Partisan Review

Accessing Issues Online

Issues of Partisan Review from 1934-2003 are available online.

The Partisan Review collection held in BU’s Special Collections consists primarily of correspondence to and from various contributors to and editors of the journal. The collection also includes some professional material and other items. View the detailed Finding Aid to the Partisan Review collection.

About the Magazine

Founded in 1934, Partisan Review magazine was one of the most significant cultural literary journals in the United States.  Throughout its 69-year history, Partisan Review contributors wrote on the cultural and political subjects of the day, ranging from art and book reviews to psychology and political theories to columns from intellectuals reporting on World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the reintegration of Europe, terrorism, and other topics. It also published creative essays, commentary, book reviews, and book excerpts by such writers as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Shattuck, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren.

In 1978, Partisan Review moved from Rutgers University to Boston University under the editorship of William Phillips and Steven Marcus, with Edith Kurzweil as Executive Editor. The Partisan Review held several conferences at BU, including 1982 conference “Writers in Exile”, where writers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union gathered for the first time. Other topics of conferences or special issues in the following years were cultural freedom, education, multiculturalism, and the role of literacy.

The last issue of the magazine, that of Spring 2003, was devoted to “A Tribute to William Phillips.”