Partisan Review - Overview

Overview

The journal was founded by William Phillips, Philip Rahv, and Sender Garlin. It grew out of the John Reed Club as an alternative to New Masses, the publication of the American Communist Party, but became staunchly anti-Communist after Joseph Stalin secured his place at the head of the Soviet Union. Many of its early authors were the children of Jewish immigrants from Europe. Rarely having more than ten thousand subscribers, the journal reached its peak influence from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, after which it gradually lost its relevance. Phillips died in September 2002 at age 94. The journal continued under his wife Edith Kurzweil, through an agreement with Boston University, until ceasing publication in April 2003.

Contributors included W.S. Merwin, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Saul Bellow, Doris Lessing, Philip Roth, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, and Susan Sontag.

George Orwell, in reply to a letter from Philip Rahv requesting names of possible contributors for PR, offered the following: Alex Comfort, Henry Treece, Alun Lewis, William Rogers, G. S. Fraser, Roy Fuller, Kathleen Raine, who all contributed to Poetry London. Older people he proposed included Herbert Read, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and "their lot," E. M. Forster ("who has seen and likes PR"), William Empson, Jack Common, Hugh Slater, Ahmed Ali, and Roy Campbell.

Between 1941 and 1946 Orwell wrote fifteen "London Letters" for the Review, the first of which appeared in the March-April 1941 issue. In 1949, the journal awarded Orwell £357 for the year's most significant contribution to literature, Nineteen Eighty-Four.