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NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Starting Up

First published in February 1963 during a New York newspaper strike, the New York Review of Books was intended to fill the void left by the absence of the reviews usually published by The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. It was also intended as a corrective to the intellectually shallow commentary contained in newspaper reviews. As critic Edmund Wilson wrote in the New York Review of Books in September 1963, "The disappearance of the Times Sunday book section at the time of the printers' strike only made us realize it had never existed." The first issue of the journal was intended to be the only one, but after nearly one hundred thousand copies were sold, the backers decided to publish a second issue in May 1963. The success of the two issues convinced the journal's backers to continue publication semimonthly.

Social Turmoil

Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, developed the idea for the New York Review of Books. His wife, Barbara, and Robert Silvers, a former editor at Harper's magazine, have edited the New York Review of Books since it was founded. The social chaos in the United States over the Vietnam War led the elitist but left-leaning New York Review of Books to adopt surprisingly revolutionary attitudes and radical causes. The Weathermen and the Black Panther party were two of its causes célèbres in the late 1960s. The most famous, and notorious, New York Review of Books cover was a diagram of how to make a Molotov cocktail. As the New Left and radical movements disintegrated in the early 1970s, the magazine returned to its left-wing, literary, nonviolent politics.

Fragmentation

The success of the New York Review of Books in the early 1960s was a symptom of the failing power of mainstream media outlets, newspapers especially, to continue to connect with a society that, as a whole, was becoming more fragmented with fewer shared interests.