Legends of ‘The Evergreen Review’

Musician, author, music historian, and reissue producer Pat Thomas is a man out of time–born minutes too late to be either beatnik or hippie, but possessing a fascination with the 1960s that borderlines on the obsessive. He’s in good company, as many of us share his preoccupation with the decade. The ‘60s offered more than social and political upheaval, but also an unparalleled explosion in creativity and thought that changed literature, film, fashion, politics, and music like no other period before or since.

As a writer, Thomas’ previous books include 2012’s Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975, which was accompanied by a CD and double-LP of speeches and protest songs; 2017’s Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary; and 2023’s Material Wealth: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg, published alongside a CD ‘soundtrack’ of Ginsberg’s musical and spoken word performances. With Evergreen Review: Dispatches From the Literary Underground, Thomas delves into, and shines a light on, an obscure and often neglected corner of ‘60s counterculture.

This gorgeous, oversized 320-page full-color hardback provides a look behind the curtains into the influential underground publication. Published by pioneering free speech advocate Barney Rosset and his Grove Press imprint, Evergreen Review spanned three decades and published dozens of issues from 1957-1973 before economic realities caught up with the magazine. Evergreen Review relaunched in print form several times over the years. Rosset resurrected it for the Internet in the 1990s, and it currently exists online, but it has never again had the cultural import that it did from 1965 to 1975.

The importance of Evergreen Review on a bourgeoning counterculture can’t be understated, as the quarterly (later bimonthly, then monthly) publication offered readers a glimpse of the world beyond Life magazine, publishing literature, poetry, and art from abroad while also supporting the voices of people of color and other marginalized groups. Evergreen Review published writers like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Jerry Rubin, Germaine Greer, and many others. Rosset’s Grove Press was notorious in its own right, the company publishing an uncensored version of D.H. Lawrence’s bawdy Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959 that survived a contentious legal challenge. Other Grove Press titles like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch also won important court cases that provided expanded freedoms for American publishers courtesy of Mr. Rosset’s zealous efforts.

What was it about the Evergreen Review that inspired Thomas to take on as daunting a task as this book? By email, Thomas replied “my previous books: Listen Whitey! (about the Black Panthers), Did It! (about Jerry Rubin & the Yippies), Material Wealth (the personal archives of Allen Ginsberg) all steered me towards the Evergreen Review which blends all of those topics with other 1960s-1970s political, cultural, literary topics, so, it seemed like a natural fit for me.”

Evergreen Review: Dispatches From the Literary Underground includes full-color reproductions of all 100 stunning front covers of the magazine, as well as articles, essays, and poems that Thomas reproduces exactly as they originally appeared, illustrations, advertising, and all. What was the process of choosing what to put in the book and what to leave out? Was there anything that Thomas wanted to include that he couldn’t? “I focused on my personal taste – topics or people that appealed to me personally – as well as avoiding more ‘popular’ or more ‘common’ articles that appeared in other Evergreen Review anthologies decades ago. I took the angle less traveled and more countercultural.”

Thomas presents the history of the Evergreen Review through a series of essays and interviews with those who were there for the ride, beginning with his own retrospective “The Golden Age of Reading and Thinking,” which sets the stage perfectly for the memories and insights provided by the essayists. I found that longtime publishing executive John Oakes’s essay “Committed To the Alternative” provided invaluable context to the era in which Rosset and the Evergreen Review were changing the culture; the magazine obviously influenced Oakes as well, as he’s been the publisher of the digital version since 2015. I found Kasia Boddy’s “Evergreen From the Outside In” fascinating, the author and Professor of American Literature at the University of Cambridge digging into the groundbreaking nature of the magazine’s cover artwork.

The new interviews that Thomas conducted for the book contribute additional brushstrokes to the narrative that he’s creating. His conversation with journalist, editor, and publisher Ken Jordan – son of longtime Evergreen Review editor Fred Jordan – provides a mini-history of the publication in itself. An interview with editorial assistant Claudia Menza accurately describes the nuts ‘n’ bolts production chore of producing a pre-computer/pre-desktop publishing magazine, while writer, playwright, filmmaker, and theater director Stanley E. Gontarski provides a personal dimension to the complicated visionary that was Barney Rosset.

What was the most eye-opening revelation that Thomas received from the numerous interviews he did for the book? “That publisher/editor Barney Rosset could party all night like a wild animal and still get work done! And that the magazine blended so many different types of writers: political, foreign (non-English speaking), artistic, poets, playwrights, radicals, Feminists, African-American activists, and much more.” If the book’s interviews and essays provide the reader with a senses of the history of the Evergreen Review and its founder, the inclusion of original material from the publication are that history, resurrected and presented to 21st century readers willing to dive headfirst into the looking glass.

Although some of the articles and such feel dated, that’s a large part of their charm, while others–notably the interviews with Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton and Irish MP and social activist Bernadette Devlin–sadly illustrate how badly we’ve backslid in this country in matters of race, gender equality, and class politics. Evergreen Review was as radical politically as it was artistically, so interviews with French playwright Jean Genet or book excerpts from works by the other Black Panther founder, Bobby Seale, or beloved Yippie Abbie Hoffman document the alternative political zeitgeist of the era.

Interviews with poet and activist Leroi Jones, feminist Germaine Greer, and writer William S. Burroughs, or Allen Ginsberg’s wonderful conversation with poet Ezra Pound, are powerful reminders of quality writing that has largely disappeared from today’s publicist-driven, click-happy engagement media. Although Evergreen Review largely eschewed coverage of rock music during the era, the book includes an informative piece by Crawdaddy magazine founder, rock critic Paul Williams. Rosset was a jazz fan, so you’ll find Martin Williams’ writing about the state of avant-garde jazz in the ‘60s as well as a review of a Sun Ra performance, and musician David Amram’s heartfelt memoriam to writer Jack Kerouac (which mixes jazz and beat writing in a single stroke).

What was it about Barney Rosset that made Grove Press and, by extension, the Evergreen Review as influential as they were? “Very much the right person(s) at the right time,” Thomas states, “Ground Zero in San Francisco for the Beat Generation, Ground Zero in New York City for New Journalism and New Left writers, interesting creative magic coming out of Paris, and so on.” What is the legacy of Barney Rosset, Grove Press, and the Evergreen Review? “Currently, it’s censorship! Local and regional American government officials dragged Barney into court countless times for printing these books and magazines–and my book was just seized in China by their government (for the Black Panthers and Anti-Vietnam War articles) and we had to reprint it again in India!”

With Evergreen Review: Dispatches From the Literary Underground, Pat Thomas has done an admirable job of not only capturing the essence of the publication and its free-wheeling ‘60s “anything goes” vibe, but also offers a final argument for the magazine’s status as one of the most important cultural institutions of the era. It’s also a stunning book, visually, which would have certainly pleased Rosset to no end. Whether you’re a fellow ‘60s obsessive, or just mildly interested in an alternative history of the decade, you’ll have to find impressive the work that Thomas has done with Evergreen Review, the book.