New York Review of Books, The

a fortnightly literary periodical founded on a provisional basis in 1963, when a printers' strike resulted in the suspension of New York's principal book-reviewing pages through the temporary closure of the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. It was favourably received and began regular publication under the continuing joint editorship of Robert B. Silvers, formerly a member of the editorial board of the Paris Review, and Barbara Epstein. Among the reviewers have been D. J. Enright, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Frank Kermode, V. S. Pritchett, and contributors of articles have included W. H. Auden, Noam Chomsky, Richard Ellmann, Andrei Sakharov, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mary McCarthy. Like its British descendant, the London Review of Books, the journal is noted for the high standards of its extended review essays and is a leading literary and intellectual organ of the democratic Left. During the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair it was in the vanguard of articulate protest against the American administration. The celebrated caricatures of literary and political figures by the artist David Levine are a perennial feature of its pages. Most issues devote space to poetry; among the notable British and American poets whose work has been represented are Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Ted Hughes, John Ashbery, and Richard Wilbur.