The Massachusetts Review

About The Massachusetts Review

The Massachusetts Review is a quarterly literary magazine published at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Founded in 1959, it publishes fiction, poetry, and essays, and has long been known for its commitment to publishing voices from the margins of American literature — Jewish, Black, and women writers among them — alongside established literary figures. Its official website is massreview.org.

Founding in 1959

In 1958, Jules Chametzky, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, penned a memo suggesting that the English Department sponsor a new literary magazine. The following year, the Massachusetts Review, a quarterly publication, was launched. The name was chosen to honor an earlier journal, Emerson's Massachusetts Quarterly Review, linking the new venture to a distinguished New England literary lineage. The University of Massachusetts officially records 1959 as the year the Massachusetts Review was founded.

From its inception, the magazine had the support of the German and History departments as well as English. When English professor Sidney Kaplan — who would in 1970 become a founding member of the university's W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies — joined the planning committee, the magazine's scope extended further, taking in questions of race and American culture that would become central to its identity.

The University of Massachusetts itself records the magazine's founding as a milestone of 1959 in its official institutional timeline, alongside the founding of the School of Nursing and the construction of the Public Health Center that same year — a sign of how quickly the Review became part of the university's identity.

Jules Chametzky's Editorial Vision

Chametzky, born in Brooklyn in 1928 and a specialist in Jewish American literary history, was the second managing editor of the journal and, from 1963 to 1974, co-edited the Review with John Hicks and others. He would be asked to return as co-editor in the 1990s, and in 2001 he became the magazine's Editor Emeritus. His papers, documenting his career as educator, advocate, and academic pioneer, are held in the university's Special Collections and include extensive materials relating to the founding of the Massachusetts Review.

Chametzky described the magazine's editorial goals during its formative years in terms that captured its rebellious spirit: "We wanted to break the logjam of ideas represented by the New Criticism and formalism," he commented; publishing so-called "marginal" voices — Jewish, Black, and women writers — was one way of "letting in fresh political and ideological currents." That commitment to voices excluded from the mainstream canon gave the Review a distinctive profile among the literary quarterlies of its generation.

Black and White in American Culture

Responding to the tumultuous times of the late 1960s, in 1969 Chametzky and Kaplan put together a collection of essays from the first ten years of the magazine, Black and White in American Culture, dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. The anthology collected the Review's writings on race across its first decade and was received as a landmark. Julius Lester, reviewing it in the New York Times, called it "a rare anthology ... with a higher degree of relevance than almost any other book of its kind." The collection stood as evidence that the magazine's editorial commitments had produced writing of lasting historical importance.

Scope and Character

The Massachusetts Review publishes fiction, poetry, and essays in quarterly issues, maintaining the schedule it has kept since 1959. Over the decades it has published work from across the spectrum of American and international writing, honoring its founding mission to break down institutional barriers and foster deep cultural dialogue. The magazine has consistently sought to expose readers to radical new perspectives, treating literature and the arts as part of a broad, ongoing cultural conversation.

Translation has been an important part of the magazine's program. In 2010, the Massachusetts Review established an annual Jules Chametzky Translation Prize, awarded to a translation published in the magazine, honoring both Chametzky's role at the magazine and his contributions in advancing cross-cultural understanding. The prize reflects the journal's enduring internationalism and its belief that American literature is enriched by its encounter with the world's writing.

Chametzky's Later Recognition

Chametzky's contributions to American letters extended well beyond the magazine. An expert in American Jewish and ethnic literatures, his books included Out of Brownsville, From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan, Our Decentralized Literature, and the Norton anthology Jewish-American Literature. He taught at UMass Amherst beginning in 1958 and lectured at universities in Zagreb, Venice, Berlin, Copenhagen, Freiburg, and Tübingen, twice serving as a Fulbright professor. He also served the wider literary-magazine community as Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines from 1967 to 1972. He received the MELUS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Studies in 1995. When he died, UMass Amherst hosted a day-long celebration of his life and work, "The Legacy of Jules Chametzky: Honoring the Intellect, Fostering Justice and Equality," sponsored by the offices of the Chancellor and Provost, multiple academic departments, and the Massachusetts Review itself — a measure of how deeply his founding of the magazine was woven into the university's identity.

A University Magazine with an Independent Spirit

Unlike many university-sponsored journals, the Massachusetts Review has maintained an editorial spirit closer to that of the independent little magazines. Its founding mission — to break the logjam of New Criticism and formalism, to publish marginal voices, to let in fresh political and ideological currents — was a challenge to the literary establishment rather than an extension of it. The magazine's early alliance with the German and History departments, and with scholars like Sidney Kaplan who were building the field of Afro-American studies, gave it an interdisciplinary and socially engaged character from the start.

That character has persisted through more than six decades of publication. The Review has remained a quarterly of fiction, poetry, and essays that takes seriously its role as a forum for cultural dialogue, publishing work that engages the political and social questions of its moment while holding to high literary standards.

Contemporary Standing

Today the Massachusetts Review continues to publish from Amherst, Massachusetts, as one of the long-lived university literary quarterlies that have survived the upheavals of American magazine publishing. Its website, massreview.org, carries the magazine's current issues, archives, and submission information to a digital readership, extending the reach of a journal that began as a departmental memo in 1958.

The magazine's endurance is itself a statement: founded to challenge the critical orthodoxies of its day, it has outlasted most of the movements it published against and alongside, remaining a venue where new writing can meet a serious readership. Its six-decade archive constitutes a significant record of American literary and cultural life since the late 1950s.

Legacy

The Massachusetts Review's legacy rests on its founding wager that a university literary magazine could be an instrument of cultural change rather than a repository of academic fashion. By publishing Jewish, Black, and women writers when the mainstream canon excluded them, by producing the landmark anthology Black and White in American Culture, and by sustaining its quarterly schedule for more than sixty years, the Review demonstrated that editorial vision and institutional support could combine to lasting effect. Jules Chametzky's 1958 memo became one of the most consequential documents in the history of American literary magazines — the seed of a journal that is still publishing, still quarterly, still committed to the fresh political and ideological currents its founders sought to let in.