The Paris Review Today

Growing up, always clustered on one of my parents' many bookshelves, were myriad copies of The Paris Review, the literary magazine founded in 1953 by the late George Plimpton.

Plimpton was a larger than life character, a bon vivant extrodinaire, whose parties were almost as famous as his magazine that published such luminaries as Samuel Becket, Jack Kerouac, and Philip Roth. Plimpton not only edited the magazine and hosted the parties but he also wrote books chronicling his one-shot experiences as a football player and a boxer, as well as his friendship with Robert Kennedy (with whom Plimpton was with when RFK was killed). Plimpton also died suddenly, in 2003, and since then the editorship of The Paris Review has passed through a few hands, sometimes with troubling results.

This year a young woman named Emily Nemens has become the editor and she is promising to make the ultimate good-'ol-boy, Old New York swinging literary journal into a fully "woke" #MeToo multi-media enterprise. How this will unfold remains to be seen but it's a tribute to the magazine and Plimpton's legacy that it has survived fifteen-years after his death, and that someone like Nemens, as different form Plimpton as one can be, can take the helm. 

And maybe she'll discover the 21st Century version of Jack Kerouac (who won't necessarily be a man).