Paris Review, The

an international literary periodical begun in Paris in 1953 by Peter Matthiessen and Harold Humes and latterly published in Paris and New York. Matthiessen remains prominent among the unusually numerous editorial personnel, as do George Plimpton and Donald Hall, who joined him on the second issue in 1953. The Paris Review was founded to pursue a policy of filling its pages with all forms of creative writing and graphics, deliberately eschewing what its editors viewed as the constraining gravitas of critical and socio-political material. Its emphasis has always been on publishing the best contemporary writing available while encouraging authors in the early stages of their careers; its contributors have included Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Robert Creeley, Jorge Luis Borges, Simone Weil, V. S. Naipaul, Terry Southern, Wole Soyinka, Edna O'Brien, and William Burroughs, a list indicative of its vigorously eclectic tendency. The magazine is particularly noted for its regular interviews with leading authors: E. M. Forster, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Boris Pasternak, Robert Lowell, and Marianne Moore were among the the subjects in its earlier years; more recently, interviews with Doris Lessing, William Trevor, Maya Angelou, and Tom Stoppard have appeared. Graphic artists whose work has been published include Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Raoul Duffy.