The Kenyon Review was the vision of poet Roberta Teale Swartz and her husband, Gordon Keith Chalmers, who became the thirteenth president of Kenyon College in 1937. Roberta Teale Swartz, a protege and friend of Robert Frost, published two acclaimed books of poetry. She was also instrumental in recruiting John Crowe Ransom to found a literary magazine in Gambier.
From the beginning, Swartz and Chalmers had grand ambitions for The Kenyon Review, and John Crowe Ransom’s stature in the literary world gave the magazine immediate clout. The inaugural issue, published in January 1939, included work by Delmore Schwartz, Ford Madox Ford, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell (then a student at Kenyon, who had transferred from Harvard to study with Ransom). During Ransom’s 21-year tenure as editor, The Kenyon Review became one of the most influential literary magazines in the English-speaking world.
Since Ransom, editors of the magazine have included Robie Macauley, George Lanning, Ellington White, Ronald Sharp, Frederick Turner, Philip D. Church, Galbraith M. Crump, Robert W. Daniel, William F. Klein, T.R. Hummer, Marilyn Hacker, and most recently, David H. Lynn, who shepherded the magazine for twenty-six impressive years.
With the appointment of poet Nicole Terez Dutton as editor in 2020, the magazine begins a new era, but remains indebted to the visionaries who helped The Kenyon Review make history.