40th Anniversary Retrospective: Looking Back at 1973
This guy was rocking in '73.

With the Vietnam War ongoing, Dick Nixon was sworn in as president. The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, overturning state bans on abortion, and Foreman defeated Frazier for the heavyweight championship. American-Chinese relations improved after Nixon’s visit to the PRC, and less than two weeks later Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon. The year was 1973. Before long, Watergate would break, the Twin Towers would open for business and the patent for the ATM would be filed. Amid all this, William Allen, a professor in the English Department at The Ohio State University, started a little literary magazine called The Ohio Journal, which would later be shortened to The Journal.

Now, in 2013, it’s time to celebrate our little publication’s fourth decade of putting out some of the best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (though, back in the day, the only labels we used to distinguish our content were poetry and prose, and before that we didn’t use any labels because we weren’t into “labels”, man). The year of our magazine’s first issue was a good vintage for literature more broadly, particularly for writing of the postmodern ilk. John Barth’s Chimera got the nod for the National Book Award in fiction, beating out Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, while Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, and Maxine Kumin took home the Pulitzer honors in poetry for her Up Country. But perhaps no release would prove more important than Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which came out in February and cemented his reputation as the most prominent voice of postmodernism in America. ’73 would also see the passing of many luminaries: Picasso and J.R.R. Tolkien would both be dead before the fall. Pablo Neruda and W.H. Auden would follow them into the void on September 23rd and 29th, respectively.

As we look back at The Journal’s history throughout the course of this year, we have several events in the works to celebrate our ruby anniversary, including an off-site reading at the AWP conference in Boston (March 8th at 10PM in the Sheraton Boston! More details as we get closer to the date). Our next post will begin a series of interviews with contributors from throughout our last four decades. In a few hours we’ll kick things off by posting an interview with poet Denise Duhamel. Stayed tuned, dear readers, stay tuned.

Michael Larson was born and raised on a horse farm in the small town of Rainier, Washington. He earned his B.A. from Dartmouth College, before moving to Mutsu, Japan, where he lived and worked as a middle-school English teacher for two years. He is currently in the Creative Writing MFA Program at The Ohio State University, and serves as online editor for The Journal.