PEN America’s First Year

PEN America‘s newest issue time travels back to 1922, the magazine’s founding year and the height of modernism. “Borrowing from the pages of The Dial, The Crisis, and The Little Review,” says the magazine, “we offer you a taste of the literary scene, alongside a trove of photographs, drawings, advertisements, headlines, and commentary. The featured writers—including Joyce, Du Bois, Woolf, McKay, Crane, Cather, Fitzgerald, Mansfield, and Moore—remain some of our greatest teachers and literary loves.”

In an introduction to the special section, Steven L. Isenberg, PEN America Center’s executive director, says, “This year we celebrate PEN’s ninetieth anniversary and hence our origins and our emergence after World War II and unto today as a literary human rights organization devoted to the protection of free expression and as a standard-bearer for the place of literature and thus the ties that bind, internationally, through reading, writing, translation, and fellowship. When we turn to the literature of 1922 in the pages ahead, we begin the journey once again.”

Writers featured within the pages of the rest of the journal include Jamal Joseph & Sonia Sanchez, Julie Otsuka, Herta Mϋller, Liu Xiaobo & Liu Xia, John Cage, Kimiko Hahn, Theresa Rebeck, Etgar Keret, Eileen Myles, and Richard Feynman.