On Tuesday, February 5, the "New York Review of Books" celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its first issue, published during the 1963 New York City printers’ strike that shut down several newspapers – including “The New York Times” and with it, the paper’s Sunday books section. The debut issue of the upstart review boasted poetry, fiction, and essays by writers such as Adrienne Rich, W. H. Auden, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell. In their first editors’ letter, Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein modestly offered readers “review of some of the more interesting and important books published this winter.” They went on to explain that the contributors wrote at short notice and without pay. The review was an optimistic experiment, and fifty years later, still offers erudite and irreverent commentary on American literature and culture with Silvers at the helm (since Epstein’s death in 2006).

Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein edited several anthologies of the work of their contributors. In the two volumes of the collection “The Company they Kept,” they cull from the magazine’s extensive archive for essays that explore the lives of great writers through their formative friendships. From Saul Bellow on John Cheever to Robert Oppenheimer on Albert Einstein, the pieces are both fond and fierce, collectively presenting a vivid picture of intellectual engagement, influence and affection.

The distinctive visual appearance of the “New York Review of Books” was the work of caricaturist David Levine, whose illustrations appeared in every issue of the magazine for forty-five years. His unsparing eye and delicate touch combined to create striking portraits of political and literary luminaries. A drawing of Lyndon Johnson lifting up his shirt to reveal a Vietnam-shaped scar is one of his most famous images, and forms the cover of his anthology “American Presidents,” in which his witty drawings take on those at the pinnacle of power, from Lincoln to Obama.

Elizabeth Hardwick, another “New York Review of Books” co-founder, contributed more than one hundred articles and stories, from its first issue until her death in 2007 – several of which have been collected by the magazine’s publishing imprint, New York Review Books. In the 2001 collection “Seduction and Betrayal: Women in Literature,” she reflects on the lives and careers of several essential female authors, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Sylvia Plath. The posthumously published collection of her short fiction, “The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick,” draws heavily on her own life, from her childhood in Kentucky to her life as a writer and editor in the postwar city. Called “a gifted miniaturist biographer” by Joyce Carol Oates, her stories and essays alike are marked by a sharp eye and a subtle wit.

Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Seduction and Betrayal” includes an insightful introduction by Joan Didion, one of the Review’s longest-serving writers. Didion’s nonfiction from her long career – on subjects as diverse as the Black Panthers, Newt Gingrich, and El Salvador – was recently collected in the anthology “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.” Meanwhile Didion’s memoirs, “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights” – telling the stories respectively of the loss of her husband and literary collaborator John Gregory Dunne ] and the troubled life and death of her daughter Quintana Roo – have become modern classics of the genre.

One of the preeminent cultural critics of the twentieth century, Edmund Wilson began contributing to the fledgling “New York Review of Books” in June 1963. Lewis Dabney’s lively biography traces the life and career of “America’s last great Renaissance man,” detailing his extraordinary intellect and range of interests, along with his turbulent relationships with equally brilliant women: his wife Mary McCarthy and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. He was a friend and champion of many legendary writers, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Nabokov, and his revealing correspondence with the latter is collected in the volume “Dear Bunny, Dear Volodnya.” Wilson’s own remembrances of the period of the founding of the “New York Book Review” can be found in “The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965.”

Among the contemporary writers who will join Joan Didion and Robert B. Silvers to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the “New York Book Review” are several with an interest in biography, memoir, and creative nonfiction. In his recent collection “Waiting for the Barbarians,” Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays cover a range of cultural topics, including modern retellings of Greek myths, Susan Sontag’s journals, the hit television show Mad Men, and the life and work of the novelist Jonathan Franzen. Mendelsohn’s fellow classicist Mary Beard has written extensively about both ancient Rome and her own life as a prominent academic and public intellectual in Britain. Her popular personal blog for the “Times” of London gave rise to her funny, feisty book, “It’s a Don’s Life.” In a different vein, Darryl Pinckney’s “Out There” profiles three marginalized black writers – J. A. Rogers, Vincent O. Carter, and the British-Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips – whose work explores the impact and psychology of diaspora and race across Europe, America, and the Caribbean.

We wish the “New York Review of Books” and its writers another vibrant half-century of debate and critique.