About Evergreen Review

Evergreen Review

Evergreen Review is an American literary magazine founded in New York in 1957 by Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press. In its original print run, which lasted until 1973 in most accounts and is also dated to 1984 for its later phase, it introduced American readers to Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Günter Grass, Kenzaburō Ōe and many other writers, published the Beats and the avant-garde, and became a byword for literary provocation. It was relaunched online in 1998 under Rosset, ceased again after his death, and was revived in 2017 under publisher John Oakes with editor-in-chief Dale Peck.

Few magazines so completely embodied their publisher's taste. Evergreen Review functioned as the house journal of Grove Press, the company that fought America's defining censorship battles over Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch, and its pages carried the same mixture of European modernism, Beat writing, radical politics and erotic frankness.

Barney Rosset and Grove Press

Barney Rosset bought Grove Press in 1951 for three thousand dollars and turned it into the most daring literary house in America. Grove published Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1954 after mainstream publishers had refused it, became Beckett's American publisher and later Harold Pinter's, introduced French writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet and Eugène Ionesco, and published most of the American Beats, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, as well as Frank O'Hara and Robert Duncan.

Rosset's willingness to publish books the authorities considered obscene — Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Burroughs's Naked Lunch — made Grove the centre of the era's free-expression litigation. Evergreen Review, launched six years after he bought the company, extended that mission into magazine form.

The First Issues of 1957

The first issue of Evergreen Review appeared in 1957 with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer and James Purdy. Grove's archive at Syracuse University preserves the editorial files for the opening volumes, including correspondence with Beckett, Ginsberg and Kerouac, evidence of how directly the magazine drew on the press's book list and friendships. The Summer 1957 issue carried a Jackson Pollock cover, signalling that the magazine's ambitions embraced visual art as well as writing.

In its first year the Review also published Albert Camus's essay on capital punishment, Reflections on the Guillotine, for the first time in English. When the essay was reprinted in the March–April 1960 issue, the magazine presented it as its contribution to the worldwide debate on capital punishment and specifically to the case of Caryl Chessman, then facing execution in California.

The March–April 1960 Issue

That single 1960 issue is routinely cited as the magazine in miniature. Alongside Camus it contained work by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bertolt Brecht and LeRoi Jones — later Amiri Baraka — and it published Edward Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, written in 1958. In a few dozen pages a reader encountered European philosophy, German theatre, Beat poetry, Black American writing and the debut of a major American dramatist. Grove's own summary of the magazine's print years lists contributors including Albee, Brecht, Burroughs, Camus, Ferlinghetti, Nat Hentoff, LeRoi Jones, John Lahr and Timothy Leary.

Writers Introduced and Published

The full contributor list across the print run reads as a syllabus of post-war experimental writing. Evergreen published early or defining work by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Günter Grass, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O'Hara, Kenzaburō Ōe, Octavio Paz, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott and Malcolm X. Kerouac and Ginsberg appeared regularly.

For many European and Latin American writers, Evergreen was the door into the United States. Rosset, sole editor throughout the magazine's fifteen-year core life according to the editors of its collected Reader volumes, used the journal to test translations, excerpt forthcoming Grove books and build audiences for writers American trade publishing considered uncommercial or dangerous.

Politics: Civil Rights, Vietnam and Che

The magazine's commitment to the progressive side of politics was consistent, from an early stance for civil rights to open opposition to the Vietnam War. Its February 1968 cover carried the image of Che Guevara designed by Paul Davis from Alberto Korda's famous photograph; the image became a popular symbol of resistance far beyond the magazine's readership, reproduced on posters and walls around the world.

In 1969 the magazine published a controversial article by United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an indication of how far a nominally literary journal could reach into national debate. Anthologies of the 1967–1973 years document coverage of the assassinations of the era, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the My Lai massacre, alongside the literature.

Illustration, Eroticism and Phoebe Zeit-Geist

Evergreen was always a visual magazine. Its early issues included cartoons; by the mid-1960s many of its illustrations and photographs were frankly erotic, testing the same obscenity boundaries Grove contested in court. Its best-known comics feature was The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, an adult serial written by Michael O'Donoghue and drawn by Frank Springer, which parodied and pushed the conventions of adventure comics. Covers and picture essays — a hundred photographs are reproduced in the second Reader volume alone — made the magazine an artefact of 1960s visual culture as much as a literary one.

The Print Run's End

Accounts differ on the exact end of print publication: Grove Press histories date the magazine's run from 1957 to 1973, while the magazine's own reference entries describe print existence from 1957 until 1984 with the original series folding in 1973. What is clear is that the classic monthly era — the period covered by the two Evergreen Review Reader anthologies, 1957–1966 and 1967–1973 — ended in 1973, as Grove Press's finances and the counterculture itself ebbed. Rosset later sold Grove, and the magazine slept for a quarter of a century.

Online Revivals: 1998 and 2017

Rosset relaunched Evergreen Review online in 1998, editing it with Astrid Meyer. The web edition mixed flashbacks to classic issues with new work by contemporary dissident poets including Dennis Nurkse, Giannina Braschi and Regina Dereiva, and Rosset welcomed the new medium's ability to add sound and moving images to the magazine form. The online magazine ceased publication in 2013, soon after Rosset's death in 2012.

In 2017 the title was revived again under John Oakes, who had begun his publishing career in 1987 as an assistant editor at Rosset's Grove Press, with Dale Peck as editor-in-chief. The revived magazine, with a publishing arm called Foxrock Books, states its mission in terms Rosset would have recognised: seeking out stories that are not being told or heard, and that challenge sensibilities and expand understanding of how people live.

Legacy

Evergreen Review's lasting achievement was connection. Between 1957 and 1973 it connected American readers to Beckett and Borges, to the Beats and to Black and anti-war writing, often before book publishers dared. Histories of Grove Press, studies of the counterculture and the collected Reader volumes all treat it, in the anthology's words, as one of the most provocative magazines ever published and a bible for a generation of radicals and freethinkers. A complete set of its covers from 1957 to 1973 has itself been published as a book, an honour few magazines receive, and its archive within the Grove Press records at Syracuse University remains a working resource for scholars of post-war literature.