Trends

TO WHAT EXTENT CIA involvement with the Paris Review influenced the magazine's content isn't something which can be determined in the course of a few minutes on this blog. We'd have to look at CIA influence on other lit-journals, like Encounter and Partisan Review, for clues and comparison. We'd have to examine many Paris Review issues and at the same time judge the overall context; the general thrust of the journal, including which writers and kinds of writers were discovered and promoted. We'd have to place Paris Review within the context of American literature as a whole.

The point is that this is a matter which should be examined, not run from. Until then, we don't know if the CIA was a "Ministry of Culture" or not.

Important literary figures like George Plimpton, over the past decades, created what's known and accepted (and acceptable) as American literature now.

One thing we know for sure: that certain kinds of writing (Tony Christini's "Social Lit" for instance); anything smacking of crude social realism, a strand of American lit and thought widespread in the 1930s; is today practically prohibited by the established literary world, by common agreement. It's not considered "literary" and scarcely considered literature. Since the 1950s official American literature has valued style over substance, craft over content; esteeming the "well-written sentence," often to the exclusion of all else. The focus of fiction and poetry has drastically narrowed-- matching the narrowed position of letters in our culture.

What role Paris Review played in this is worth looking into.