Grand Street was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 magazine which appeared from 1981 to 2004. It was described by the New York Times as "one of the most revered literary magazines of the postwar era."

Founding

Grand Street was founded as a quarterly by Ben Sonnenberg

Ben Sonnenberg

Benjamin "Ben" Sonnenberg, Jr. was an American publisher and the founder of the literary magazine Grand Street, which he began as a quarterly journal in 1981....

 in 1981. When Jean Stein

Jean Stein

-Biography:Jean Stein grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of Dr. Jules Stein and his wife, Doris. She authored of two books and a pioneer of the narrative form of oral history. She is presently at work on a cultural and political history of Los Angeles, to be published by Farrar, Straus and...

 became editor

Editing

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...

 and publisher in 1990, the magazine's format changed to encompass visual art

Visual arts

The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...

, and it began actively to seek out international author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

s and artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

s to introduce to its readers.

Contributors

Contributors to Grand Street included 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...

, John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

, Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...

, William Eggleston

William Eggleston

William Eggleston , is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries—which, until the 1970s, often tended to privilege work by photographers making black-and-white prints.- Early years...

, William H. Gass

William H. Gass

William Howard Gass is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor. He has written two novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which have won National Book Critics Circle Award...

, Doug Henwood

Doug Henwood

Doug Henwood is an American journalist who writes frequently about economic affairs. He publishes a newsletter, Left Business Observer, that analyzes economics and politics from a left-wing perspective, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.- Early years :Henwood was born in Teaneck, New...

, Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...

, Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper

Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors' Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant...

, Kenzaburō Ōe

Kenzaburo Oe

is a Japanese author and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, social non-conformism and existentialism.Ōe was awarded...

, Jane Kramer

Jane Kramer

Jane Kramer is an American journalist who is the European correspondent for The New Yorker; she has written a regular "Letter from Europe" for twenty years. Kramer has also written nine books, the latest of which, Lone Patriot , is about a militia in the American West...

, David Mamet

David Mamet

David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...

, Susan Minot

Susan Minot

Susan Minot is a prize-winning American novelist and short story writer.Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She graduated from Concord Academy and then attended Brown University, where she studied writing and painting; in 1983 she graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts with...

, Rick Moody

Rick Moody

Rick Moody is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into a feature film of...

, Michael Moore

Michael Moore

Michael Francis Moore is an American filmmaker, author, social critic and activist. He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, which is the highest-grossing documentary of all time. His films Bowling for Columbine and Sicko also place in the top ten highest-grossing documentaries...

, Mark Rudman

Mark Rudman

Mark Rudman is an American poet.He was Professor at Columbia University and New York University.He graduated from The New School with a BA, and from Columbia University with an MFA....

, Terence Kilmartin

Terence Kilmartin

Terence Kilmartin CBE was an Irish translator who served as the literary editor of The Observer between 1952 and 1986. The most well-known and popular of his translations is his 1981 revision of C. K...

, Onat Kutlar, Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists...

, Salman Rushdie, W. G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald

W. G. Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature...

, David Shields

David Shields

David Shields is an American author of non-fiction, fiction, and works that resist generic classification. His latest book is Reality Hunger: A Manifesto...

, Terry Southern

Terry Southern

Terry Southern was an American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style...

, Saul Steinberg

Saul Steinberg

Saul Steinberg was a Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker.-Biography:...

, José Saramago

José Saramago

José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE was a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Harold Bloom has described Saramago as "a...

, Fiona Shaw

Fiona Shaw

Fiona Shaw, CBE is an Irish actress and theatre director. Although to international audiences she is probably most familiar for her minor role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, she is an accomplished classical actress...

, Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...

, Edward Said

Edward Said

Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...

, Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson OBE is a British novelist.-Early years:Winterson was born in Manchester and adopted on 21 January 1960. She was raised in Accrington, Lancashire, by Constance and John William Winterson...

 and William T. Vollmann

William T. Vollmann

William Tanner Vollmann is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist and winner of the National Book Award...

.

External links

• Columbia University Archival Collections: Ben Sonnenberg Papers
• Columbia University Archival Collections: Grand Street Publication Records