Starting Up.

First published in February 1963 during a New York newspaper strike, the New York Review of Books was intended to fill the void left by the absence of the reviews usually published by The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. It was also intended as a corrective to the intellectually shallow commentary contained in newspaper reviews. As critic Edmund Wilson wrote in the New York Review of Books in September 1963, "The disappearance of the Times Sunday book section at the time of the printers' strike only made us realize it had never existed." The first issue of the journal was intended to be the only one, but after nearly one hundred thousand copies were sold, the backers decided to publish a second issue in May 1963. The success of the two issues convinced the journal's backers to continue...