Merlin was the name of an avant-garde literary magazine, which published, amongst others, the work of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Christopher Logue, Pablo Neruda and Jean-Paul Sartre. Published in seven issues between 1952 and 1954, it was edited by Scottish expatriate Alexander Trocchi with the collaboration of Richard Seaver (a few years later to become editor of The Evergreen Review), Christopher Logue, George Plimpton (co-founder of the The Paris Review) and Patrick Bowles. Merlin brought the recent work of Samuel Beckett to the attention of English-language readers. Trocchi claimed that the journal came to an end when the US State Department cancelled its many subscriptions in protest over an article by Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1953, Merlin and Maurice Girodias of the new Olympia Press collaborated on a new series called the "Collection Merlin." The editors of Merlin wrote numerous pornographic novels ("dbs", or "dirty books") for Olympia Press under various pseudonyms.
