The Evergreen Review is a U.S.-based literary magazine. Its publisher is John Oakes and its editor-in-chief is
Dale Peck. The Evergreen Review was founded by
Barney Rosset, publisher of
Grove Press. It existed in print from 1957[1] until 1984, and was re-launched online in 1998, and again in 2017. Its lasting impact can be seen in the March–April 1960 issue, which included work by
Albert Camus,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Bertolt Brecht and
Amiri Baraka, as well as
Edward Albee's first play, The Zoo Story (1958). The Camus piece was a reprint of "
Reflections on the Guillotine", first published in English in the Review in 1957 and reprinted on this occasion as the magazine's "contribution to the worldwide debate on the problem of
capital punishment and, more specifically, the case of
Caryl Whittier Chessman." The magazinne's commitment to the progressive side of the political spectrum has been consistent, with early stance for civil rights and against the
Vietnam War. The image of
Che Guevara that first appeared on the cover of its February 1968 issue, designed by
Paul Davis and based on a photograph by
Alberto Korda, became a popular symbol of resistance.
Although primarily a literary magazine, Evergreen Review always contained numerous illustrations. In its early years, these included a small number of
cartoons. By the mid-1960s, many illustrations and photographs were of an
erotic nature, including a serialized graphic novel, The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist by writer
Michael O'Donoghue and artist
Frank Springer. It was later published as a Grove Press hardcover in 1968 and trade paperback in 1969.
Evergreen evolution
Ken Jordan, writing in the introduction to the Evergreen Review Reader, 1957–1996, described the counter-cultural contents and the impact of the publication on readers:
The first issue featured an essay by
Jean-Paul Sartre and an interview with the great New Orleans jazz drummer
Baby Dodds. It also included a story of
Samuel Beckett's Dante and the Lobster, the first of his many appearances in the pages of Evergreen, which continued through to the last [print] issue published.
The second issue was a landmark. A banner across the cover declared "San Francisco Scene," and inside held the first collection of work by the new Beat writers - including Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Gary Snyder,
Michael McClure,
Philip Whalen, Jack Kerouac (before the publication of On the Road) and Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl had already been published as a pamphlet by Ferlinghetti's press,
City Lights, and was confiscated by customs officials and faced trial for obscenity in San Francisco. The issue brought the Beats and Evergreen Review to the forefront of the American stage...
Evergreen published writing that was literally counter to the culture, and if it was sexy, so much the better. In the context of the time, sex was politics, and the powers-that-be made the suppression of sexuality a political issue. The court battles that Grove Press fought for the legal publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch, and for the legal distribution of the film I Am Curious: Yellow, spilled onto the pages of Evergreen Review, and in 1964, an issue of Evergreen itself was confiscated in New York State by the
Nassau County District Attorney on obscenity charges...
All of this was done on a shoestring budget by a tiny staff. Barney Rosset started the magazine with editor
Don Allen and
Fred Jordan, who was nominally the business manager in its early days.
Richard Seaver joined the editorial team with the ninth issue, and Don Allen stepped back to become a contributing editor. Publication increased from quarterly to bimonthly to, in the late sixties, monthly, and the format changed from trade paperback to a full-sized, glossy magazine attaining a subscription base of some 40,000 copies and a newsstand circulation of 100,000. [2]
Online
The print edition of Evergreen Review ceased publication in 1984, but the magazine was revived in 1998 in an online edition edited by founder
Barney Rosset and his wife Astrid Myers.[3] The online magazine featured American lyric poets such as
Dennis Nurkse[4] and postcolonial authors such as
Giannina Braschi.[5] The online version ceased publication in 2013 and was revived in March 2017 with
OR Books co-publisher John Oakes as publisher and writer and critic
Dale Peck as editor-in-chief. The poetry editor is
Jee Leong Koh. Contributing editors include
Porochista Khakpour and
Jeffery Renard Allen.[6][7]
Collections
Rosset, Barney, ed. Evergreen Review Reader: A ten-year anthology of America's leading literary magazine (1957–1968). Grove Press, 1968.
Glass, Loren. Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Rosset, Barney. Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship.OR Books, 2017.