- "Transatlantic Review" redirects here. For the 1924 magazine edited by Ford Madox Ford, see Transatlantic Review (1924).
Transatlantic Review was a literary journal founded and edited by Joseph F. McCrindle in 1959, and published at first in Rome, then London and New York. McCrindle revived the title of the original Paris
transatlantic reviewThe Transatlantic Review was an influential monthly literary magazine edited by Ford Madox Ford in 1924...
founded by
Ford Madox FordFord Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
in 1924.
History
McCrindle's first intention was to publish short stories and poetry that he had not been able to place as a literary agent. He was inspired in part by the periodical
Botteghe OscureBotteghe Oscure was a literary journal, published and edited in Rome by Marguerite Caetani from 1948 until 1960.It was named after Botteghe Oscure Street, where the editorial office was located...
, which was based in Rome and published by Marguerite Caetani.
Eugene WalterEugene Ferdinand Walter, Jr. was an American screenwriter, poet, short-story author, actor, puppeteer, gourmet chef, cryptographer, translator, editor, costume designer and well-known raconteur. During his years in Paris, he was nicknamed Tum-te-tum...
provided a connection between the two; after helping launch
The Paris Review, he edited Caetani's magazine for a while and was a contributing editor to
Transatlantic Review from the third issue until the last.
George GarrettGeorge Palmer Garrett. was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2006. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun...
was one of a group of initially credited editors, including
William GoldmanWilliam Goldman is an American novelist, playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.-Early life and education:...
, and by issue 3 became the poetry editor, continuing alongside
B. S. JohnsonB. S. Johnson was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic, producer of television programmes and film-maker.-Biography:...
up until issue 39. Another significant contributing editor was the playwright, poet and actor
Heathcote WilliamsHeathcote Williams is an English poet, actor and award-winning playwright. He is also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror...
.
In the long run,
TR, as it was often called, brought together a mixture of essays, interviews, short stories and poetry in a publication that ran for 60 issues between 1959 and 1977. Seven
O. Henry AwardThe O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....
-winning stories came from its pages. McCrindle's goal was to strike a balance between leading writers and new, sometimes unpublished, ones, and, as the title implies, between American and British writers.
B.S. Johnson was eventually the sole poetry editor and assembled the feature, "New Transatlantic Poetry". He also introduced the idea of an occasional "
eroticaErotica are works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or sexually arousing descriptions...
" competition in the interest of stimulating circulation. Prize-winners included
Paul AblemanPaul Ableman was an English playwright and novelist. He was the writer of much erotic fiction and novelisations, and a freelance writer who turned his hand to non-fiction....
,
Diana AthillDiana Athill OBE is a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the most important writers of the 20th century.-Life and writings:...
,
Gavin EwartGavin Buchanan Ewart was a British poet best known for contributing to Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse at the age of seventeen.-Life:...
, Giles Gordon,
D. M. ThomasDonald Michael Thomas, known as D. M. Thomas , is a Cornish novelist, poet, and translator.Thomas was born in Redruth, Cornwall, UK. He attended Trewirgie Primary School and Redruth Grammar School before graduating with First Class Honours in English from New College, Oxford in 1959...
,
Jerry StahlJerry Stahl is an American novelist and screenwriter, He is best known for his memoir of addiction Permanent Midnight. A film adaptation followed with Ben Stiller in the lead role....
, Jay Jeff Jones and Trevor Hoyle.
A notable issue was number 52 (Autumn 1975), which featured
An Anthology of New American Poetry, compiled by
Gerard MalangaGerard Joseph Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, curator and archivist.-Early life:Born in the Bronx, New York, Malanga graduated from the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan and attended Wagner College on Staten Island...
. It included work by
Charles BukowskiHenry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...
,
Lawrence FerlinghettiLawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
,
Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
,
Louis ZukofskyLouis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
,
George OppenGeorge Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
,
Jonathan WilliamsJonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...
,
Gary SnyderGary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
,
Michael McClureMichael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
,
Harold NorseHarold Norse was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.- Life :Born Harold Rosen to an unmarried Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn...
and
Lou ReedLewis Allan "Lou" Reed is an American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his successful solo career, which has spanned several decades...
.
After a decade, McCrindle selected the magazine's best for his
Stories from the Transatlantic Review (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970; Penguin, 1974), an anthology that included
Paul BowlesPaul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...
,
Jerome CharynJerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life...
,
Bruce Jay FriedmanBruce Jay Friedman is an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor.Raised in the Bronx by Irving and Mollie Friedman, Bruce Jay Friedman graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School. He then attended the University of Missouri as a journalism major, then served as a First Lieutenant in...
, Penelope Gilliatt,
William GoldmanWilliam Goldman is an American novelist, playwright, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.-Early life and education:...
and
Joyce Carol OatesJoyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...
. McCrindle collected the interviews in
Behind the Scenes: Theater and Film Interviews from the Transatlantic Review (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).
The final issue was published June 1977. A complete set of
Transatlantic Review is valued at $600. An announcement appeared in the penultimate issue of the magazine saying that the title would continue as an annual review but this idea was not pursued. After he folded the magazine, McCrindle established the Henfield Foundation (later called the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation) and continued to support new writing talent with awards and grants. He died July 11, 2008 at his home in New York City.
Writers
J. G. BallardJames Graham Ballard was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction...
,
Samuel BeckettSamuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
,
Anthony BurgessJohn Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
,
William S. BurroughsWilliam Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
,
Jean CocteauJean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
,
William FaulknerWilliam Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
,
Alan LelchukAlan Lelchuk is a novelist, professor, and editor from Brooklyn, New York. He did his undergraduate work at Brooklyn College and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1965...
,
Iris MurdochDame Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious...
,
Alan SillitoeAlan Sillitoe was an English writer and one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s.. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied.- Biography :...
,
John UpdikeJohn Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
,
Richard YatesRichard Yates was an American novelist and short story writer, known for his exploration of mid-20th century life.-Life:...
,
Harold PinterHarold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
,
William TrevorWilliam Trevor, KBE is an Irish author and playwright. He is considered one of the elder statesman of the Irish literary world and widely regarded as the greatest contemporary writer of short stories in the English language....
,
John BanvilleJohn Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter.Banville's breakthrough novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011...
and other well-known authors appeared in the publication. Many issues featured interviews with theater and film directors, authors and playwrights, such as
Eugene WalterEugene Ferdinand Walter, Jr. was an American screenwriter, poet, short-story author, actor, puppeteer, gourmet chef, cryptographer, translator, editor, costume designer and well-known raconteur. During his years in Paris, he was nicknamed Tum-te-tum...
's 1960 interview with
Gore VidalGore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
and Giles Gordon's 1964 interview with
Joe OrtonJohn Kingsley Orton was an English playwright.In a short but prolific career lasting from 1964 until his death, he shocked, outraged and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies...
, which appeared shortly before Orton was murdered. Other interviewees included
Edward AlbeeEdward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
,
Peter YatesPeter James Yates was an English director and producer. He was born in Aldershot, Hampshire.The son of an army officer, he attended Charterhouse School as a boy, graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked for some years as an actor, director and stage manager...
, Pinter, Burgess (twice),
Federico FelliniFederico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI , was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century...
,
William GaskillWilliam 'Bill' Gaskill is a British theatre director.He worked alongside Laurence Olivier as a founding director of the National Theatre from its time at the Old Vic in 1963...
,
William IngeWilliam Motter Inge was an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s, he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, and one of these, Picnic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize...
and
Christopher IsherwoodChristopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an English-American novelist.-Early life and work:Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...
.
Illustrators
The only issue of
Transatlantic Review that did not contain an illustration was the debut issue. The second issue had only one, by Jean Cocteau, but illustration soon became a staple item, usually unrelated to the text but in some cases complementing short stories or articles. Contributors of illustration included
Dylan ThomasDylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
, Peter Farmer,
Elaine de KooningElaine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist, Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era and editorial associate for Art News magazine...
, Daniel Mroz,
Mervyn PeakeMervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R...
,
Patrick ProcktorPatrick Procktor RA was a prominent English artist of the late 20th century.-Early life:Patrick Procktor was born in Dublin, the younger son of an oil company accountant, but moved to London when his father died in 1940...
, Kaffe Fasset, Mike McGear,
Heathcote WilliamsHeathcote Williams is an English poet, actor and award-winning playwright. He is also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror...
,
Larry RiversLarry Rivers was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
,
John H. HowardJohn H Howard is a British painter and illustrator. He graduated from Camberwell School of Art. He started his career in London and moved to New York where he began illustrating for advertising,...
and
Colin SpencerColin Spencer is an English writer and artist who has produced a prolific body of work in a wide variety of mediums since his first published short stories and drawings appeared in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22...
.
Contents of Stories from the Transatlantic Review
- "Introduction" • Joseph F. McCrindle
- "Music to Lay Eggs By" • Thomas Bridges • 1968
- "Home Is" • Morris Lurie • 1968
- "The Road" • Alan Sillitoe • 1968
- "Summer Voices" • John Banville • 1968
- "Making Changes" • Leonard Michaels • 1969
- "My Sister and Me" • Asa Baber, Jr. • 1967
- "Before the Operation" • Paul Breslow • 1967
- "The Collector" • Austin C. Clarke • 1967
- "Sing, Shaindele, Sing" • Jerome Charyn • 1966
- "Black Barbecue" • Daniel Spicehandler • 1966
- "The Adult Education Class" [from Eating People Is Wrong] • Malcolm Bradbury • 1959
- "During the Jurassic" • John Updike • 1966
- "Acme Rooms and Sweet Marjorie Russell" • Hugh Allyn Hunt • 1966
- "The Zodiacs" • Jay Neugeboren • 1969
- "Dying" • Joyce Carol Oates • 1966
- "The Redhead" • Penelope Gilliatt • 1965
- "Girl in a White Dress" • Edward Franklin • 1964
- "Changed" • Norma Meacock • 1964
- "A Meeting in Middle Age" • William Trevor • 1964
- "The World’s Fastest Human" • Irvin Faust • 1964
- "The Siege" • Sol Yurick • 1963
- "The Enemy" • Bruce Jay Friedman • 1963
- "Simple Arithmetic" • Virginia Moriconi • 1963
- "The Hyena" • Paul Bowles • 1962
- "The Fair of San Gennaro" • John McPhee • 1961
- "Ismael" • Alfred Chester • 1961
- "Francois Yattend" • Jean-Claude Van Itallie • 1961
- "The Star Blanket" • Shirley Schoonover • 1961
- "A Game of Catch" • George Garrett • 1960
- "The Educated Girl" • V. S. Pritchett
Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE , was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes...
• 1960
- "Johnny Dio and the Sugar Plum Burglars" • Harry D. Miller • 1960
- "At Home with the Colonel" • Frank Tuohy • 1962
- "A Different Thing" • Walter Clemons • 1959
- "The Ice Cream Eat" • William Goldman • 1959
- "Biographical Notes"
External links