Oldest Literary Magazines in the U.S.

Paying respect to our lit mag elders

Recently I posted a list of 73 brand new lit mags, begun in 2020 or after. To follow up on that, I thought it would be fun to highlight the elders among us, those lit mags that were founded way back in pre-historic times, before zany inventions like the internet, cell phones, disposable cameras and the first artificial human heart.

For history lovers, looking through the archives of these lit mags can be fun. Not only will we find the very first published stories of some of the world’s greatest writers, but we can see how literary trends evolved over the decades. And we can see how journal editors play a role in not only finding literary talent, but curating the narratives that reflect particular historical moments.

For writers, older lit mags can be more competitive to publish in, as over the years they have built large followings and solid reputations, and therefore high submission volume. Still, it’s worth a shot! And whether or not you break in right away, you can take comfort in knowing these journals—we hope—will stick around for a good while longer.

All info is taken from the journals’ websites or wikipedia. They are arranged in order of founding date.

Founded in Boston in 1815, The North American Review is the oldest and one of the most culturally significant literary magazines in the United States. Contributors include important nineteenth-century American writers and thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and twentieth-century writers like William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, and Flannery O’Connor.

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A pre-eminent journal of literature and ideas, The Yale Review has published writers such as Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, José Ortega y Gasset, Stanley Cavell, Robert Lowell, John Hersey, Bayard Rustin, Adrienne Rich, James Merrill, and Rita Dove. We began in 1819 as The Christian Spectator, became The New Englander in 1843, and then an economics-focused Yale Review in 1892. The modern history of the journal began on a rainy day in 1911, when the English professor Wilbur Cross ducked under the umbrella of Yale’s president, Arthur Twining Hadley, and outlined to him plans for a new and greater Yale Review, a journal that could house luminaries in their fields such as George Santayana and Edith Wharton, but also nurture unheralded beginners such as Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Hardwick. After Cross, the magazine had a succession of distinguished editors, including, most recently, the eminent sociologist Kai Erikson, literary critic Penelope Laurans, and the poet and librettist J. D. McClatchy. Each editor extended the journal’s rich tradition of literary excellence and broadened its reach. Entering its third century in 2020, The Yale Review is proud to be a space for the dynamic exchange of ideas, and a home to poetry, fiction, interviews, and incisive criticism and essays.  

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Harper’s Magazine made its debut in June 1850, the brainchild of the prominent New York book-publishing firm Harper & Brothers. The initial press run of 7,500 copies sold out immediately, and within six months circulation had reached 50,000.

Although the earliest issues consisted largely of material that had already been published in England, the magazine soon began to print the work of American artists and writers—among them Horatio Alger, Stephen A. Douglas, Theodore Dreiser, Horace Greeley, Winslow Homer, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Jack London, John Muir, Frederic Remington, Booth Tarkington, and Mark Twain. Several departments served to note regularly important events of the day, such as the publication of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, the laying of the first trans-Atlantic cable, the latest discoveries from Thomas Edison’s workshop, and the progress of the crusade for women’s rights.

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Reed Magazine is California’s oldest literary journal. Tracing its heritage to 1867, the journal started as a mere pamphlet published by students of the California State Normal School, the precursor of San José State University. In more than a century and a half of publication, the journal’s name evolved until the end of World War II. Then in 1948, we adopted The Reed, which was later shortened to just Reed, the title we have proudly held ever since.

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Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly. Many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, have appeared in the magazine. SR also has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent: we published excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels, and the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.

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Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Harriet Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in volume 1 of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented—often for the first time—works by virtually every significant poet of the 20th and 21st centuries. Poetry has always been independent, unaffiliated with any institution or university—or with any single poetic or critical movement or aesthetic school. It continues to print the major English-speaking poets while presenting emerging talents in all their variety. In recent years, more than a third of the authors published in the magazine have been writers appearing for the first time. On average, the magazine receives more than 150,000 submissions per year from around the world.

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Founded in 1915 and housed on the campus of Southern Methodist University, Southwest Review is the third-longest-running literary quarterly in the United States. SwR has featured many important writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Ginsberg, Annie Dillard, and Anne Carson. Four Nobel winners—Saul Bellow, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, and Orhan Pamuk—have published inside its covers. The magazine is also known for eyeing talent before it becomes widely recognized. In 1960 SwR printed a poem by an unknown Texan named Larry McMurtry, followed a year later by an excerpt from his debut novel. On our centennial, former fiction editor Ben Fountain remarked, “The roll call of heavyweights who’ve appeared in its pages stands up to any American magazine, large or small, of the past 100 years.”

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In 1925, Harold Ross established The New Yorker as a lighthearted, Manhattan-centric magazine—a “fifteen-cent comic paper,” he called it. Today The New Yorker is considered by many to be the most influential magazine in the world, renowned for its in-depth reporting, political and cultural commentary, fiction, poetry, and humor. In addition to the weekly print magazine, newyorker.com has become a daily digital destination for news and cultural coverage by staff writers and contributors. In print and online, The New Yorker stands apart for its commitment to truth and accuracy, for the quality of its prose, and for its insistence on exciting and moving every reader.

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Prairie Schooner, a national literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska Press, is home to the best fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews being published today by beginning, mid-career, and established writers.

To celebrate Prairie Schooner’s tenth birthday, associate editor Maurice Johnson wrote in the Spring 1937 issue, "Like other little magazines, the Schooner was not published for money's sake, paid nothing for contributions, and sought to print the work of new writers not yet accepted by the wealthy, policy-bound periodicals. Unlike most little magazines, the Schooner has been long-lived. . . and it has published the early work of more than twenty writers whose subsequent appearances in print have brought them general recognition."

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The American Scholar is the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won five National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and been nominated for awards sixteen times. Many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.

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Building on a tradition of excellence dating back to 1939, the Kenyon Review has evolved from a distinguished literary magazine to a pre-eminent arts organization. Today, KR is devoted to nurturing, publishing, and celebrating the best in contemporary writing. We’re expanding the community of diverse readers and writers, across the globe, at every stage of their lives.

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Since 1946, Chicago Review has published a range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and criticism. Each year typically includes two single issues and a double issue with a special feature section. 

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Founded in 1948, The Hudson Review is a quarterly magazine of literature and the arts published in New York City. Frederick Morgan, one of its founding editors, edited the magazine for its first fifty years. Paula Deitz has been the editor since 1998.

Since its beginning, the magazine has dealt with the area where literature bears on the intellectual life of the time and on diverse aspects of American culture. It has no university affiliation and is not committed to any narrow academic aim or to any particular political perspective. The magazine serves as a major forum for the work of new writers and for the exploration of new developments in literature and the arts. It has a distinguished record of publishing little-known or undiscovered writers, many of whom have become major literary figures. Each issue contains a wide range of material including: poetry, fiction, essays on literary and cultural topics, book reviews, reports from abroad, and chronicles covering film, theatre, dance, music and art. The Hudson Review is distributed in twenty-five countries.

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The Paris Review is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly.

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Northwest Review was first published by the University of Oregon in 1957. The inaugural issue sold for fifty cents and included native Oregonian Ken Kesey’s first publication, a short story called “The First Sunday in September.” In its fifty-four year history, the University of Oregon’s Northwest Review has published multiple winners of the Pulitzer-Prize, the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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december magazine was founded in Iowa City in 1958 by a group of poets, writers, and artists who declared, “We are humanists…far more concerned with people than dogmatic critical or aesthetic attitudes.” december was a pioneer in the “little” magazine and small press movement, publishing cutting-edge fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art. By 1962, the founding editors had left Iowa City; one of them, Jeff Marks, took december to Chicago and turned it over to Curt Johnson, an award-winning short story writer and novelist. Johnson edited and published december for the next 46 years until his death in 2008.

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TriQuarterly is the literary magazine of Northwestern University. It is edited by students in the Litowitz MFA+MA Graduate Creative Writing Program and the MFA in Prose and Poetry in the School of Professional Studies. Alumni of these programs and other readers also serve as editorial staff. Available around the world, TriQuarterly has remained "an international journal of writing, art, and cultural inquiry. TQ has created an online archive of its own history by publishing individual works from its past, sometimes with new accompanying comments by the writers. The Northwestern University Library has digitized the entire history of the journal.

As a web journal, TQ has the capacity to add audio, video, and a variety of new and frequently uploaded content to supplement its schedule of publishing issues twice a year. 

In 1958, the "tri-quarterly" was so named because its original form as a student magazine was published in each of the three quarters of Northwestern's academic year, and not in the fourth quarter, summer. This name has been belied at times by the magazine's real publishing schedule, but now TQ has altered the tradition quite deliberately to one of semi-annual publishing of discrete issues and frequent updating with new reviews, interviews, blog posts, and excerpts from longer works. And for the first time, new writing published in this journal can be read everywhere there is web access.

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Founded in 1959 by a group of professors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke, and Smith, the Massachusetts Review is one of the nation’s leading literary magazines, distinctive in joining the highest level of artistic concern with pressing public issues. As The New York Times observed, “It is amazing that so much significant writing on race and culture appears in one magazine.”  MR was named one of the top ten literary journals in 2008 by the Boston Globe.

A 200-page quarterly of fiction, poetry, essays, and the visual arts by both emerging talents and established authors, including Pulitzer and Nobel prizewinners, special issues have covered women’s rights, civil rights, and Caribbean, Canadian, and Latin American literatures.

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The Carolina Quarterly has been publishing established and emergent writers for 65 years. Recent issues have featured the works of Lauri Anderson, James Gordon Bennett, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Sean Bishop, Nicole Terez Dutton, Aaron Gwyn, K.A. Hays, Caitlin Horrocks, Stuart Nadler, Ben Purkert, Valerie Sayers, Ken Taylor, Matthew Volmer, G.C. Waldrep, Jerald Walker, and more. Pieces published in The Carolina Quarterly have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best of the South, Poetry Daily, O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prizes, and Best American Short Stories.

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Michigan Quarterly Review, founded in 1962, is the University of Michigan’s flagship literary journal, publishing each season a collection of essays, interviews, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and book reviews.

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For over half a century, Puerto del Sol has been dedicated to provide a forum for inventive and fresh prose, poetry, reviews, criticism, and artwork; and we strive to publish voices from emerging and established writers and artists. Most importantly, we pride ourselves in not following a standardized aesthetic—instead, we seek work that presents authenticity, sincerity, and respect. We recommend reading our most current issue or works from our online journal to get a sense of the content we have published recently. Thank you for your interest in our magazine, and we look forward to reading your work.

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2020 marked 55 years of the Denver Quarterly.

Here are 50 of the many, many amazing writers, past and present, whose work has appeared in our pages...

Diane Ackerman, John Ashbery, Paul Auster, Mary Jo Bang, Roland Barthes (trans. Annette Lavers), Eula Biss, Maurice Blanchot (trans. Patrick Bowles), Gerald Chapman, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Joan Didion, Rikki Ducornet, Percival Everett, Forrest Gander, Dana Gioia, Jorie Graham, Lily Hoang, Edmond Jabès (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop), Siel Ju, Frank Kermode, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Siwar Masannat, Harry Mathews, Farid Matuk, Cris Mazza, Shane McCrae, Fred Moten, Es'kia Mphahlele, Joyce Carol Oates, Simon Ortiz, Camille Rankine, Martha Ronk, Jacques Roubaud (trans. Harriet Zinnes), Tomaž Šalamun, Christine Schutt, Anis Shivani, Gary Soto, Susan Steinberg, James Tate, Deb Olin Unferth, Lee Upton, César Vallejo (trans. Clayton Eshleman with Jorge Guzmán), Gerald Vizenor, Ocean Vuong, Anne Waldman, Robert Penn Warren, Diane Williams, John Williams, Tyrone Williams, Sara June Woods, C.D. Wright.

And there is so much more to come.

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Roanoke Review was co-founded in 1967 by Roanoke College student Edward A. Tedeschi and teacher Henry Taylor, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The Flying Change in 1986. Poet James Boatwright and novelist George Garrett served as advisory editors, and the first issue included work by William Stafford, Lee Smith, Kelly Cherry, William Jay Smith, and Malcom Cowley, among others. 

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Locus magazine was founded in 1968 in New York by Charles N. Brown, Ed Meskys, and Dave Vanderwerf as a one-page newszine to promote the “Boston in ’71” Worldcon bid. Two trial issues were sent to various fans and professionals to drum up subscriptions before issue #1 was mailed. Vanderwerf left after issue #4, and Meskys after #11, but Charles decided to keep the ‘zine going with the help of first wife Marsha Brown (who was co-editor from 1968-69), and later second wife Dena Brown (who co-edited from 1970-77). Issues were published once or twice a month, as the news merited.

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Celebrating its 50th year of continuous publication, The Iowa Review publishes the best short stories, poems, and essays being written today, often being pleased to introduce new writers. Once published in TIR, work has recently been selected for Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Pushcart Prize, and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.

What do you think about some of these long-lasting literary magazines? Have they stood the test of time? Have they adapted to the digital age? Do you prefer old-school lit mags or new-school lit mags, or maybe no-school lit mags? What lit mags are you reading these days and why?