Horizon: Review of Literature and Art

Date began:

01 Jan 1940

Precise date began unknown:

Date ended:

01 Jan 1950

Precise date ended unknown:

About:

Founded and edited by Cyril Connolly, with financial backing from Peter Watson (who was also its art editor), Horizon was a London-based magazine which published short fiction, essays on literature and art, and book reviews by an impressive range of contributors including W. H. Auden, George Orwell [1], E. M. Forster [2] and Stephen Spender [3], who was also the magazine’s uncredited associate editor in its early years. Several of its contributors had connections with South Asian writers in Britain in the 1940s, and the magazine displays an awareness of the work of Indian writers in the form of numerous advertisements for their published fiction as well as for periodicals featuring their work. In spite of this, however, Horizon itself gave surprisingly little space to articles by these writers or about their work. An article on ‘Kalighat Folk Painters’ by Ajit Mookerjee [4], and an essay on the artist Jamini Roy [5] by E. Mary Milford, are two of the rare exceptions to this tendency to confine itself to Euro-American literature and art.

Key individuals:

Stephen Spender [6]

Key Individuals' Details:

Cyril Connolly (editor), Stephen Spender (unofficial associate editor), Peter Watson (art editor).

Connections:

W. H. Auden, George Barker, John Betjeman, Laurence Binyon [7], Maurice Blanchot, Elizabeth Bowen, Alex Comfort, Paul Eluard, William Empson, E. M. Forster [2], Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Aldous Huxley [8], C. E. M. Joad [9], Augustus John [10], John Lehmann [11], Cecil Day Lewis, Jack Lindsay, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Louis MacNeice [12], Henry Miller, Ajit Mookerjee [4], George Orwell [1], Ben Nicholson, Peter Quennell, Kathleen Raine, Osbert Sitwell [13], Dylan Thomas [14], Ruthven Todd.

Books Reviewed Include:

Fielden, Lionel, Beggar My Neighbour (London: Secker & Warburg, 1943). Reviewed by George Orwell.

Menon, Narayana, The Development of William Butler Yeats (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1942). Reviewed by George Orwell.

Secondary works:

Shelden, Michael, Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon (London: Hamilton, 1989)

Archive source:

British Library, St Pancras