John Crowe Ransom: Editor

Abstract

This study examines John Crowe Ransom's career as editor of a literary magazine, The Kenyon Review. A preliminary investigation of Ransom's relations with The Fugitive publication is made to determine the wellsprings of his critical theories and editorial practices, and to note the associations he formed with students and friends which had an effect on his later career as editor, but this work concentrates on the first twelve years of Ransom's editorship of the Kenyon Review. Unpublished documents in the Archives of Kenyon College were studied to determine some aspects of how the Kenyon Review came to be founded and the personnel involved with the magazine. These documents also provide primary evidence of the difficulties encountered in starting and continuing a review of this nature, and of the mechanics of its operation. Complementing the study of these documents is an analysis of the contents of the magazine which is made to particularize the findings of the investigation. Quality and quantity of the contents are assessed with the intention of determining more precisely how the editor's goals were or were not realized. Finally, some conclusions are reached as the result of this analysis which enabled the investigator to evaluate realistically John Crowe Ransom's accomplishment as an editor. Though the research is concerned primarily with Ransom as editor, it seemed the best way to order the study was around the New Criticism, since an examination of Ransom and the Kenyon Review is not only a study of Ransom as editor, but one of the emerging New Criticism. The investigation reveals that Ransom as editor was one of the most influential figures in the literary history of America in the mid-twentieth century, especially as that history relates to literary criticism. Through his experiences in helping to found and edit The Fugitive magazine and with the friends he made at Vanderbilt University and Kenyon College, Ransom was able to start a literary review devoted primarily to criticism that has altered the way we read literature in this century. His encouragement of young, untried authors enlarged the ranks of his supporters, and the establishment of a School of English at Kenyon College put into the academy the tenets of the criticism the editor had been developing and codifying for the past ten years in his Review. It is no exaggeration to say that without the presence of John Crowe Ransom as an editor, the course of literary history would have been vastly different. He must be considered one of the great modern editors.