History
During his 21-year tenure as head of the magazine, John Crowe Ransom made it, according to the magazine's Web site, "perhaps the best known and most influential literary magazine in the English-speaking world during the 1940s and '50s."
In 1959 Robie Macauley succeeded Ransom as editor of The Kenyon Review, where he published fiction and poetry by John Barth, T. S. Eliot, Nadine Gordimer, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, Richmond Lattimore, Doris Lessing, Robert Lowell, V. S. Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates, Frank O'Connor, V. S. Pritchett, Thomas Pynchon, J. F. Powers, Karl Shapiro, Jean Stafford, Christina Stead, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, as well as articles, essays and book reviews by Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Ellmann, Leslie Fiedler, Martin Green, and Raymond Williams. During Macauley's tenure The Kenyon Review published the first reviews in English of Tristes Tropiques and A Clockwork Orange.
A decade after Ransom left the magazine, in 1969, Kenyon College closed it down as its reputation dropped and financial burdens continued. In 1979, however, the quarterly was started up again. Marilyn Hacker, a poet, became the magazine's first full-time editor. "She quickly broadened the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints," according to the magazine.
In April 1994, the college trustees directed that costs be cut and revenues increased in various ways. Hacker left and an English professor at the college, David H. Lynn (acting editor in 1989-90), took over on a two-thirds time basis. The publication's finances have stabilized and improved, and a Kenyon Review Board of Trustees has been set up.
The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize, established in 2008, is awarded annually to writers under the age of thirty. The inaugural contest, judged by novelist Alice Hoffman, was won by Cara Blue Adams; Nick Ripatrazone and Megan Mayhew Bergman were named runners-up.
Read more about this topic: The Kenyon Review
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