In Conversation: Robert Silvers
As the New York Review of Books turns 50, its founding editor speaks with Review contributor Mark Danner about the poetry of Twitter, hiding the Pentagon Papers, and how his journal of ideas emerged from the flood of “little magazines” as possibly the unlikeliest success story in publishing. |
(Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath)
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Fifty years—50 years of the New York Review.
From John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis and King’s “I have a dream” to tweets and drones and Barack Obama.
You could say the inspiration for the Review went back even further, to 1959 and Elizabeth Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing” in Harper’s. That essay is crucial.
It was an attack you published on what she took to be the lazy criticism found elsewhere—particularly in the New York Times.
She wrote, “The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself—have made the New York Times into a provincial literary journal.”
Lizzie made it clear something different was needed—something new! About that, she wrote, “Nothing matters more than the kind of thing the editor would like, if he could have his wish. Editorial wishes always partly become true.”
The newspaper strike came about three years later—114 days without a newspaper printed. Lizzie and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, were having dinner with my friends Jason and Barbara Epstein, and Jason, then a senior editor at Random House, said there was no choice: The time had come to start a new book review. More
