Carl Sandburg

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.

John Crowe Ransom

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.

Thomas Wolfe

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.

Aldous Huxley

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. Eric Pinker of the James B. Pinker & Son, Inc. literary agency sent two Huxley essays on October 10, 1930, and editor Stringfellow Barr replied just eight days later, indicating that VQR would take what was then called “Notes on Liberty and the Boundaries of the Promised Land” for the winter 1931 issue. The essay, in which Huxley sets out to define freedom as it relates to property and highlight the impossibility of the modern class structure, is exactly the sort of diverse and prescient intellectualism VQR had become known for.

Luigi Pirandello

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 then experiencing his first large-scale success with Six Characters in Search of an Author. This is story of Pirandello's essay that issue, in which he explained why and how he wrote "Six Characters in Search of an Author."

Wallace Stegner

His 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.

Evelyn Waugh

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.

Thomas Wolfe’s “Old Catawba”

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.

H. L. Mencken’s "The South Astir"

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 work in 1935, along with the original manuscript that he submitted.

Katherine Anne Porter

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.

Robert Frost

Over the course of nearly twenty years, Robert Frost published some of his most famous and enduring poetry in the pages of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Poems like “Acquainted with the Night,” “The Silken Tent,” “The Gift Outright,” and “Directive” are some of the most well-loved and repeatedly anthologized poems not only of the 20th century, but in the English language. He considered VQR among his favorite publications and enjoyed a long-running relationship with both founding editor James Southall Wilson and the journal itself, visiting Charlottesville and the University of Virginia frequently. The eleven poems collected here are samples from four different volumes of poetry spanning three decades and showing Frost in what Lambert Davis called his “most pleasant variousness.”

Hayden Carruth

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."

Ezra Pound-"Canto 99"

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 between Kohler, Pound, and Richmond businessman (and Pound advocate) Harry Meacham that that resulted in the publication of that work.

Pablo Neruda in VQR: Two Poems

By 1961, Pablo Neruda had established himself as one of the most important and prolific Spanish-language writers of the twentieth century. His work had been translated into a dozen different languages, yet for most North Americans and other English-speaking peoples, Neruda was virtually unread 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 a few translations of Neruda to the journal, Charlotte Kohler, the editor at the time, quickly accepted.

Nadine Gordimer's First Publication in VQR

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 the Virginia Quarterly Review. Editor Charlotte Kohler chose her short story “The Catch” for publication in the Summer issue of that year. Presented here is the original manuscript of Gordimer’s story along with the original correspondence between Kohler, Gordimer, and Gordimer’s agent. Subscription Required

Eleanor Roosevelt—"Keepers of Democracy"

Shortly after taking over as the new editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review 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. Their son, Franklin, Jr., had entered the Law School at the University of Virginia in Fall 1937, and Lee hoped that he might capitalize on that connection. That Eleanor Roosevelt contributed to VQR at all is a testament to Lee’s relentless pursuit as an editor; that the essay she eventually contributed has so endured is a testament to Roosevelt’s skill as a writer.

T. S. Eliot's Suppressed Lecture

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.”

The Manuscripts of John Berryman

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 at the height of his powers.