-18-

are becoming solemnly aware that the arts, scholarship
and precious thought of the West are in their keeping.
For in Europe's desperate atmosphere the free life of
the intelligence is suspended where it has not been
crushed.

June 2 was the 100th birthday of the
English novelist Thomas Hardy. Neither in the little
old town of Dorchester, where he lived, worked and
died, nor in London, where his ashes rest in Westminster
Abbey, was this anniversary marked so impressively as
it was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There *The Southern
Review*, solidest and most accomplished of U.S. literary
quarterlies, devoted its summer issue entirely to essays
on the work of Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Hardy's novels of "Wessex" are un-
questionably the greatest 19th-Century English fiction
dealing with folk characters and a rural setting. Such
characters and such a setting in the U.S. have been the
chosen material of the South's most gifted modern writers.
*The Southern Review* itself was founded five years ago
by writers who thought seriously about "Agrarianism,"
i.e., rehabilitation of the land, return to the life on
it, respect for its literary possibilities--as a sal-
vation for the South.

Their paradoxical benefactor was Louisiana's
Huey Long, who had simpler notions of salvation. From the
millions lavished by Huey to endow Louisiana State Univer-
sity with a nonpareil stadium, football team and campus,

-19-

three ex-Rhodes scholars, named Robert Penn Warren,
then 29, Cleanth Brooks, Jr., 28, and Charles W. Pipkin,
35, managed in 1935 to get a cut of $10,000 a year for
a quarterly review...

MORE EXACTING THAN THE YALE REVIEW, LESS
STAID THAN THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY, RICHER THAN OHIO'S
NEW KENTUCKY REVIEW, THE SOUTHERN REVIEW HAS APPLIED NO
STANDARDS SAVE EXCELLENCE, HAS BEEN SUBJECT TO NO
POLITICAL PRESSURE WHATEVER (LOUISIANA'S POLITICIANS
ARE APPARENTLY OBLIVIOUS OF THE MAGAZINE)...

As a result, the Hardy Memorial issue of
*The Southern Review* displays more studied insight and
ability than any group of European writers would be
likely to provide. It adds up to the most discerning
criticism of Hardy's verse and fiction that has ever
appeared. The essays of John Crowe Ransom, R.P. Blackmur,
Allen Tate, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Donald Davidson, Katherine
Anne Porter indicate that the stiff formality long typical
of serious U.S. criticism is relaxing, gain in spirited-
ness and ease. They testify to the breadth and integrity
of U.S. literary talent. And they prove, if any proof
was necessary that there exists in the U.S. a national
community of scholars and artists, alive to their own
time and country, and capable of preserving the traditions
of the West.

In the course of discussing some of the new cultural activities
in the South, George Fort Milton writes: "A number of group-
impressed periodicals have arisen, such as "The Southern Review"
-- a Baton Rouge offset to James Monroe Smith." *The Yale Review*,
Autumn, 1939, p. 150.

COMMENTS ON THE SOUTHERN REVIEW

*The New Republic*; October 19, 1938

Meanwhile there is still a need for a magazine primarily devoted to literature, one that can publish long poems or groups of poems and leisurely essays and long stories of literary merit that wouldn't have a chance in the commercial weeklies or monthlies--a magazine, in short, that would carry on the traditions of *The Dial*, dead in 1929, and the *Hound and Horn*, dead in 1934. I saw both of them go without much sorrow, but I miss them more as time goes on, and I think they are missed by every serious writer. Today there is *The Criterion**, edited by an Anglo-Catholic in London, and there is *THE SOUTHERN REVIEW*, EDITED IN BATON ROUGE...Here is a place the *Partisan Review* might have filled in New York...

*Highschool* (National secondary education journal); Feb. 8, 1936:

*The Southern Review*, published by Louisiana State University, is AN ELOQUENT REPLY TO THOSE WHO THINK OF THE COTTON COUNTRY AS A MORASS OF ILLITERACY. It is a scholarly and literary quarterly that stands to the fore of its contemporaries with its concern for democratic culture.

Birmingham *Age-Herald*; March 13, 1937; from the report of an address by Dean Christian Gauss, of Princeton University:

Exampling this renascence, in Dean Gauss's opinion, are the literary magazines at Southern universities--*The Sewanee Review*, *The South Atlantic Quarterly*, *The Virginia Quarterly*,

-2-

*The Southern Review*. He praises the South for "having made this field of distinctively non-commercial, non-academic publication your own. As I have read these magazines I have been delighted particularly by the fact that you are interested in promoting certain experiments in non-commercial American living..."

*The New Republic*; July 21, 1941

This criticism has been extremely catholic and extremely acute: there has been no analysis too complicated, delicate or surprising for these critics to undertake. Modern criticism has accomplished a change in taste, a critical revolution, even greater than the change in poetic performance which modernist poets have affected...I have been speaking of such critics as William Empson...Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren...and five or six others. Their criticism is often printed in such magazines as *The Southern Review*, *The Kenyon Review*, and *Partisan Review*.

*Poetry: A Magazine of Verse*; April, 1936:

It is a matter for general congratulation that this gloom has been relieved by *The Southern Review*, and a cause for special rejoicing that relief has come, not in the form of such feeble compromises with popularity as are usually put up in luring public support, BUT THROUGH A QUARTERLY OF UNQUESTIONABLE INTEGRITY IN ITS EDITORIAL AND LITERARY AIMS...This fear may be greatly reduced, and even eliminated, if one keeps an eye on the object, for the *Review* has accounced and maintained a distinction that immediately makes it SUPERIOR TO POLITICAL AFFILIATIONS... These papers require no unthinking agreement, but whoever

-3-

disagrees with their point of view is invited to do so on a
level of intelligence and sanity, not of provincial bias or the
customary intolerant violence of propagandist causes...This
prejudiced intelligence ought to become an object lesson to other
journals advocating social or literary causes (including the
*Review's* direct opponents, WHO HAVE YET TO PRODUCE AN ORGAN A
SHADE AS GOOD), and likewise should shed light on the DEFECTS
WHICH HAVE BROUGHT QUARTERLIES LIKE THE *YALE REVIEW* AND THE
*VIRGINIA QUARTERLY* TO MISS THEIR SERIOUS OPPORTUNITIES. The
secret of such success for *The Southern Review* lies in its
critical program, which should direct and instruct the more
precarious effort of reconciling the conservative and revolutionary
elements in the American struggle.

Duluth *Herald*: May 25, 1937:

It is a fact worthy of examination that many of Mr.
O'Brien's selections come from magazines that are not traditional
leaders in the field. From *The Southern Review* come four of
the stories which Mr. O'Brien considers best, while the largest
number that any of the lordly publications has achieved is two.

*The New Republic*: October 7, 1936; in Basso's review of
Milburn's novel, *Catalogue*:

In the Autumn, 1935, issue of *The Southern Review*, Mr.
Milburn published some of the episodes contained in *Catalogue*
as a short story. It was an admirable story, done with skill
and distinction...

-5-

of those in *The Saturday Evening Post*, while Story magazine gets that coveted asterisk for nine-tenths of its stories; and every one of the sixteen or seventeen short stories printed in *The Atlantic* and *The Southern Review* wins O'Brien stars.

(The following tables are taken from the O'Brien *Best Short Stories* of 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940. In addition to reprinting in these annual volumes a selection of the best short stories of the year, Mr. O'Brien grades the stories that are printed by the various magazines in America, assigning one star to stories of merit, two stars to stories of superior merit and three stars to stories of highest merit. The following excerpts from his tables show *The Southern Review* in relation to other magazines noted for their excellent stories. It is worthy of comment that the *Southern Review* in the four covered leads in the percentage of its stories which were given two stars or three stars--that is, the stories of very highest merit.):

-6-

1937

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>One Star</th><th>Two Star</th><th>Three Star</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>The Southern Review</td><td>100%</td><td>94%</td><td>56%</td></tr><tr><td>The Atlantic Monthly</td><td>100%</td><td>76%</td><td>47%</td></tr><tr><td>Harper's</td><td>76%</td><td>57%</td><td>24%</td></tr><tr><td>Scribner's</td><td>71%</td><td>32%</td><td>20%</td></tr><tr><td>Story</td><td>89%</td><td>65%</td><td>36%</td></tr></tbody></table>

1938

<table><tbody><tr><td>The Southern Review</td><td>91%</td><td>57%</td><td>43%</td></tr><tr><td>The Atlantic Monthly</td><td>95%</td><td>40%</td><td>15%</td></tr><tr><td>Harper's</td><td>75%</td><td>50%</td><td>20%</td></tr><tr><td>Scribner's</td><td>71%</td><td>32%</td><td>20%</td></tr><tr><td>Story</td><td>90%</td><td>73%</td><td>40%</td></tr></tbody></table>

1939

<table><tbody><tr><td>The Southern Review</td><td>90%</td><td>90%</td><td>70%</td></tr><tr><td>The Atlantic Monthly</td><td>100%</td><td>82%</td><td>52%</td></tr><tr><td>Harper's</td><td>93%</td><td>74%</td><td>37%</td></tr><tr><td>Scribner's</td><td>71%</td><td>29%</td><td>18%</td></tr><tr><td>Story</td><td>96%</td><td>60%</td><td>24%</td></tr></tbody></table>

1940

<table><tbody><tr><td>The Southern Review</td><td>100%</td><td>78%</td><td>78%</td></tr><tr><td>The Atlantic Monthly</td><td>72%</td><td>48%</td><td>36%</td></tr><tr><td>Harper's</td><td>89%</td><td>53%</td><td>41%</td></tr><tr><td>Story</td><td>81%</td><td>59%</td><td>37%</td></tr></tbody></table>

-7-

Atlanta Journal; July 27, 1935:

...the most notable contribution to the literary and
printing art in the South in many years, carrying articles by
many noted persons in the literary world...

The Criterion (London), Spring; 1938:

The Southern Review is published by the Louisiana State
University...IT WOULD BE A GOOD THING IF A FEW OF OUR OWN
UNIVERSITIES SET TO WORK TO PRODUCE PERIODICALS OF SIMILAR
EXCELLENCE. The Southern Review has the inestimable advantage
of a solid core of homogeneous criticism...Already the best
literary periodical of all the American publications...

The English Journal (College Edition); January, 1939:

The Southern Review of Baton Rouge, AT THE MOMENT THE
FOREMOST CRITICAL JOURNAL IN THE UNITED STATES. The critics
adhering to this group have from the first attempted to link
the idea of a whole and homogeneous culture with a whole aesthetic
quality of a work of art. Their criticism has aimed to join the
historical method with a formal and aesthetic on equal and mutually
corrective terms. Their purposes have been best demonstrated in
the work of Allen Tate...John Crowe Ransom..., Donald Davidson...,
Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks (in The Southern Review.)...

...there are projects afoot in literary and critical
pedagogy (at the University of Chicago, Kenyon College, Louisiana
State University, and Harvard University) which are of the greatest
moment in the coming years.

-9-

late Huey Long, inadvertently started a writing colony there when he imported a group of young southern writers to give his Louisiana State University intellectual prestige to match its new buildings. Leader is Robert Penn Warren, who found time to edit a critical quarterly, *The Southern Review*, while writing his first novel, *Night Rider*.

Time; June 10, 1940:

*Wessex and Louisiana.* While the peoples of Europe turn to mass murder, training in the science of murder, or defense against it, intelligent U.S. citizens are becoming solemnly aware that the arts, scholarship and precious thought of the West are in their keeping. For in Europe's desperate atmosphere the free life of the intelligence is suspended where it has not been crushed.

June 2 was the 100th birthday of the Englishnovelist Thomas Hardy. Neither in the little old town of Dorchester, where he lived, worked and died, nor in London, where his ashes rest in Westminster Abbey, was this anniversary marked so impressively as it was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There *The Southern Review*, solidest and most accomplished of U. S. literary quarterlies, devoted its summer issue entirely to essays on the work of Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Hardy's novels of "Wesse," are unquestionably the greatest 19th-Century English fiction dealing with folk characters and a rural setting. Such characters and such a setting in the U.S. have been the chosen material of the South's most gifted modern writers. *The Southern Review* itself was founded five years ago by writers who thought seriously about "Agrarianism," i.e. rehabilitation of the land, return to the life of it, respect for

-10-

its literary possibilities--as a salvation for the South

Their paradoxical benefactor was Louisiana's Huey Long, who had simpler notions of salvation. From the millions lavished by Huey to endow Louisiana State University with a nonpareil stadium, football team and campus, three ex-Rhodes scholars, named Robert Penn Warren, then 29, Cleanth Brooks, Jr., 28, and Charles W. Pipkin, 35, managed in 1935 to get a cut of $10,000 a year for a quarterly review...

MORE EXACTING THAN THE YALE REVIEW, LESS STAUD THAN THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY, RICHER THAN OHIO'S NEW KENYON REVIEW, THE SOUTHERN REVIEW HAS APPLIED NO STANDARDS SAVE EXCELLENCE, HAS BEEN SUBJECT TO NO POLITICAL PRESSURE WHATEVER (LOUISIANA'S POLITICIANS ARE APPARENTLY OBLIVIOUS OF THE MAGAZINE)...

As a result, the Hardy Memorial issue of the *Southern Review* displays more studied insight and ability than any group of European writers would be likely to provide. It adds up to the most discerning criticism of Hardy's verse and fiction that has ever appeared. The essays of John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Donald Davidson, Katherine Anne Porter indicate that the stiff formality long typical of serious U.S. criticism is relaxing, gain in spiritedness and ease. They testify to the breadth and integrity of U.S. literary talent. And they prove, if any proof was necessary, that there exists in the U.S. a national community of scholars and artists, alive to their own time and country, and capable of preserving the traditions of the West

-4-

It would be called "highbrow," I suppose; YET BECAUSE OF ITS CATHOLICITY IT HAS A QUALITY OF UNEXPECTEDNESS THAT IS CERTAINLY ONE OF THE PRIME REQUISITES OF GOOD JOURNALISM. Incidentally, it is very attractively printed.

## II. THE REVIEW AS AN INTERPRETER AND DEFENDER OF THE SOUTH

*The New Republic; October 19, 1938:*

Meanwhile there is still a need for a magazine primarily devoted to literature, one that can publish long poems or groups of poems and leisurely essays and long stories of literary merit that wouldn't have a chance in the commercial weeklies or monthlies--a magazine, in short, that would carry on the traditions of *The Dial*, dead in 1929, and the *Hound and Horn*, dead in 1934. I saw both of them go without much sorrow, but I miss them more as time goes on, and I think they are missed by every serious writer. Today there is *The Criterion**, edited by an Anglo-Catholic in London, and there is *THE SOUTHERN REVIEW*, EDITED IN BATON ROUGE BY A GROUP OF DE-RECONSTRUCTED REBELS; ... Here is a place the *Partisan Review* might have filled in New York...

*(The Criterion has since suspended publication.)*

*The Tennessean Magazine; July 28, 1935:*

The maiden issue of *The Southern Review*, a quarterly published at Louisiana State University,

appearing this month is a phenomenon to warn the
cockles of a Southerner's heart and whip up intell-
ectual appetites all over the country.

*Highschool* (*National secondary education journal*);
February 8, 1936:

The *Southern Review*, published by Louisiana State University, IS AN ELOQUENT REPLY TO THOSE WHO THINK OF THE COTTON COUNTRY AS A MORASS OF ILLITERACY. It is a scholarly and literary quarterly that stands to the fore of its contemporaries with its concern for democratic culture.

Headline in Memphis *Commercial-Annal*, reviewing the
Spring, 1937, issue of *The Southern Review*:

MAGAZINE HURLS GAUNTLET IN DEFENSE OF
SOUTH

Columbus, Georgia, Ladson; February 21, 1936, in an
editorial headed "Wade on Caldwell":

One of the brightest minds the writing
world of Georgia has produced in the last decade is
John Donald Wade...He has given the nation some highly
valuable interpretations of Georgia life. It is of par-
ticular interest therefore when he undertakes a calm and
factual estimate of another Georgia writer, Erskine
Caldwell, who is now ranked as the South's interpreter
of most doubtful value. For instance, he wrote "Tobacco

-6-

Road."...

Dr. Wade's able analysis appears in the CURRENT ISSUE OF THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY THE LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS AT BATON ROUGE. He concludes with the assertion that "truly, it is a damaging thing to say of an author that the more one may know of a circumstance the author describes, the less, very often, one is disposed to credit his report. Much that Mr. Caldwell has written is misleading...It is likely that his entire literary output would be more impressive if--a good Southerner still-he were not as plaintively anxious as he is to please the kind and class of people that he has come to be affiliated with-- the detached, nervous, thrill-goaded metro-cosmopolitans."

Birmingham Age-Herald; March 13, 1937; from the report of an address by Dean Christian Gauss, of Princeton University:

Exampling this renaissance, in Dean Gauss's opinion, are the literary magazines at Southern universities--*The Souvenir Review*, *The South Atlantic Quarterly*, *The Virginia Quarterly*, *The Southern Review*. He praises the South for "having made this field of distinctively non-commercial, non-academic publication your own. As I have read these magazines I have been delighted particularly by the fact that you are interested in promoting certain experiments in non-commercial American living..."

-7-

### III. THE JUSTIFICATION OF THE SUBSIDIZED QUARTERLY

Nashville *Banner*; in a column headed "Southern Review":

*The Dial* was a lot of fun; sometimes you couldn't understand what it was all about; sometimes it was as lucid as Christopher Morley himself. But it is gone now, with nothing to take its place. That is sad, but not an irreparable loss...AND THEN THERE'S THE SOUTHERN REVIEW.

The Lord knows it's not *The Dial*. But, then, it's not *The American Review* either, that sad downfall of the smug and swell old *Backman*. It's academic and a quarterly, but it is entertaining, in a very serious way...THERE ARE HERE IN THIS QUARTERLY MANY OTHER ARTICLES OF A NATURE FOR WHICH THERE ARE NONE TOO MANY MEDIUMS...

*The New Republic*; July 21, 1941:

This criticism has been extremely catholic and extremely acute: there has been no analysis too complicated, delicate or surprising for these critics to undertake. Modern criticism has accomplished a change in taste, a critical revolution, even greater than the change in poetic performance which modernist poets have effected...I have been speaking of such critics as William Empson...Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren...and five or six others. Their criticism is often printed in such magazines as *The Southern Review*, *The Kenyon Review*, and *Partisan Review*.

-8-

Harvard Alumni Bulletin; November 1, 1935:

The difficulties of publishing successfully a serious quarterly review identified with a college or university are considerable. Such a review must, to put it briefly, CONTENT ITSELF WITH FEW SUBSCRIBERS AND EX- ACT A HEAVY SUBSIDY...

But a magazine can always be printed if its backers are able and willing to support it, and although it may reach but few readers, if it is well edited it may perform a useful service. MORE THAN ONE COLLEGE OR UNIVERSITY QUARTERLY IS SUBSISTING ON THESE TERMS, AND IS BRINGING OUT EXCELLENT MATERIAL, MATERIAL WHICH MIGHT OTHERWISE NEVER APPEAR AT ALL, or might appear on terms even less favorable to writers who are hard enough put to it for channels of publication.

Although it is hardly possible to imagine encouraging commercial prospects for a newcomer in the field, we extend our greetings and good wishes to _The Southern Review_...This promising quarterly is published by the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. IT IS DIGNIFIED AND READABLE IN FORMAT, AND VIGOROUSLY EDITED...

Poetry: *A Magazine of Verse*; April, 1936

It is a matter for general congratulation that this gloom has been relieved by _The Southern Review_, and a cause for special rejoicing that relief has come, not in the form of such feeble compromises with popularity as are usually put up in luring public support, BUT THROUGH A QUARTERLY OF UNQUESTIONABLE INTEGRITY IN ITS EDITORIAL

-12-

1937

1938

1939

1940

-13-

V. THE GENERAL REPUTATION OF THE SOUTHERN REVIEW IN THIS
COUNTRY AND ABROAD

The Washington Post; July 30, 1935:

If the editor were searching for a legendary
yardstick for The Southern Review, he would have no fur-
ther to look than within one of its own articles. There
Ford Madox Ford states that "to possess a Literature, a
country must have a whole cloud--or better still, a whole
populace--of writers instinct with a certain skill in, a
certain respect for, a certain productivity of, writing."
THE WRITERS OF THIS FIRST ISSUE MEASURE UP.

Memphis Commercial Appeal; May 16, 1937:

Despite its youth, this magazine has already
made a distinguished contribution to American letters.
Its list of contributors includes such names as Herbert
Agar, Aldous Huxley, Ford M. Ford, John Crowe Ransom,
Allen Tate, Carolyn Gordon, John T. Flynn, Hilaire
Belloe, and John Deway--truly a distinguished group.

New Orleans Times-Picayune (?):

It is a serious and thoughtful periodical,
not to be classed as light reading, even for the erudite,
and it is attractive in form and typography.

San Francisco Chronicle; January 13, 1936; from a literary
column by J. H. Jackson:

Judging by Volume I, Number 3, the first
issue I have seen, it's going to force some of the older

-14-

and better known quarterlies to look to their laurels.

Louisville Courier-Journal; May 31, 1936:

The new quarterly has something that suggests the quality of the lamented *Hound and Horn* that makes a telling blend with its Southern flavor.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, World; October 6, 1935:

...it is one of the most beautiful magazines of its kind I have ever seen. It has the *Yale Review* and *The Virginia Quarterly* so far outclassed as to appearance there is no comparison...

Dallas News; August 4, 1935:

With its initial number, *The Southern Review*, published at Baton Rouge under the patronage of the Louisiana State University, comes up fairly abreast of the ten-year-old *Virginia Quarterly*, quite as broad in its outlook, as weighty in opinion, somewhat fresher in its appropriately modern form.

-16-

*Etudes Anglaises; April-June, 1938:*

Cette revue continue à être aussi soignée dans sa présentation que dans son contenu, et l'une des plus littéraires des Etats-Unis.

*Englische Studien (Leipzig):*

Im ganzen scheint die neue Zeitschrift sehr wertvoll, anregend und für den heutigen Tag ausserordentlich aufschussreich zu sein.

*Time Magazine; January 23, 1939:*

Not since its brief awakening after the Civil War has southern literary life been as lively as it is now. Not since that same period has southern life changed as rapidly as it is now changing. Political and economic news from the South is confused and contradictory; but Southern literary news snaps and crackles with unexpected items--with new writers discovered and old writers coming back, new magazines popping up and every mail bringing to publishers' desks fresh evidence of the South's literary ferment. In England (where T.S. Eliot's