A Partisan View: Five Decades in the Politics of Literature

Since its founding in 1937, Partisan Review has been one of the most important and culturally influential journals in America. Under the legendary editorship of William Phillips and Philip Rahv, Partisan Review began as a publication of the John Reed Club, but soon broke away to establish itself as a free voice of critical dissent. As such, it counteracted the inroads of cultural Stalinism and took up the fight for aesthetic modernism at a time when the latter was fiercely contested by both the political left and right. In this work, William Phillips offers an account of his own part in the magazine’s eventful history. As the magazine’s editor, Edith Kurzweil, notes in her introduction, many of the literary and political disagreements that famously marked Partisan Review ‘s history originated in the editors’ initial adherence to a programme of radical politics and avant-gardism. Although this proved increasingly unworkable, Phillips and Rahv, even from the outset, never allowed sectarian narrowness to determine the magazine’s contents. Over the decades, Partisan Review published work by authors as far from radicalism as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens or from Marxist orthodoxy as Albert Camus and George Orwell. In literature, its contributors were as stylistically and intellectually varied as Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Lowell and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In short, Partisan Review featured the best fiction, poetry and essays of the 1940s and postwar decades.