Encounter (magazine) - Recognition

Recognition

Thanks to the uncommon distinction, disciplinary and geographic range of the contributors it brought together in one venue, most markedly during the years 1953–67 prior to the CIA-funding revelations, Encounter earned regard as a high-water mark in postwar periodical literature. In a review of recent work by Stephen Spender in The New Republic in 1963, the American poet John Berryman wrote, "I don't know how Spender has got so many poems done, especially because he does many things besides write poetry: he is a brilliant and assiduous editor (I would call Encounter the most consistently interesting magazine now being published)…" In the early 1970s, the American monthly Esquire said of Encounter that it was "probably not as good now as when it was backed by the CIA, but still the best general monthly magazine going." In the late 1970s, the Observer wrote that "Encounter is a magazine which constantly provides, in any given month, exactly what a great many of us would have wished to read... there is no other journal in the English-speaking world which combines political and cultural material of such consistently high quality", while the International Herald Tribune called Encounter "one of the few great beacons of English-language journalism... a model of how to present serious writing." And in a review in 2011 in The New Republic of a posthumous collection of essays by Irving Kristol, Franklin Foer wrote that "Encounter... deserve a special place in the history of the higher journalism... was some of the best money that the ever spent. The journal, published out of London, was an unlikely coupling of the New York intelligentsia with their English counterparts—an exhilarating intermarriage of intellectual cultures. I am not sure that any magazine has ever been quite so good as the early Encounter, with its essays by Mary McCarthy and Nancy Mitford, Lionel Trilling and Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Wilson and Cyril Connolly. In his typically self-effacing manner, Kristol heaped credit upon Spender for the achievement."