"5. Kenyon Review
Probably the finest literary magazine in American history, the Kenyon Review
was founded by John Crowe Ransom in 1939. The intellectuals and CIA officers
who ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom loved Ransom, and used him and his
literary networks to locate promising students and literary friends that it
could recruit to work for it. Even Ransom’s technique of “New Criticism,” seen
as a quintessentially conservative Cold War form of analysis because it
eschewed examination of the social and political context of literary works, has
sometimes been compared to the work of espionage, by which careful reading can
unearth hidden plans and meanings.
A partial list of the nearly insuperable roster of the Kenyon Review’s authors
includes Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Nadine
Gordimer, Randall Jarrell, and Joyce Carol Oates. It, as well as others,
including the Hudson Review, the Sewannee Review, Poetry, Daedalus, Partisan
Review, and The Journal of the History of Ideas, had hundreds and even
thousands of copies purchased for distribution abroad by the Congress for
Cultural Freedom, and sometimes received grants more directly. This was
significant help for a small magazine; Kenyon Review had to close for a decade
beginning in 1969, just a few years after revelations of CIA involvement forced
such support to be discontinued. Robie Macauley, who had been recruited by the
CIA some years earlier, succeeded Ransom as editor of the Kenyon Review."
http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for-socialists-funded-by-the-cia-ranked
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