A new quarterly's first issue interviewed a novelist about method

The Paris Review's founding issue paired a fiction-first mission with an interview built to ask a novelist how he works.

Historical event

January 1, 1953

Site publication

September 18, 2026

The record

The Paris Review published its first number in Paris in the spring of 1953. By the magazine's own account of its founding, it was started by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton, and that inaugural issue carried a letter from William Styron stating the new quarterly's editorial aim: to emphasize creative work, fiction and poetry, rather than the criticism Styron said dominated most literary magazines of the day. The same issue, numbered Issue 1 and dated Spring 1953, carried what the magazine still labels The Art of Fiction No. 1: an interview with the novelist E. M. Forster, conducted not by Plimpton but by P. N. Furbank and F. J. H. Haskell.

What the documents show

The interview page itself records Forster discussing a novel he had set aside, Arctic Summer, which he had read aloud two years earlier at the Aldeburgh Festival before explaining, at some length, why he had been unable to finish it. That choice of subject and method, a working novelist walking through an abandoned draft's technical problems rather than a verdict on a finished book, is one the magazine's history page shows recurring across later Art of Fiction entries, including Norman Mailer's two turns at the form and Joan Didion's 1978 interview. The founding materials do not explain why Furbank and Haskell, rather than one of the three founders, conducted the first interview; on that editorial decision the record is silent.

Why it stays interesting

Opening a quarterly's history with a novelist explaining a book he never finished, rather than one he had, is worth sitting with. This is an editorial reading rather than a claim the magazine makes outright, but the choice suggests a series built to treat unfinished work as a legitimate subject of craft conversation rather than a fact edited out of an author's public record. For a working writer, the interview format the Review established, long, unhurried, aimed at method rather than a finished text's meaning, remains distinct from both workshop critique and promotional author interview, and it is worth asking which of those modes a given piece of craft writing is performing.

What to read next

A reader testing that distinction could go directly to the Forster interview, still posted under its original number, and set it beside a prescriptive guide from the same writing-practice tradition, such as the revision history of The Elements of Style recorded elsewhere in this ledger: one document records a writer describing a specific difficulty, the other prescribes rules meant to prevent one.

• Does the piece under discussion describe a method, or only assert a result?
• What did the writer say went wrong, and how does that differ from what critics later said about the finished book?
• Whose editorial decisions determined which parts of that conversation survived into print?

The Paris Review's founding issue did not promise a theory of fiction; it printed one novelist's account of a specific failure to finish one. That modesty of scope, sustained across seventy years of subsequent interviews, is arguably the format's most durable feature.

Sources & reading trail

States the magazine's 1953 Paris founding, its three founders, and Styron's mission letter in the inaugural issue.

Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

Identifies the interview as Issue 1, Spring 1953, names the interviewers, and records Forster's account of an unfinished novel.

Source published: Not established · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

Reports, filings, records and studies establish the entry; the reading of why it stays interesting is Chapter Ledger editorial analysis. This retrospective draft does not imply the site published on the event date.

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Published September 18, 2026, not on the date of the event described.