1963 It all began with a newspaper strike that shut down the major New York papers from December 1962 until the end of March of the following year. Among the casualties was the New York Times Book Review, issued every Sunday as a magazine supplement to the mother paper. The Review had been running since 1896, covering between twenty and 30 new books per week in judiciously measured prose.
In the NYTBR’s temporary absence a group of like-minded literary friends saw their chance to start up another kind of review altogether. They included Barbara Epstein, a senior editor at Doubleday’s, her husband Jason, then a vice president at Random House and America’s version of Allen Lane (see 22 May), and Elizabeth Hardwick, author of a famous attack on the ‘sweet, bland commendations’ of contemporary book reviewing.
The New York Review of Books actually hit the streets some three weeks after its publication date, 1 February. It looked different. It felt different. Mimicking a mass-circulation paper, with its rough newsprint in tabloid format, yet with very special headline type fetched from Holland, it already looked, as the novelist Tom Wolfe was soon to put it, like ‘the chief theoretical organ of radical chic’.
But the real difference was in the editorial strategy. Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein set out from the start to review books in their contemporary political context, and to allow authors to take as long as they wanted to do so. So whereas the NYTBR might have reviewed around 1,250 books a year, and the Times Literary Supplement around 2,600, the NYRB, with its generous word limits and fortnightly timetable, would struggle to reach 400.
Besides, not all the essays were based on books. During the Vietnam War I.F. Stone, the veteran Washington investigative journalist, used the transcript of a hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (available from the Government Printing Office, price 30¢) as a peg on which to hang an eight-page attack on L.B. Johnson’s use of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext for widening the conflict. In Mary McCarthy’s case it wasn’t a book she reviewed but a situation; she travelled to Vietnam and used her experiences as her text on which to base a three-part critique of American policy there.
Since the sixties the paper’s adversarial stance has become even firmer, if anything. Reaganomics, the administration of George W. Bush and the role of the Supreme Court in hoisting him into the White House, the second Iraq war and its dreadful aftermath, even the inadequacy of the American press in letting all this go by with minimal scrutiny – all have come in for the paper’s well informed, analytically acute contempt.
Of course those on the American right, including some formerly liberal New York intellectuals who ought to know better, have repeatedly accused the NYRB of being un-American. They think it should review books, not spout politics. But in truth the paper has always worked to a venerable – if latterly forgotten – tradition: that of the 19th-century quarterly magazines on both sides of the Atlantic like the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, the Westminster and the North American. These too invited gifted writers to hang long, opinionated essays on slender pegs, and were very partisan indeed.
In pursuit of such conditions, good writers have flocked to the NYRB like swallows to a barn. As a recent Guardian editorial put it: ‘It has published Auden, Updike, Sontag, Roth, Arendt, Mailer, Vidal, Bellow, Lowell, Capote and – oh well, everyone.’1 And besides, it has the most intriguing classified ads in the business – as accurate an insight into the socio-cultural environment as any Woody Allen film:
MWF [that’s Married White Female], attractive, intelligent, humorous, articulate, and sexy, seeks a local collaborator in the form of a tall man with similar qualities to hang out with. Married or single, 45–65. Hair (preferably on head), height, and brains preferred.
REFINED/LOVELY MANHATTANITE, 5'5" seeks well-educated, principled NYC male, 60–69, widowed or divorced only, Jewish (not religious), nonsmoker. Serious-minded only.
1 Editorial, Guardian, 25 October 2008.