Founded in 1915 and housed on the campus of Southern Methodist University, Southwest Review is the third-longest-running literary quarterly in the United States. SwR has featured many important writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Ginsberg, Annie Dillard, and Anne Carson. Four Nobel winners—Saul Bellow, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, and Orhan Pamuk—have published inside its covers. The magazine is also known for eyeing talent before it becomes widely recognized. In 1960 SwR printed a poem by an unknown Texan named Larry McMurtry, followed a year later by an excerpt from his debut novel. On our centennial, former fiction editor Ben Fountain remarked, “The roll call of heavyweights who’ve appeared in its pages stands up to any American magazine, large or small, of the past 100 years.”

In 2018 SwR redesigned its print edition and, for the first time, launched a website with exclusive text, art, photography, video, and audio. Our mission remains the same: to publish a magazine of the highest quality for general readers worldwide. As we reflect on our past and look ahead to the future, the goal is to inspire new ways of connecting with the world. Simply put, we think writing should be as comprehensive and far-reaching as twenty-first–century life itself.