Salmagundi

History and profile

Salmagundi was founded by Robert Boyers in the fall of 1965, using money he earned as a youth, singing at his neighborhood Jewish temple, and at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. Boyers drew inspiration for his quarterly from other "little magazines" of the era, such as Partisan Review, F.R. Leavis's Scrutiny, and T.S. Eliot's Criterion, among others. The title of the magazine was chosen as a reference to the 19th-century periodical of the same name, published by Washington Irving.

In 1969, the magazine moved its headquarters to Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Boyers and his wife, Margarita "Peg" Boyers, are both professors in Skidmore's English Department. The magazine celebrated its Fiftieth Anniversary in 2015 by publishing three large volumes, featuring "Best Of" selections from Salmagundi's first five decades.

While the magazine has no explicit mission statement, Boyers has often invoked Lionel Trilling's description of the role served by little magazines in preventing the culture from "being cautious and settled, or merely sociological, or merely pious" and "to make the official representatives of literature a little uneasy."

Salmagundi's editors take pride in continually finding "ways to say NO and THINK AGAIN to the largely settled views of our own enlightened readership." Christopher Lasch, a frequent contributor to the Salmagundi until his death in 1994, observed, in 1975, that the magazine "often criticized leftist clichés from a point of view sympathetic to the underlying objectives of the left." Lasch further noted that Salmagundi reliably opposed "fake radicalism," "genteel academicism" and "estheticism," even as it recognized "the precarious position of intellectual culture in the modern world."

An aspect of Salmagundi that makes it unique from other literary magazines is its commitment to hosting (and transcribing, for publication) symposia, featuring lively debate among prominent scholars and writers. Past symposia have included figures such as, Lionel Trilling, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek, Anthony Appiah, Orlando Patterson, Susan Sontag, and many others.

Notable columnists and contributors

Critics and scholars

Susan Sontag

George Steiner

Marilynne Robinson

Christopher Hitchens

James Miller

Tzvetan Todorov

Sir Isaiah Berlin

William H. Gass

Christopher Lasch

Adam Phillips

Phillip Lopate

Steve Fraser

Daniel Swift

Siri Hustvedt

George Scialabba

Novelists

Russell Banks

Joyce Carol Oates

J.M. Coetzee

Nadine Gordimer

Mario Vargas Llosa

Darryl Pinckney

Steve Stern

Mary Gordon

Norman Manea

Mary Gaitskill

Rick Moody

Amy Hempel

Binnie Kirschenbaum

Jim Shepard

Howard Norman

Poets

Robert Lowell

Seamus Heaney

Adrienne Rich

Robert Pinsky

Frank Bidart

Richard Howard

Marie Howe

Charles Simic

Louise Glück

Carolyn Forché

Honor Moore

Carl Dennis

Campbell McGrath

Vijay Seshadri

Rosanna Warren

Notable essays, poetry, and fiction

Edward Said's "Beginnings" (1966)

Richard Schechner's "Theatre & Revolution" (1967)

Howard Nemerov's "First Snow" (#22 - 23, 1973)

Adrienne Rich's "Pieces" and "Incipience" (#22 - 23, 1973)

Robert Lowell's "History" and "Man and Woman" (#22 - 23, 1973)

Robert Penn Warren's "The Nature of A Mirror" (#22 - 23, 1973)

Louise Glück's "Pomegranate" (#22 - 23, 1973)

Leslie H. Farber's "Lying on the Couch" (1975)

Howard Nemerov's "Ozymandias II" and "Ginkgoes in Fall" (#28, 1975)

Robert Lowell's "Epilogue" (#37, 1977)

Robert Penn Warren's "Question You Must Learn to Live Past" and "What Was The Thought?" (#50 - 51, 1980–81)

Louise Glück's "First Goodbye" (#50 - 51, 1980–81)

William H. Gass's "The Death of the Author" (1984)

George Steiner's "Our Homeland, the Text" (1985)

Seamus Heaney's "Place, Pastness, Poems: A Tryptch" (1986)

Martin Jay's "The Descent of de Man" (1988)

Christopher Lasch's "Counting by Tens" (1989)