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The Paris Review is a literary magazine started in 1953 by Peter Matthiessen, Thomas H. Guinzburg, and Harold L. Humes, and edited until his death in 2003 by George Plimpton. Its first publisher was Sadruddhin Aga Khan; its current publisher is Drue Heinz.
The Paris Review's editorial staff has always been focused on the publication's quality, and its mission is to promote the literary arts. In Issue #1, one of the first advisory editors, William Styron, wrote, in an introductory letter to readers: "I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe grinders. So long as they're good."
Although never profitable, over more than 50 years The Paris Review has published work by and interviews with a remarkably diverse and distinguished array of writers and poets, both American and international - some Nobelists, some now forgotten, some up-and-coming, but virtually all worth learning about or re-visiting.
A sample list (and it is only a sample), in alphabetical order, includes the foreign authors Chinua Achebe, Anna Akhmatova, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, Italo Calvino, Elias Canetti, Simone de Beauvoir, Isak Dinesen, E. M. Forster, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Seamus Heaney, P. D. James, Philip Larkin, Ian McEwan, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, Junichiro Tanizaki, V. S. Naipaul, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Derek Walcott.
It includes well-known 20th-century Americans , such as Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm Lowry, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Edgar Wideman.
Represented, as well, are contemporary fiction writers and poets, "conventional" as well as "experimental," including Ai, Donald Antrim, Rick Bass, Jim Carroll, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lorrie Moore, Rick Moody, and Brenda Shaughnessy, The "Back Issues" section at the Paris Review official website (http://www.theparisreview.com) provides a far more extensive list.
During Plimpton's lifetime, The Paris Review was also well-known for the often wild parties that were held regularly at his apartment overlooking the East River on East 72nd Street in New York City. These parties were attended (or crashed) by many an aspiring young writer or editor.
Since Plimpton's death, the journal (since 2000 a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) has been governed by a Board of Directors. The future editorial direction of The Paris Review is uncertain.
Controversy
The motivations behind the initial founding of The Paris Review were recently questioned by Richard Cummings who claims in an online essay[1] (http://www.www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings29.html) that Peter Matthiessen's first wife, Patsy Southgate (no friend to her ex-husband), told him that the magazine was conceived and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency - to what purpose is not clear.
Whatever paths Peter Matthiessen may have followed in his early career, Cummings appears to be overreaching in his insistence on linking either The Paris Review or Matthiessen - who for the past several decades has been a leading environmentalist and a vocal supporter of Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement - with the views and work of William F. Buckley, the operations of the Trilateral Commission, and an extensive list of "perfidious undercover operations" which have, purportedly, encumbered Cummings's professional life.
Paris Review Publications
The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, and Waiting Rooms (Picador, 2004)
The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travel (Picador, 2004)
Latin American Writers at Work (The Modern Library, 2003)
Playwrights at Work (The Modern Library, 2000)
Beat Writers at Work (The Modern Library, 1999)
The Writers Chapbook (The Modern Library, 1999)
Women Writers at Work (Random House, 1998)
External links
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