Big News For a Small Magazine

By Belinda Luscombe

"As a seedbed for little magazines, the American soil is fertile but thinly spread," wrote TIME almost 60 years ago to the day. "Last week a cluster of new ones bravely poked their heads above ground. The most promising was Hudson Review, edited by three young Princeton alumni." Well, ahem, we know how to call it. THE HUDSON REVIEW puts out its 60th-anniversary edition this month, celebrating its longevity with a concert at the Guggenheim Museum and a book, Writes of Passage. The Review, which promised at its inception not to "open its pages to those whose only merits lie in their anguish, their fervor, and their experimentation," is not the biggest nor the most prestigious of the literary-periodical set, but it has nurtured the early careers of such now familiar names as W.S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Wallace Stevens. And it has the distinction of having chosen a title that doesn't sound nearly as quaint as those of the other new magazines Time wrote about that week: Tiger's Eye, Masses & Mainstream, Instead and even that bible of the Beat Generation, Neurotica.