History and profile
Salmagundi was founded by Robert Boyers in the fall of 1965, using money he earned as a youth, singing at his neighborhood Jewish temple, and at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. [2] [3] Boyers drew inspiration for his quarterly from other "little magazines" of the era, such as Partisan Review , F.R. Leavis's Scrutiny , and T.S. Eliot's Criterion, among others. [3] The title of the magazine was chosen as a reference to the 19th-century periodical of the same name, published by Washington Irving.
In 1969, the magazine moved its headquarters to Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. [2] [4] [5] Boyers and his wife, Margarita "Peg" Boyers, are both professors in Skidmore's English Department. The magazine celebrated its Fiftieth Anniversary in 2015 by publishing three large volumes, featuring "Best Of" selections from Salmagundi's first five decades. [3]
While the magazine has no explicit mission statement, Boyers has often invoked Lionel Trilling's description of the role served by little magazines in preventing the culture from "being cautious and settled, or merely sociological, or merely pious" and "to make the official representatives of literature a little uneasy." [3]
Salmagundi's editors take pride in continually finding "ways to say NO and THINK AGAIN to the largely settled views of our own enlightened readership." [3] Christopher Lasch, a frequent contributor to the Salmagundi until his death in 1994, observed, in 1975, that the magazine "often criticized leftist clichés from a point of view sympathetic to the underlying objectives of the left." Lasch further noted that Salmagundi reliably opposed "fake radicalism," "genteel academicism" and "estheticism," even as it recognized "the precarious position of intellectual culture in the modern world." [3]
One thing that sets Salmagundi apart from other literary magazines is its commitment to hosting (and transcribing, for publication) ambitious symposia, featuring lively debate among prominent scholars and writers. Past symposia have included figures such as, Lionel Trilling, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek, Anthony Appiah, Orlando Patterson, Susan Sontag, and many others.
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