Encounter Books is an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, a tax-exempt, non-profit corporation dedicated to strengthening the marketplace of ideas and engaging in educational activities to help preserve democratic culture.
Our Name
ENCOUNTER BOOKS draws its name from Encounter magazine, an Anglo-American literary journal founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and journalist Irving Kristol.
Encounter was a liberal, anti-Soviet monthly dedicated to two things: “a love of liberty and a respect for that part of human endeavour that goes by the name of culture.”
The magazine seemed to have come “out of nowhere”—with an immediate impact.
Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, Robert Conquest, Philip Larkin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel Trilling, Richard Wilbur, and Edmund Wilson—\to name just a few—\all wrote for Encounter. Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford debated in its pages. Even Virginia Woolf appeared there, posthumously of course.
Melvin J. Lasky, who succeeded Irving Kristol as editor in 1958, cultivated dissident writers from across the Soviet Bloc. Joseph Brodsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Koestler, Leszek Kołakowski, and Václav Havel all made their mark in Encounter.
