New World Writing

New World Writing was a paperback magazine, a literary anthology series published by New American Library's Mentor imprint from 1951 until 1964.^[1]

Rare Library described it as "one of the longest running and very significant paperback magazines in American literature. An institution that sprang up in the 1950s, showcasing original and first appearance of stories, poems, essays, etc. of leading writers from around the world. It has sometimes lapsed, but then returned to life, outlasting imitators in nearly every decade."

A purchase of the anthology was described in Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died":

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly New World Writing to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days^[1]

Contributors

The fourth issue had two contributions by Gore Vidal, who had helped found New World Writing.^[2]

The seventh issue (1955) included the first chapter of Catch-22 (named Catch-18 originally) and "Jazz of the Beat Generation" by "Jean-Louis" (actually an excerpt from Jack Kerouac's On the Road). That issue also included work by Heinrich Böll and Dylan Thomas. The eighth issue (1955) featured Flannery O'Connor, Federico Garcia Lorca and Thomas Berger. New World Writing 17 (1960) included John Updike's "The Sea's Green Sameness", James Purdy's "Daddy Wolf", an essay by Otto Friedrich on Ezra Pound and Louise W. King's first published story, "The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies."

Other contributors included W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, E. E. Cummings, William Gaddis, Jean Genet, André Gide, Eugène Ionesco, Christopher Isherwood, Norman Mailer, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Robert Motherwell, Octavio Paz, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams, Upton Sinclair, Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams.

The editors were Stewart Richardson and Corlies M. Smith. The cover design was by Ernst Reichl. It was succeeded in 1967 by New American Review, edited by Ted Solotaroff.

See also

• List of literary magazines

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Davidson, Michael. Guys Like Us, University of Chicago Press, 2004.
2. ^ Kloman, Harry. "The Pseudonyms of Gore Vidal: 1950-1954," 2005