The VQR Vault:
A Documentary History of the Virginia Quarterly Review
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 The early editors of VQR. From left to right: Stringfellow Barr (second editor), Edwin A. Alderman (president), James Southall Wilson (first editor), and Lambert Davis (third editor), outside One West Range, Hotel A, in fall 1929. (Photograph by Ralph Thompson. Courtesy Special Collections, University of Virginia, Visual History Collection, Prints 08568)
In 1915, UVa president Edwin A. Alderman declared publicly that he was seeking to create a university publication that could be "an organ of liberal opinion . . . solidly based, thoughtfully and wisely managed and controlled, not seeking to give news, but to become a great serious publication wherein shall be reflected the calm thought of the best men." Alderman appealed for financial support from friends of the university, and over the next nine years raised an endowment and assembled a vision for the publication. It was in the fall of 1924 when he announced the establishment of the Virginia Quarterly Review, saying that it would provide "independent thought in the fields of society, politics, and literature . . . in no sense a local or sectional publication . . . [but inviting] as contributors to its pages men and women everywhere who think through things and have some quality of expressing their thoughts in appealing and arresting fashion."
The VQR Vault, an ongoing project drawing on the archives held in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the University of Virginia Library, documents the rich history of the magazine by offering a behind-the-scenes look at how some of our famous contributors came to be published in our pages. Many of the articles feature galleries of original manuscripts and correspondence between the writers and VQR editors.
Additional readings:
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Featured Authors
Click on the name or portrait of featured authors to read the stories of how their work came to appear in VQR. |
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Sherwood Anderson
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A literary icon of the 1920s—best known for his psychologically rich tales of Midwestern life in such works as Winesburg, Ohio and Poor White—Sherwood Anderson received a surprising letter of rejection from VQR in August 1928. The magazine didn’t publish fiction at the time. But soon Anderson contributed two important essays—one on artist J.J. Lankes, one on writer D.H. Lawrence. |
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John Berryman
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Among the staggering collection of literary manuscripts and letters in the VQR Archive in the Special Collections at Alderman Library, University of Virginia, are thirteen typescript poems and numerous letters to and from John Berryman. Taken together, they provide a snapshot of Berryman through the three main phases of his literary reputation: the struggling young poet, the tormented genius, and the tragic figure who took his own life. |
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Hayden Carruth
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Hayden Carruth published work with VQR for nearly forty years, and he remains the only poet to have won VQR's Emily Clark Balch Prize more than once. In his long life in letters, he published literary criticism, essays, a novel, and more than thirty books of poetry. Here we offer some of the early correspondence between Carruth and editor Charlotte Kohler, along with the typescripts of three of his poems, including his classics “North Winter” and “Emergency Haying.” |
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T. S. Eliot
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In May 1933, T. S. Eliot delivered three lectures at the University of Virginia, as part of the Page-Barbour Series. By Eliot’s own description, these lectures were intended as “further development of the problem which the author first discussed in his essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’” A number of critics have also noted the fact that Eliot had recently separated from his wife Vivien, and without her steadying hand, these lectures reveal his complete transformation from aesthete to self-described “moralist.” |
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Robert Frost
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Over the course of nearly twenty years, Robert Frost published some of his most famous and enduring poetry in the pages of VQR. Poems like “Acquainted with the Night,” “The Silken Tent,” “The Gift Outright,” and “Directive” are some of the most well-loved and anthologized poems not only of the 20th century, but in the English language. Frost considered VQR among his favorite publications and enjoyed a long-running relationship with both founding editor James Southall Wilson and the journal itself. |
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Nadine Gordimer
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Considered among the most important authors in the world, Nadine Gordimer began her international career in 1951, when she received her first letter of acceptance for publication in an American magazine from VQR. Editor Charlotte Kohler chose her short story “The Catch” for publication in the Summer issue of that year. Presented here is the manuscript of Gordimer’s story along with the editorial correspondence. |
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Aldous Huxley
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In 1931 Huxley was only months away from the publication of Brave New World, a work that put him squarely on the modernist map and solidified his iconoclast position in the literary canon. That same year Huxley published two essays in VQR, “Boundaries of Utopia” and “Tragedy and the Whole Truth,” exactly the sort of diverse and prescient intellectualism VQR had become known for.
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D. H. Lawrence
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Several works by D. H. Lawrence appeared in VQR, both during his life and immediately after his death, including his important late essay “The Bogey between the Generations,” which James Southall Wilson, VQR’s first editor, described as “interesting as a plea for greater frankness by one of the most daring writers of what, to old-fashioned people, must seem the frankest generation in English literary history.” The original typescripts for all five of Lawrence’s works from our pages are presented here. |
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Thomas Mann
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In 1939, managing editor Archibald Shepperson invited Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann to publish an essay in VQR—in German. The resulting essay, “Denken und Leben,” was a series of reflections on the disconnection between philosophy and life in Nazi Germany and on the dire results which will come to any country in which such disconnection is permitted to continue. The typescript of the English translation is included here. |
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H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken was among the most controversial literary voices of his time and retains his place today as one of the livelier figures in the American tradition. Here is the story of how VQR came to publish his essay “The South Astir” in 1935, along with the original manuscript that he submitted. |
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Pablo Neruda
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By 1961, Pablo Neruda had established himself as one of the most important and prolific Spanish-language writers of the twentieth century, yet Neruda was virtually unread by Americans and viewed more as a radical politician than South America’s most explosive poet. So when Ben Belitt, VQR’s self-proclaimed “hispanic Ear to the Ground,” sent translations of Neruda, editor Charlotte Kohler quickly accepted. |
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Luigi Pirandello
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In 1925, when editor James Southall Wilson was searching for big names for VQR’s inaugural issue, he could not have found any name bigger than Luigi Pirandello. Though the Italian writer had already published a number of novels and plays and dozens of volumes of short stories, poetry, and essays, he was just experiencing his first large-scale success with Six Characters in Search of an Author. This is the story of Pirandello’s essay in that issue, in which he explained why and how he wrote his famed play. |
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Katherine Anne Porter
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Toward the end of 1934, VQR editor Lambert Davis began assembling a roster of prominent Southern writers to contribute essays, short stories, and poems to the tenth anniversary issue of the journal focused exclusively on “Southern letters.” Among the most coveted names on his list was Katherine Anne Porter. We published five works by her during the 1930s, and here we describe how we came to publish “The Grave” in our tenth anniversary issue. The original manuscript is featured. |
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Ezra Pound
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Ezra Pound was in his twelfth year of commitment to the Chestnut Ward of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital when he was given a copy of Virginia Quarterly Review. Impressed, he submitted “Canto XCIX” for publication. VQR editor Charlotte Kohler enthusiastically accepted the poem. In the meantime, the release of Pound became a cause celebre, and he was granted his freedom by the state. Here is the correspondence that resulted in the publication of that work. |
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John Crowe Ransom
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Poet, editor, teacher, and philosopher, John Crowe Ransom was also one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century, and the five essays he published in VQR in the 1930s reveal the evolution of his thoughts and ideas about the contemporary South and its literature. |
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Eleanor Roosevelt
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Shortly after taking over as the new editor of VQR in 1938, Lawrence Lee began sending letters to authors he hoped would help him advance the journal’s “new effort at liberalism.” High on Lee’s list of potential contributors were President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. That Eleanor Roosevelt eventually appeared in VQR is a testament to Lee’s relentless pursuit as an editor. |
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Carl Sandburg
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During April of 1927, Sandburg came to UVa and visited the editor of VQR, James Southall Wilson, who commissioned poetry from Sandburg during their meeting. His poems were sent within a year after his initial meeting with Wilson, who published the poems in VQR in the July and October issues of 1928. |
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Wallace Stegner
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Stegner’s writing first appeared in the pages of VQR in 1938, when he was a young college professor teaching in Wisconsin. He published three brutal short stories in VQR around this time, all of which depict boys growing up in the rural west of the US and Canada. His characters are often numbed or terrified by what surrounds them—the state, the community, or the violence of the prairie itself. |
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Allen Tate
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From 1925 to 1970, Allen Tate submitted over twenty poems and a dozen essays to VQR. Over the course of this long relationship, the magazine published five of his poems (some of which number among his most discussed verse) and five of his most famous and frequently quoted essays. Tate’s personal correspondence with VQR’s editors through the years reveals a passionate and sometimes confrontational writer who wanted most of all to be recognized as a penman of the South. |
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Robert Penn Warren
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Robert Penn Warren was one of the leading voices of American intellectual and aesthetic identity during the twentieth century. Warren was deeply invested in defining the emerging consciousness of a new South during decades of social upheaval, and his concerns fit well with VQR’s early penchant for publishing works with a compelling Southern focus. This alignment of interests sparked a rich relationship between Warren and VQR, resulting in eight works published from 1931 to 1942. |
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Evelyn Waugh
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The English writer is best known as a novelist, but he was no less of a short story writer. We published “The Rough Life” in 1934, but only now have we learned that we didn’t get what we paid for. |
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Thomas Wolfe’s “Old Catawba”
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After Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, VQR set about trying to get some of his work for the magazine. It required years of pleading and cajoling, but we finally got “Old Catawba” out of the famously-difficult writer for our April 1935 issue. |
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Thomas Wolfe’s “A Western Journey”
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Nine months after Wolfe’s death, the Summer 1939 issue of VQR contained the last words that he penned, an excerpt from a journal called “A Western Journey,” written just weeks before he died. It's full of astute descriptions of dramatic western scenery—“the bay-bright gold of wooded big barks,” “a valley plain, flat as a floor and green as heaven and fertile and more ripe than the Promised Land,” “vast, pale, lemon-mystic plain,”—but the people of the American West fascinated Wolfe as much as the scenery. |
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