiet political meaning: an American eagle holding a pen and wearing a Phrygian cap, the symbol of liberty, blending American and French identity into a single image. The Cafe de Tournon in the Rue de Tournon on the Rive Gauche became the informal headquarters where staffers and writers gathered, among them du Bois, Plimpton, Matthiessen, Alexander Trocchi, Christopher Logue, and Eugene Walter. For a brief stretch from 1956 to 1957, the magazine operated out of a Thames River grain carrier anchored on the Seine, a detail that captures just how improvised and adventurous the whole enterprise was. Plimpton himself edited the Review from that founding year until his death in 2003, a fifty-year tenure that no successor has come close to matching.

• 3. Writers at Work

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  An interview with E. M. Forster, an acquaintance of Plimpton's from his days at King's College at the University of Cambridge, was the first entry in what became the magazine's signature contribution to literary culture. The series, eventually titled "Writers at Work," grew into a body of work that included conversations with Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov, among hundreds of others. Literary critic Joe David Bellamy described the series as "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world." In September 2010, the Review made its entire archive of interviews available online, opening decades of literary conversation to anyone with a connection. A four-volume set of Paris Review interviews was also published by Picador between 2006 and 2009, gathering the conversations into a physical record that could outlast any website.

• 4. Emerging Voices

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  Philip Larkin, Adrienne Rich, V. S. Naipaul, and T. Coraghessan Boyle all appeared in the Review's pages before the wider world caught up with them. Selections from Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy ran in the fifth issue of the magazine. Jack Kerouac's short story "The Mexican Girl" was published in 1955, making the Review among the first to recognize his work. The list of debuts grew to include Italo Calvino's Last Comes the Raven, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, Donald Barthelme's "Alice", Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. In November 2015 the Review published The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review, its first anthology of new writing since 1964. It gathered well-established writers like Zadie Smith, Ben Lerner, and John Jeremiah Sullivan alongside emerging voices including Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, Alexandra Kleeman, and Angela Flournoy, a pairing that reflects exactly how the magazine has always seen its role.

• 5. The CIA Connection

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  Founding editor Peter Matthiessen carried a secret for years. In January 2007, an article in The New York Times confirmed that Matthiessen had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency at the time the magazine was founded, and that he used The Paris Review as cover for his activities while stationed in Paris. Historians, including Frances Stonor Saunders, noted that the Review was not directly funded by the CIA. Archival records do show that the magazine benefited indirectly, through the sale of reprints to CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom journals such as Encounter and Preuves, and through shared contributors and editors with those magazines. Matthiessen later expressed regret for his CIA involvement. He maintained that the Review operated with full editorial independence and was never directed or influenced by U.S. government interests. Whether that independence was entirely real or partly convenient, the magazine's literary record largely bore him out: the work it published belonged to no ideology.

• 6. Prizes and Revel

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  Three prizes carry the Review's annual calendar. The Hadada is a bronze statuette awarded to a distinguished member of the literary community who has shown a strong and unique commitment to literature. Past recipients include Jamaica Kincaid, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, James Salter, and Fran Lebowitz. The Plimpton Prize offers $10,000 and an engraved ostrich egg for the best fiction or poetry by an emerging or previously unpublished writer; past winners include Emma Cline, Wells Tower, and Jesse Ball. The Terry Southern Prize for Humor, a $5,000 award, honors work from the Review or the Paris Review Daily that embodies humor, wit, and sprezzatura, a word Styron might have appreciated, given his original call for writers who carry no axes. All three prizes are celebrated at the annual Spring Revel, a gala that brings together figures and patrons of American arts and letters. Proceeds go to The Paris Review Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit established by the co-founders in 2000 to secure the magazine's future. At the 2011 Spring Revel, held on the 12th of April, Robert Redford presented the Hadada to James Salter, and Fran Lebowitz presented the inaugural Terry Southern Prize for Humor.

• 7. Art, Design, and Change

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  In 1964, the Review introduced a prints and posters series with the explicit goal of building a lasting relationship between literature and visual art. Drue Heinz, then publisher of the Review, shared credit with Jane Wilson for starting it. The series went on to feature Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaler, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg, among many others. The series was suspended after Plimpton's death in 2003 and relaunched in 2012 with a print by Donald Baechler. The magazine's own look changed several times across its decades. Lorin Stein, named editor in April 2010, oversaw a redesign of both the print edition and the website, drawing critical acclaim. In late 2021, for the first issue under editor-in-chief Stokes and art director Na Kim, designer Matt Willey of Pentagram gave the journal a new look that recalled its appearance in the late 1960s and early 1970s: minimalist, with a sans serif cover font, generous white space, a smaller trim size, and physically softer paper. The magazine that once published from a grain carrier on the Seine had found its way back, visually at least, to the lean lines of its own early years.