The Paris Review is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton.
The Reviews "Writers at Work" series includes interviews 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 wrote that the series was "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world."
The headquarters of The Paris Review moved from Paris to New York City in 1973. Plimpton edited the Review from its founding until his death in 2003.
History
20th century
Postwar-World War II Paris offered a vibrant and affordable literary scene that attracted many writers on the G.I. Bill and provided creative independence from the U.S. publishing establishment. An editorial statement by William Styron in the inaugural Spring 1953 issue described the magazine's intended aim:
<blockquote>The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines. […] 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.</blockquote>
The Reviews founding editors included Humes, Matthiessen, Plimpton, William Pène du Bois, Thomas Guinzburg, and John P. C. Train. The first publisher was Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan. Du Bois, the magazine's first art editor, designed the iconic Paris Review eagle to include both American and French representation: An American eagle holding a pen and wearing a Phrygian cap.
The magazine's first office was located in a small room of the publishing house Éditions de la Table ronde. Other notable locations of The Paris Review include a Thames River grain carrier anchored on the Seine from 1956 to 1957. The Café de Tournon in the Rue de Tournon on the Rive Gauche was the meeting place for staffers and writers, including du Bois, Plimpton, Matthiessen, Alexander Trocchi, Christopher Logue, and Eugene Walter.
The first-floor and basement rooms in Plimpton's 72nd Street apartment became the headquarters of The Paris Review when the magazine moved from Paris to New York City in 1973. The magazine's circulation was 9,700 in 1989.
21st century
Brigid Hughes was appointed as the magazine's second editor (and first female editor) in January 2004, following Plimpton's death the prior year. The last issue that was published during her tenure as editor-in-chief is the March 2005 edition.
Hughes was succeeded by Philip Gourevitch in spring 2005.
Lorin Stein was named editor of The Paris Review in April 2010. He oversaw a redesign of the magazine's print edition and its website, both of which were met with critical acclaim. In September 2010, the Review made available online its entire archive of interviews. On December 6, 2017, Stein resigned in response to an internal investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct toward women in the workplace.
In October 2012, The Paris Review published an anthology, Object Lessons, comprising a selection of 20 short stories from The Paris Reviews archive, each with an introduction by a contemporary author. Contributors include Jeffrey Eugenides (with an introduction to a story by Denis Johnson), Lydia Davis (with an introduction to a story by Jane Bowles), and Ali Smith (with an introduction to a story by Lydia Davis).
On October 8, 2012, the magazine launched its app for the iPad and iPhone. Developed by Atavist, the app includes access to new issues, back issues, and archival collections from its fiction and poetry sections—along with the complete interview series and the Paris Review Daily.
In November 2015, The Paris Review published its first anthology of new writing since 1964, The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review, including writing by well-established authors like Zadie Smith, Ben Lerner, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, as well as emerging writers like Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, Alexandra Kleeman, and Angela Flournoy.
In late 2021, for the first issue with Stokes as editor-in-chief and Na Kim as art director, the journal was given a redesign by Matt Willey of Pentagram that hearkened back to the look that it had in the late 1960s and early 1970s: a minimalist style, a cover with a sans serif font and a great deal of white space, a smaller trim size, and paper that was physically softer.
CIA
In January 2007, an article published by The New York Times supported the claim that founding editor Matthiessen had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the magazine's founding and reported that he used The Paris Review as a cover while he was stationed in Paris, not a collaborator, for his spying activities. Historians such as Frances Stonor Saunders have noted that the Review was not directly funded by the CIA, although it operated within the same postwar network of literary and cultural institutions supported by the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Specifically, archival records indicate that The Paris Review occasionally benefited indirectly through the sale of reprints to CCF-affiliated journals such as Encounter and Preuves, and by sharing contributors and editors with those magazines. Matthiessen later expressed regret for his CIA involvement, maintaining that The Paris Review was editorially independent and was never directed or influenced by U.S. government interests.
Emerging writers
Since its early years, The Paris Review has published the work of numerous emerging writers who later achieved significant literary recognition, including Philip Larkin, Adrienne Rich, V. S. Naipaul, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, Edward P. Jones, Terry Southern, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, Robert Bly, and Rick Moody. Selections from Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy appeared in the fifth issue, and the magazine was among the first to recognize the work of Jack Kerouac with the publication of his short story “The Mexican Girl” in 1955.
Other notable works making their first appearance in The Paris Review 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 recent years, The Paris Review has continued to feature emerging voices. Aisha Sabatini Sloan contributes a monthly column, “Detroit Archives,” exploring her family history through iconic landmarks in Detroit.