With this issue, The New Criterion completes its twentieth year of publication. Twenty years is a significant anniversary for any magazine devoted to serious criticism of culture and the arts. For a magazine as outspoken and heterodox as The New Criterion has been, living through a twentieth birthday is almost a miracle.

We hasten to acknowledge that this achieve- ment has been a collaborative effort. Indeed, it has been a collaboration of many hands. As with other magazines, the excellence of The New Criterion is inseparable from the excellence of its primary intellectual resource: its writers. From its very first issues, The New Criterion has been exceedingly fortunate in attracting distinguished literary talent. Some of that talent was already established and well known. Much of it was not. Many prominent figures on the critical landscape today first made their reputations in our pages, ...

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