Editor | Norman Cousins, 1942–1971, 1973–1977 |
---|---|
Categories | U.S. culture; book, music, and movie reviews; education |
Frequency | Weekly |
Circulation | 660,000 (peak) |
Publisher | various |
Founder | Henry Seidel Canby |
First issue | 1920 |
Final issue | June 1986 |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
ISSN | 0036-4983 |
Saturday Review, [1] previously The Saturday Review of Literature, [2] was an American weekly magazine established in 1924. Norman Cousins was the editor from 1940 to 1971. [3] Under Cousins, it was described as "a compendium of reportage, essays and criticism about current events, education, science, travel, the arts and other topics." [1]
At its peak, Saturday Review was influential as the base of several widely read critics (e.g., Wilder Hobson, music critic Irving Kolodin, and theater critics John Mason Brown and Henry Hewes), and was often known by its initials as SR. It was never very profitable and eventually succumbed to the decline of general-interest magazines after restructuring and trying to reinvent itself more than once during the 1970s and 1980s.
From 1920 to 1924, Literary Review was a Saturday supplement to the New York Evening Post . [4] Henry Seidel Canby established it as a separate publication in 1924. Bernard DeVoto was the editor in 1936–1938. In 1950, John Barkham became book reviewer there. [5] Until 1952, it was known as The Saturday Review of Literature. [4]
The magazine was purchased by the McCall Corporation in 1961. [1]
Saturday Review reached its maximum circulation of 660,000 under the editorship (1940–1971) of Norman Cousins. [2] Longtime editor Cousins resigned when it was sold, along with McCall Books, to a group led by the two co-founders of Psychology Today , which they had recently sold to Boise Cascade. They split the magazine into four separate monthlies [6] and renamed the publishing company Saturday Review Press, but the experiment ended in insolvency two years later. Former editor Cousins purchased it and recombined the units with World, a new magazine that he had started in the meantime. Briefly it was called SR World before it reverted to Saturday Review. Saturday Review Press was sold separately to E. P. Dutton.
The magazine was sold in 1977 to a group led by Carll Tucker, who sold it in 1980 to Macro Communications, the owner of the business magazine Financial World . It was insolvent again in 1982 and was sold to Missouri entrepreneur Jeffrey Gluck. A new group of investors in 1984 resurrected it briefly. According to Greg Lindsay writing for Folio twenty years later, most people consider 1982 "the year Saturday Review died".
Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione acquired all properties in 1987 and used the title briefly from 1993 for an online publication at AOL.
In December 2010, business columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer Joseph N. DiStefano reported in his blog that John T. Elduff of JTE Multimedia planned to "revive" both Collier's and Saturday Review as print and online magazines — mainly print, "for Americans 55 to 90". Both would "have a liberal share of attention to research" and look like they did in the 1950s. [7]
In 2011, JTE Multimedia made use of the Saturday Review name with its website, Saturday Review–Drug Trials, [8] to report on clinical drug research, focusing on inconclusive and adverse trial results. [9] The site disappeared in 2016, with its home page essentially unchanged since its launch date.
John Payne Collier was an English writer, Shakespearean critic, and forger.
Norman Alfred William Lindsay was an Australian artist, etcher, sculptor, writer, art critic, novelist, cartoonist and amateur boxer. One of the most prolific and popular Australian artists of his generation, Lindsay attracted both acclaim and controversy for his works, many of which infused the Australian landscape with erotic pagan elements and were deemed by his critics to be "anti-Christian, anti-social and degenerate".
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American nonprofit organization with more than 700 members. It is the professional association of American book review editors and critics, known primarily for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, a set of literary awards presented every March.
Collier's was an American general interest magazine founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier. It was launched as Collier's Once a Week, then renamed in 1895 as Collier's Weekly: An Illustrated Journal, shortened in 1905 to Collier's: The National Weekly and eventually to simply Collier's. The magazine ceased publication with the issue dated the week ending January 4, 1957, although a brief, failed attempt was made to revive the Collier's name with a new magazine in 2012.
The Saturday Evening Post is an American magazine, currently published six times a year. It was published weekly from 1897 until 1963, and then every other week until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influential magazines among the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons and features that reached two million homes every week.
New York is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, with a particular emphasis on New York City.
MIT Technology Review is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as The Technology Review, and was re-launched without The in its name on April 23, 1998, under then publisher R. Bruce Journey. In September 2005, it was changed, under its then editor-in-chief and publisher, Jason Pontin, to a form resembling the historical magazine.
Norman Cousins was an American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate.
The American Mercury was an American magazine published from 1924 to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States through the 1920s and 1930s.
The Smart Set was an American monthly literary magazine, founded by Colonel William d'Alton Mann and published from March 1900 to June 1930. Its headquarters was in New York City. During its Jazz Age heyday under the editorship of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, The Smart Set offered many up-and-coming authors their start and gave them access to a relatively large audience.
Harold von Schmidt was an American illustrator, who specialized in magazine interior illustrations.
Liberty was an American weekly general-interest magazine, originally priced at five cents and subtitled, "A Weekly for Everybody." It was launched in 1924 by McCormick-Patterson, the publisher until 1931, when it was taken over by Bernarr Macfadden until 1941. At one time it was said to be "the second greatest magazine in America," ranking behind The Saturday Evening Post in circulation. It featured contributions from some of the biggest politicians, celebrities, authors, and artists of the 20th century. The contents of the magazine provided a unique look into popular culture, politics, and world events through the Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, World War II, and postwar America. It ceased publication in 1950 and was revived briefly in 1971.
The Oxford American is a quarterly magazine that focuses on the American South.
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) is a collection of 11 short stories by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, it includes one of his better-known short stories, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". All of the stories had first appeared, independently, in either Metropolitan Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Collier's, the Chicago Sunday Tribune, or Vanity Fair.
Woman's Home Companion was an American monthly magazine, published from 1873 to 1957. It was highly successful, climbing to a circulation peak of more than four million during the 1930s and 1940s. The magazine, headquartered in Springfield, Ohio, was discontinued in 1957.
Alfred Balk was an American reporter, nonfiction author and magazine editor who wrote groundbreaking articles about housing segregation, the Nation of Islam, the environment and Illinois politics. His refusal to identify a confidential source led to a landmark court case. During a career-long emphasis on media improvement, he served on the Twentieth Century Fund's task force that established a National News Council, consulted for several foundations, served as secretary of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's Committee on the Employment of Minority Groups in the News Media, and produced a film, That the People Shall Know: The Challenge of Journalism, narrated by Walter Cronkite. He wrote and co-authored books on a variety of topics, ranging from the tax exempt status of religious organizations to globalization to the history of radio.
Cassell is a British book publishing house, founded in 1848 by John Cassell (1817–1865), which became in the 1890s an international publishing group company.
Musical America is the oldest American magazine on classical music, first appearing in 1898 in print and in 1999 online, at musicalamerica.com. It is published by Performing Arts Resources, LLC, of East Windsor, New Jersey.
Whit Burnett was an American writer and educator who founded and edited the literary magazine Story. In the 1940s, Story was an important magazine in that it published the first or early works of many writers who went on to become major authors. Not only did Burnett prove to be a valuable literary birddog for new talent, but Story remained a respectable though low-paying alternative for stories rejected by the large-circulation slick magazines published on glossy paper like Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post or the somewhat more prestigious and literary slick magazines such as The New Yorker. While Story paid poorly compared to the slicks and even the pulps and successor digest-sized magazines of its day, it paid better than most of, and had similar cachet to, the university-based and the other independent "little magazines" of its era.
John Barkham was a South African-born American syndicated writer for Time, New York Times Book Review, New York World-Telegram, and New York Post who published several thousand book reviews in over half a century of work.