Suvarna Garge (Editor)

The Sewanee Review

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Abbreviated title (ISO 4)
  
Sewanee Rev.

Language
  
English

Publication history
  
1892–present

Discipline
  
Literature

Edited by
  
Adam Ross

The Sewanee Review

Publisher
  
Johns Hopkins University Press for Sewanee: The University of the South (United States)

The Sewanee Review is a literary journal established in 1892 and the oldest continuously published periodical of its kind in the United States. It incorporates original fiction and poetry, as well as essays, reviews, and literary criticism. It notably published five stories by Flannery O'Connor, the dramatic version of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and Cormac McCarthy's first published work — a selection from his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Other noted contributors include Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, John Berryman, Wendell Berry, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, Billy Collins, James Dickey, Andre Dubus, T. S. Eliot, B. H. Fairchild, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, George Garrett, Robert Graves, Donald Hall, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Hecht, X. J. Kennedy, Thomas Kinsella, Maxine Kumin, C. S. Lewis, Robert Lowell, Thomas Merton, Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov, Joyce Carol Oates, Walker Percy, Saint-John Perse, Sylvia Plath, Katherine Anne Porter, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Eudora Welty, Richard Wilbur, Christian Wiman, and James Wright, among others.

Contents

History

The Sewanee Review was established in 1892 by William Peterfield Trent, as a magazine "devoted to reviews of leading books and to papers on such topics of general Theology, Philosophy, History, Political Science, and Literature as require further treatment than they receive in specialist publications." Trent edited the review until 1900.

After a number of short-term editors George Herbert Clarke took over in 1920. Clarke was the first editor of the journal to publish poetry, and he published verse by Donald Davidson, William Alexander Percy, John Crowe Ransom, Mark Van Doren, and Margaret L. Woods, and a twenty-year-old Robert Penn Warren. Clarke remained editor until 1926, and was succeeded by William S. Knickerbocker, who published the first piece of fiction in the Review.

In 1942, Tudor Seymour Long became editor, with Andrew Lytle serving as a highly active managing editor and Allen Tate serving as an advisory editor and de facto editor until 1944. In 1944, when Tate took over as editor, he and Lytle revolutionized the magazine's place in American Letters. It became a solid pillar in New Criticism, alongside Cleanth Brooks's Southern Review and John Crowe Ransom's Kenyon Review. Tate also had the review redesigned by P. J. Conkwright, who crafted the distinctive blue cover and design. Throughout his tenure, Tate published T. S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Taylor, Jean Stafford, Caroline Gordon, Theodore Roethke, William Meredith, Wallace Stevens, Reed Whittemore, Karl Shapiro, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Jacques Maritain, Joseph Frank, and Marshall McLuhan. In 1952, Eliot commented that the "Sewanee Review has . . . reached the status of an institution — by which I mean that if it came to an end, its loss would be something more than merely the loss of one good periodical; it would be a symptom of an alarming decline in the periodical world at its highest level."

Tate's editorship ended in 1946, and John E. Palmer became editor. He was followed by Monroe K. Spears in 1952 and then Andrew Lytle again in 1965. George Core succeeded Lytle in 1973. After 43 years as editor, Core retired in 2016, and the novelist Adam Ross was appointed to succeed him.

Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry

The review gives the annual Aiken Taylor Award, a prize of $10,000, begun in 1985 by the physician and poet K. P. A. Taylor in honor of his brother Conrad Aiken. Winners of the award, which has often been given to poets otherwise unaffiliated with the review, have included Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, W. S. Merwin, John Frederick Nims, Gwendolyn Brooks, George Starbuck, Wendell Berry, Maxine Kumin, Fred Chappell, Carolyn Kizer, X. J. Kennedy, George Garrett, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Frederick Morgan, Grace Schulman, Daniel Hoffman, Henry S. Taylor, B. H. Fairchild, Brendan Galvin, Anne Stevenson, John Haines, Donald Hall, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, and Christian Wiman.

The journal is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Prior to its transfer to electronic processing at the Johns Hopkins University Press, it was one of only two academic journals in the United States still printed by letterpress.

References

The Sewanee Review Wikipedia