New Republic, The

a weekly magazine devoted to domestic and international current affairs, reviews of the arts, and commentary on a wide range of social and cultural topics. It was founded in New York in 1914 by Willard D. Straight, with Herbert D. Croly as editor. Croly was succeeded in 1930 by Bruce Bliven. The magazine subsequently came under the control of an editorial board. Malcolm Cowley, Robert Pinsky, and Edmund Wilson have been among its literary editors. Although the prevailing political orientation of the New Republic has always been perceptibly, and sometimes radically, liberal, it is remained hospitable to a wide spectrum of views. It assumed authority and influence early in its career; its failure to censure the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution generated controversy and it was instrumental in swaying opinion towards the Senate's repudiation of President Wilson's signature to the Treaty of Versailles. In the course of the 1920s it became one of the most highly regarded of the more widely circulated periodicals of quality in America and Britain, featuring work from distinguished writers on both sides of the Atlantic: Walter Lippmann, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, and Virginia Woolf were among the contributors of articles; reviewers included Llewellyn Powys, Sean O'Faolain, Lewis Mumford, Robert Penn Warren, and Louise Bogan, who also supplied poems, as did Edith Sitwell, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Elinor Wylie. From 1930 onward the increasing urgency of the journal's political concerns resulted in some diminishment of its literary content. In the post-war decades it regained its reputation for the excellence of its book reviews, and is also noted for its coverage of the cinema and theatre.