Partisan Review

Partisan Review

April-May 1935 issue
First issue	1934
Final issue	2003
Language	English
ISSN	0031-2525

Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.

Overview

It 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 Stalin secured his place at the head of the Soviet Union.^[1] Many of its early authors were the children of Jewish immigrants from Europe. Rarely having more than ten thousand subscribers,^[1] the journal reached its peak influence from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, but then gradually lost its relevance to modern American culture. Phillips died in September 2002 at age 94. The journal continued under his wife Edith Kurzweil until it ceased publication in April 2003.^[2]

Contibutors included 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.

In reply to a letter from Philip Rahv requesting names of possible contributors for PR,^[3] George Orwell replied on 14 October 1943 with the following list: Alex Comfort, Henry Treece, Alun Lewis, Alan Brook, 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, Mark Benney, Jack Common, Hugh Slater, Ahmed Ali, Roy Campbell.

In 1949, Partisan Review awarded Orwell £357 for the year's most significant contribution to literature, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Between 1941 and 1946 Orwell had written fifteen articles, "London Letters", for the Review, the first of which appeared in PR in the March-April 1941 issue.^[3]

A controversy

The September-October 1942 issue of PR carried Orwell's reply to letters sent in by D. S. Savage, George Woodcock and Alex Comfort in response to his "London Letter" of the March-April issue, in which he criticized "left-wing defeatism" and "turn-the-other-cheek" pacifists, stating that they were "objectively pro-Fascist". In his article he had mentioned several people by name, including Comfort, and accused the review Now, of which Woodcock was editor, of having a Fascist tendency. In his reply, Orwell reiterated that "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist"; defended his work for the BBC's Indian broadcasts and refuted the accusation that he "is intellectual-hunting again".^[3]

Classic contributions

• Saul Bellow's "Two Morning Monologues"
• Two of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"
• Leslie Fiedler's "Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey"
• Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"
• George Orwell's "Such, Such Were the Joys"
• Delmore Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"
• Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" (translated by Saul Bellow)
• Susan Sontag's "Notes on "Camp""

See also

• Bibliography of George Orwell

Bibliography

• Bloom, Alexander, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World, Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-19-505177-3

References

External links

• http://slate.msn.com/id/2081610
• http://chronicle.com/free/2003/04/2003041603n.htm
• Partisan Review online Archive 1996–2003