Encounter (magazine) - Melvin Lasky and The 1960s

Melvin Lasky and The 1960s

The transition to Kristol’s replacement on the political side of Encounter in 1958 by Melvin J. Lasky (1920-2004) was seamless, and a key factor both in the broadening of the magazine’s international scope to include a deeper extension of its European coverage, from the Soviet bloc not least, as well as its coverage of the newly-decolonized nations of Africa and Asia. After combat with the 7th army and postwar service in Berlin under military governor Lucius Clay, Lasky founded the influential German-language highbrow monthly Der Monat (The Month), and, amid an adult life spent largely ever since in Germany, was enlisted in 1955 back in New York to edit the first two numbers of The Anchor Review (1955–57), an annual published by the new Anchor Books imprint of Doubleday, fruit of the 1950s quality-paperback revolution spearheaded by Jason Epstein, and whose international roster of high-humanist contributors – Auden, Connolly, Koestler, Silone – made it resemble a concurrent mini-Encounter.