The Paris Review

About The Paris Review

The Paris Review is a quarterly English-language literary magazine based in New York City and published by The Paris Review Foundation. Founded in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, it is one of the most celebrated literary journals in the world, best known for its long-form, in-depth interviews with writers conducted under the series titles The Art of Fiction and The Art of Poetry. Over more than seventy years of continuous publication, the magazine has published fiction, poetry and essays by many of the most significant writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while its interview archive has become the single most important body of writing about the craft of writing itself.

The magazine was established in France but moved its base to New York in 1973, and it has been published there ever since. It appears four times a year in print and maintains an active digital presence, and its interviews are regularly collected in the long-running Writers at Work book series.

Founding in Paris in 1953

The Paris Review was founded in 1953 in Paris by three young American writers: Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton. At the time, as Plimpton later recalled, they were young men whose curiosity exceeded their means, but they were determined to keep a literary journal going. The debut edition announced the magazine's purpose plainly: it would emphasize creative work, namely fiction and poetry, not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim of removing criticism from the dominating place it held in most literary magazines. At a time when other literary journals concentrated on reviews and critical essays, the Review set out to publish the creative work itself.

The early issues made good on that promise with remarkable speed. Among the first interviews published were conversations with E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound and Italo Calvino, establishing from the outset the caliber of writer the magazine would attract. The fact that a brand-new journal could secure such figures spoke to the founders' ambition and to Plimpton's gift for persuading writers that the project mattered.

The Art of Fiction and Art of Poetry Interviews

The magazine's signature contribution to literary culture is its series of extended writer interviews, published under the headings The Art of Fiction and The Art of Poetry. Plimpton's philosophy behind them was simple and distinctive: rather than asking a critic to write about a novelist, the magazine would go directly to the novelist and ask him or her to talk about the craft of writing. This reversal of the usual journalistic arrangement produced conversations of unusual depth and candor, because the subjects were invited to speak as practitioners rather than as celebrities.

The interviews were conceived as documents for posterity. As one longtime reader observed, when the Review sits a writer down, the weight of the occasion tends to make even the most guarded subject speak their whole truth, since these conversations are understood from the start as contributions to the historical record of literature. Ernest Hemingway, one of the earliest interviewees, predicted that the Art of Fiction interviews would make a good book when collected, a forecast that proved prescient.

The Writers at Work Book Series

Hemingway's prediction was borne out by the Writers at Work series, the long-running sequence of volumes collecting the magazine's interviews. The first series, edited by Malcolm Cowley, gathered the earliest conversations; the third series, published in 1967 with an introduction by Alfred Kazin and edited by George Plimpton, ran to 368 pages and included interviews with Jean Cocteau, Blaise Cendrars, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Saul Bellow, Evelyn Waugh, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, William Burroughs, Harold Pinter, Lillian Hellman, Edward Albee and James Jones. The sixth series included Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Bernard Malamud, William Goyen, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Nadine Gordimer, James Merrill, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and John Gardner.

After Plimpton's death, the series continued: Philip Gourevitch oversaw new volumes that collected more recent interviews, and a boxed set of the first four volumes was issued, handsomely packaged and hand-cut. The books have, by some accounts, generated more publicity and revenue in recent years than the magazine itself, testament to the enduring appeal of the interview archive.

George Plimpton's Five Decades as Editor

George Plimpton remained at the helm of The Paris Review for half a century, from its founding in 1953 until his death. He died of natural causes on September 26, 2003, at the age of 76, just weeks before the magazine's fiftieth anniversary. Plimpton was himself a well-known figure beyond the magazine: an American journalist, writer, editor, actor and sportsman, famous for his participatory sports writing and his larger-than-life public persona.

For much of its history the magazine's offices sat just downstairs from Plimpton's apartment overlooking the East River in Manhattan, a physical arrangement that captured how completely the Review was an extension of its founder's life. A chair nailed to the ceiling of his apartment served as a souvenir of his stint as a lion-tamer, one of many episodes in a life that became the subject of the documentary film Plimpton!, which opened in New York in 2013 around the time of the magazine's sixtieth birthday.

Editors After Plimpton

Following Plimpton's death, Philip Gourevitch took over as editor in 2005. Gourevitch, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of the acclaimed nonfiction works We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and A Cold Case, brought in a new team of young editorial talent and set about renovating the journal. Under his leadership the magazine more than doubled its circulation, demonstrating that the Review could find a new generation of readers.

In 2010 the editorship passed to Lorin Stein, whose first issue appeared that September with interviews including one with Norman Rush on the art of fiction. Stein departed in 2017, and in 2018 Emily Nemens was announced as the new editor. Nemens was in turn succeeded by Emily Stokes, who edited the magazine's 240th issue, published in the spring of 2022. Each transition has preserved the quarterly's core identity while adapting its pages to contemporary writing.

Fiction, Poetry and Essays

Although the interviews are its most famous feature, The Paris Review has always been, at its heart, a publisher of creative work. Each issue brings together fiction, poetry and prose from writers around the world, and the magazine has a long record of identifying major talent early. Its pages carried early stories by Philip Roth and the David Foster Wallace novella Little Expressionless Animals, and Lorin Stein once noted with pride how much the Review had to do with the early careers of writers it championed.

The magazine's design has also been part of its identity: issues appear as handsome softcover journals with full-color card wrappers, typically running well over two hundred pages, with interviews, poetry, fiction, essays and illustrations. The physical object remains central to the Review's appeal even as its website extends its reach.

Submissions and the Discovery of New Voices

A central tradition of The Paris Review is its quest for new voices, writers who have not yet been published at the national magazine level. As Gourevitch put it during his tenure, the magazine looks for work whose form, style and voice are extremely distinctive and that has something genuinely interesting to say. This openness to unsolicited work has long distinguished the Review from journals that publish only commissioned or solicited material.

The scale of that openness is striking: as far back as 2003 the magazine was receiving more than twenty thousand submissions a year, read by a young editorial staff working in the Review's Manhattan offices. The slush pile has been a genuine engine of discovery for the magazine across its history, not merely a formality.

The Move from Paris to New York

Despite its name, The Paris Review has been a New York publication for most of its life. The magazine was founded in Paris in 1953 but moved to New York in 1973, and it has been based in the city ever since. In the early 2010s its offices occupied an upper floor of a building at 62 White Street in the Tribeca district of Manhattan, a small, paper-strewn workspace adorned with paintings and prints by distinguished names of the American art scene.

The relocation did not diminish the magazine's cosmopolitan character; if anything, the New York base consolidated its position at the center of American literary life while its interview subjects and contributors continued to span the globe.

Legacy and Influence

The Paris Review's influence on literary culture is difficult to overstate. Its interview series has been described as the single most important body of work celebrating writing about writing, and its archive now runs to hundreds of conversations with the defining authors of the modern era. The magazine reached its fiftieth anniversary in 2003, its sixtieth in 2013, and by 2022 it had published 240 numbered quarterly issues.

That most literary journals are, as one observer put it, the mayflies of the publishing world makes the Review's longevity a grand achievement in itself. By insisting, from its first issue, on publishing creative work rather than criticism, and on asking writers rather than critics to explain literature, The Paris Review created a model that has been imitated but never quite equaled.