Epoch is a three-times-a-year American literary magazine founded in 1947

1947 in literature

The year 1947 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The Diary of Anne Frank is published for the first time.*Jack Kerouac makes the journey which he will later chronicle in his book On the Road....

 and published by Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. The widely respected magazine has published well-known authors and award-winning work including stories reprinted in The Best American Short Stories series and poems later included in The Best American Poetry series.

The publication features fiction, poetry, essays, graphic art and sometimes cartoons and screenplays, but no literary criticism or book reviews.

Epoch is staffed by faculty and graduate students from the English Department creative writing program, and edited by Michael Koch. Epoch appears in September, January, and May, with issues generally running 128 to 160 pages.

History

The magazine was founded in 1947 by Baxter Hathaway, who had come to the university the year before in order to start a creative writing program. Initially the magazine was a literary quarterly staffed by the English department.

A story from the magazine's first volume was reprinted in Best American Short Stories, and all of the fiction from that volume was cited in the anthology. In the 1950s and 1960s, Epoch featured the first published fiction of Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...

 and Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...

, and early stories by Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...

, Stanley Elkin

Stanley Elkin

Stanley Lawrence Elkin was a Jewish American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.-Biography:...

, and Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction...

.

Some other poets and writers who have appeared in the magazine are Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for General...

, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen may refer to:*Ron Hansen , American novelist*Ron Hansen , Canadian politician*Ron Hansen , baseball player*Ron Hansen...

, Andre Dubus

Andre Dubus

Andre Dubus, II was an American short story writer, essayist, and autobiographer. Dubus is recognized as one of the most prolific American short-story writers in the 20th century.-Early life and education:...

, Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel

Amy Hempel is an American short story writer, journalist, and university professor at Brooklyn College.-Life:Hempel was born in Chicago, Illinois...

, Lee K. Abbott

Lee K. Abbott

Lee Kittredge Abbott is an American writer. He is the author of six collections of short stories and teaches writing at the Ohio State University in Columbus.-Life:...

, Charles Simic

Charles Simic

Dušan "Charles" Simić is a Serbian-American poet, and was co-Poetry Editor of the Paris Review. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.-Early years:...

, Leslie Scalapino

Leslie Scalapino

Leslie Scalapino was a United States poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of...

, Harriet Doerr

Harriet Doerr

Harriet Huntington Doerr was an American author who published her first novel at the age of 74.-Early life:...

, Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson

Denis Hale Johnson is an American author who is known for his short-story collection Jesus' Son and his novel Tree of Smoke , which won the National Book Award. He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.- Biography :...

, John L'Heureux, Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham is an American poet. The U.S. Poetry Foundation suggests "She is perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation". She replaced poet Seamus Heaney as Boylston Professor at Harvard, becoming the first woman to be appointed to this position...

, and Rick Bass

Rick Bass

Rick Bass is an American writer and an environmental activist.-Life:Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, U.S., the son of a geologist, and he studied petroleum geology at Utah State University. He grew up in Houston, and started writing short stories on his lunch breaks while working as a petroleum...

.

Awards and recognition

The magazine claims that "all" the major anthologies have reproduced its work, including Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Editor's Choice Awards, Best of the West, and New Stories from the South.

The periodical also won the first O. Henry Award for best magazine of 1997.

Some stories from Epoch that have been reprinted in anthologies had been picked out of the slush pile by MFA students.

According to the Cornell Chronicle, Shannon Ravenel, editor of the anthology New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, said of Epoch, "It's the best. [...] Epoch is just consistently excellent."

C. Michael Curtis, a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...

, said he considers Epoch "one of the top literary magazines in the country in terms of the consistent quality of the writing that appears there." Curtis worked on the magazine staff as a graduate student from 1959 to 1963.