Word: reviewers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This week the Review celebrated the fifth anniversary of its founding by peddling a 28,000-copy issue featuring a long, intimate interview with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was obtained with an enterprise characteristic of Review's methods. Young (31) Editor George Plimpton introduced himself to Hemingway in the bar of Paris' Hotel Ritz, spent two weeks watching bullfights with him in Madrid, later flew down to Cuba for long hours of talk in Hemingway's Finca Vigia home, broken by long hours in a fishing boat with the old man and the sea. The resulting interview...
Pernods & Bludgeons. Review's four American founders spun together accidentally in the Paris literary whirl late in 1952. They were Plimpton (Harvard '48), Novelist Harold Humes (M.I.T. '48), Peter Matthiessen (Yale '50) and John P.C. Train (Harvard '50), son of the late lawyer-writer Arthur Train. Over Pernods at the Chaplain bar in Montparnasse, they agreed that the world badly needed a new little magazine, and scraped together $ 1,000 to start it. Their complaint: "Laden with terms like 'architectonic,' 'Zeitgeist' and 'dichotomous,' the literary magazines seem today...
...Review ran in advance a big chunk of Beat Generation Novelist Jack Kerouac's On the Road, printed the first short stories of Playwright James (Blue Denim) Herlihy and Mac (No Time for Sergeants) Hyman. Their office was a back room in the office of a Paris publisher, who locked the front door after 6:30 p.m., forcing Review's editors and visiting writers to depart by dropping six feet from a side window into a stone courtyard below. Unlike its austerely printed rivals, Review early decided to print drawings and illustrate its stories, enlisted as art editor...
...Review's nonfiction manages to convey the flavor of the Left Bank's fermenting geniuses and flamboyant phonies, e.g., Editor Plimpton's relaxed biography of an expressionistic dancer named Vali, who invited her friends in to watch her commit suicide, thought better of it, instead turned out some haunting macabre drawings reproduced in the current issue...
Angel at Their Shoulders. From the first, Review's editors waved away stuffy illusions about the dignity expected of "pure" literature, promoted Paris Review as if it were Paris Confidential. Reviewmen dashed about Paris after dark armed with gluepot and brush, illegally plastered posters on handy walls (one ended up on the lavatory ceiling of the Café du Dôme); others peddled subscriptions from door to door. One early salesman: England's waspish young man Colin (The Outsider) Wilson, who absentmindedly went off with a week's collections. Circulation reached the impressive figure (among...