Wikipedia Deep Dive

The Paris Review

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A Literary Magazine Born from Espionage

In 1953, a young American named Peter Matthiessen was working undercover for the Central Intelligence Agency in Paris. He needed a cover story—something plausible that would explain why an American writer was spending so much time in the city, meeting with intellectuals, attending literary gatherings. His solution was elegant: he would help start a literary magazine.

That magazine was The Paris Review.

Matthiessen didn't work alone. Harold L. Humes and George Plimpton joined him as founding editors, and together they created what would become one of the most influential literary journals of the twentieth century. The spy connection wouldn't become public knowledge for decades, and even then, Matthiessen insisted the magazine itself remained editorially independent—his cover, not his mission.

But here's the strange part: the cover story worked so well that it outlasted the espionage. The magazine Matthiessen invented to explain his presence in Paris went on to publish Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, Philip Roth, Italo Calvino, and hundreds of other writers who would shape modern literature. The spy became a conservationist and celebrated novelist. The cover became the real thing.

Why Paris in 1953?

To understand why three Americans would launch an English-language magazine in France, you need to understand postwar Paris. The city was cheap. The literary scene was vibrant. And perhaps most importantly, it was far from the American publishing establishment.

Thousands of American veterans had flooded into Paris on the G.I. Bill, which paid for their education and living expenses abroad. Many were aspiring writers who found they could live well on modest stipends while pursuing their craft. They gathered in Left Bank cafés, argued about Hemingway and Sartre, and dreamed of literary glory.

The Paris Review's founders saw an opportunity. American literary magazines at the time were dominated by criticism—academic essays analyzing literature rather than creating it. William Styron, who wrote the magazine's founding editorial statement, made the mission clear: they would emphasize "creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines."

In other words: publish the writers, not the people writing about the writers.

The Eagle and the Prince

Every great magazine needs a great logo, and The Paris Review got one from William Pène du Bois, the first art editor. He designed an American eagle clutching a pen and wearing a Phrygian cap—that soft, conical hat that became a symbol of liberty during the French Revolution. It was a perfect visual joke: an American bird wearing a French hat, holding the universal tool of the writer.

The magazine's first publisher was Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, which gives you a sense of the social circles these young Americans traveled in. Plimpton, in particular, had connections everywhere. He'd attended King's College at Cambridge, where he'd become acquainted with E.M. Forster, the author of A Passage to India and Howards End. That friendship would lead to the first interview in what became the magazine's most enduring feature.

The first office was a small room in the publishing house Éditions de la Table ronde. But the real headquarters was the Café de Tournon on the Rue de Tournon in the Left Bank, where editors and writers gathered to drink, argue, and plan issues. At one point, from 1956 to 1957, the magazine's operations were conducted from a Thames River grain carrier anchored on the Seine—a wonderfully impractical location that captures the spirit of the enterprise.

The Writers at Work Interviews

If The Paris Review had only published fiction and poetry, it would still be remembered as an important magazine. But its interviews became something more: a permanent archive of how great writers think about their craft.

The series, called "Writers at Work," began with that E.M. Forster interview and expanded to include nearly every major literary figure of the twentieth century. Ezra Pound. Ernest Hemingway. T.S. Eliot. Jorge Luis Borges. Ralph Ellison. William Faulkner. Robert Frost. Pablo Neruda. Vladimir Nabokov. The list goes on for hundreds of names.

What made these interviews special wasn't just the prestige of the subjects—it was the approach. Interviewers asked writers about process, about revision, about the practical realities of getting words onto paper. How do you start a novel? When do you know a poem is finished? What time of day do you write?

Literary critic Joe David Bellamy called the series "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world." That sounds like hyperbole until you consider what would have been lost without it. Many of these writers are now dead. Their novels and poems survive, but their thoughts about creating those works—the false starts, the daily routines, the doubts and breakthroughs—exist largely because someone from The Paris Review sat down with a tape recorder and asked the right questions.

Discovering Tomorrow's Giants

In its first five years alone, The Paris Review published new works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly. That's an astonishing concentration of future literary giants, several of whom would go on to win the Nobel Prize.

The magazine had a gift for recognizing talent before the world caught on. Selections from Beckett's novel Molloy appeared in the fifth issue—years before he won the Nobel. Kerouac's short story "The Mexican Girl" was published in 1955, two years before On the Road made him famous.

Many works that would later become classics made their first appearance in the magazine's pages: Italo Calvino's Last Comes the Raven, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. For an unknown writer, publication in The Paris Review was a signal to the literary world: pay attention to this person.

The CIA Connection Revealed

For decades, the magazine's origins remained a romantic story of young Americans pursuing literature in postwar Paris. Then the truth started leaking out.

In 2007, The New York Times published an article confirming what had long been rumored: Peter Matthiessen had been a CIA operative when he helped found the magazine. The following year, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Matthiessen stated it plainly: "I invented The Paris Review as cover" for his CIA activities.

The revelation raised uncomfortable questions. Was the magazine itself a CIA operation? Was its editorial direction influenced by American intelligence interests?

Matthiessen insisted the answer was no. The Paris Review, he maintained, was never part of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-backed organization that secretly funded numerous literary and cultural magazines during the Cold War. The magazine remained editorially independent and was never directed by government interests.

Historians have complicated this picture somewhat. While The Paris Review wasn't directly funded by the CIA, it operated within the same network of Cold War cultural institutions. The magazine occasionally sold reprints to CIA-affiliated publications like Encounter and Preuves. It shared contributors and editors with those magazines. It benefited, at least indirectly, from the same ecosystem of cultural patronage that the CIA had helped create.

But here's what matters: whatever the origins, the literature was real. The stories and poems published in The Paris Review weren't propaganda. The interviews captured genuine artistic wisdom. The magazine's lasting influence came from the quality of its content, not from any intelligence agenda. Matthiessen later expressed regret for his CIA involvement, but he had nothing to regret about the magazine he helped create.

From Paris to Manhattan

In 1973, the magazine moved its headquarters from Paris to New York City—specifically, to the first-floor and basement rooms of George Plimpton's apartment on 72nd Street. Plimpton had been editing the Review since its founding, and he would continue for another three decades.

The move made practical sense. Most of the magazine's readers and contributors were American. But it also changed the magazine's character. It was no longer an expatriate publication, a voice from abroad. It was now part of the New York literary establishment, with all the access and obligations that implied.

Plimpton was the perfect figure to bridge these worlds. He was a genuine literary man—a serious editor who cared deeply about prose and poetry. But he was also a celebrity, famous for his participatory journalism (playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions, boxing with Archie Moore, performing as a circus trapeze artist) and his appearances in films and commercials. His apartment became a legendary gathering place, hosting parties where Norman Mailer might argue with William Styron while a young unknown read poetry in the corner.

By 1989, the magazine's circulation was 9,700—tiny by mainstream standards but respectable for a literary quarterly. More importantly, its influence far exceeded its readership. Publication in The Paris Review remained a career milestone, and the Writers at Work interviews continued to accumulate into an invaluable archive.

Life After Plimpton

George Plimpton died in 2003, ending a fifty-year editorship that had defined the magazine. The question of succession was never simple. How do you replace someone who had been synonymous with an institution for half a century?

Brigid Hughes took over first, but lasted only until March 2005. Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer at The New Yorker known for his reporting on the Rwandan genocide, succeeded her in spring 2005. Under his leadership, the magazine began incorporating more nonfiction and, for the first time, regularly published photography spreads. A four-volume collection of Paris Review interviews was published by Picador between 2006 and 2009.

Gourevitch departed in fall 2009 to focus on his own writing. Lorin Stein took over in April 2010, overseeing a redesign of both the print magazine and its website that was met with critical acclaim. In September 2010, the Review made its entire archive of interviews available online for free—a remarkable gift to writers and readers worldwide.

Stein's editorship ended badly. In December 2017, he resigned amid an internal investigation into sexual misconduct toward women at the workplace. It was a reminder that literary institutions, for all their cultivation of artistic sensitivity, are not immune to the abuses of power that plague every industry.

The magazine continued under new leadership, receiving another redesign in late 2021 when Emily Stokes became editor-in-chief and Na Kim became art director. The new look, designed by Matt Willey of Pentagram, deliberately evoked the magazine's appearance in the late 1960s and early 1970s: minimalist, lots of white space, a smaller trim size, and paper that felt softer to the touch.

The Art Portfolio

In 1964, The Paris Review launched a series of prints and posters by contemporary artists—a project initiated by publisher Drue Heinz and artist Jane Wilson. The goal was to establish an ongoing relationship between the worlds of writing and visual art, and the series delivered.

Over the following decades, the portfolio included works by some of the most important artists of the postwar era: Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaler, Keith Haring, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.

The series was suspended after Plimpton's death but relaunched in 2012 with a print by Donald Baechler. It remains one of the few places where major visual artists regularly contribute to a literary publication—a reminder that the boundaries between art forms are more porous than institutions usually acknowledge.

The Prizes and the Revel

The Paris Review awards three prizes annually, all selected from work published in the magazine the previous year. No application is required—you can't submit for consideration. You have to be published first.

The Paris Review Hadada is a bronze statuette given to "a distinguished member of the literary community who has demonstrated a strong and unique commitment to literature." Past recipients include Jamaica Kincaid, John Ashbery, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Fran Lebowitz. The name comes from the hadada ibis, an African bird—though the connection to the magazine is more whimsical than symbolic.

The Plimpton Prize awards ten thousand dollars (and an engraved ostrich egg) to the best work of fiction or poetry by an emerging or previously unpublished writer. The Terry Southern Prize for Humor, worth five thousand dollars, honors work that embodies "qualities of humor, wit, and sprezzatura"—that Italian word meaning a certain studied nonchalance, an appearance of effortlessness.

These prizes are celebrated at the annual Spring Revel, a gala that brings together "leading figures and patrons of American arts and letters from throughout New York." The event raises money for The Paris Review Foundation, a nonprofit established by the co-founders in 2000 to ensure the magazine's survival.

What The Paris Review Means

Literary magazines come and go. Most never achieve any influence. Many that do become influential eventually lose their way, captured by academic fashion or commercial pressure or simple exhaustion. The Paris Review has now survived for more than seventy years, through the Cold War and the digital revolution, through the death of its founding editor and numerous scandals and transitions.

What has it meant?

First, it proved that a magazine could prioritize creative work over criticism without becoming anti-intellectual. The Paris Review published challenging, experimental fiction alongside more traditional work. It never dumbed down for popularity, but it also never became a vehicle for theory or academic posturing.

Second, the Writers at Work interviews created a unique archive of artistic wisdom. Before podcasts and YouTube, before writers routinely discussed their craft in public, The Paris Review was recording these conversations and publishing them for anyone to read. Generations of aspiring writers have learned from these interviews—not just technique, but permission to struggle, to fail, to approach the work in their own way.

Third, the magazine demonstrated that you could discover major talent by paying attention to quality rather than credentials. Many of the writers The Paris Review published early in their careers were unknowns from nowhere. They got in because their work was good, and the magazine was willing to read unsolicited manuscripts with genuine attention.

And finally, there's the romance of the thing. A magazine invented as spy cover that outlasted the Cold War. A grain carrier on the Seine. Parties in Plimpton's apartment. The Phrygian cap on the American eagle. Literature is often a lonely business, but The Paris Review created a sense of community—a feeling that writers belonged to something larger than their individual struggles with the blank page.

That feeling turns out to be worth preserving. Matthiessen needed a cover story, and he ended up helping create something that mattered far more than whatever intelligence he gathered in Paris. The cover became the reality. The magazine became the legacy. And the work—the stories, the poems, the interviews—endures.