The history of Evergreen Review is an important part of the experience of reading the journal, but could be easily missed if you happened upon the website without knowing anything about it. Click on the ‘History’ link at the top of any page, and what is revealed is impressive and significant, to say the least. It was founded by the legendary Barney Rosset in 1957, and the first issue contained work by Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. The second issue was the first collection of work by the Beat writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder. Rosset had also bought Grove Press in 1951 when he was twenty-eight, and went on to publish the work of numerous writers such as Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Duras and Borges, as well as William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, for which he fought, and won, legal challenges against obscenity.Continued at The Review Review.
