Saturday Review (U.S. magazine)

Saturday Review was a weekly U.S.-based magazine.

For much of its later existence, it was edited and eventually, published by Norman Cousins. At its height, it was influential as the base of several well-read critics (e.g., Wilder Hobson and theater critics John Mason Brown and Henry Hewes), and was often known under its initials as SR. Never hugely profitable, the magazine was able to survive the overall decline of the general-interest magazine category by several restructurings and attempts to reinvent itself but eventually succumbed to a declining market.

Publishing history

From 1920 to 1924, Literary Review was a Saturday supplement to the New York Evening Post. Henry Seidel Canby established it as a separate publication in 1924. Until 1942, it was known as The Saturday Review of Literature.

The magazine was purchased by the McCall Corporation in 1961. In 1971, the Saturday Review began its decline due to unsteady ownership, as it was sold to a group led by the two co-founders of Psychology Today, which they had recently sold to Boise Cascade. They attempted to split the magazine into four separate monthlies, but the experiment ended in insolvency. Norman Cousins, the former owner, purchased back the magazine and recombined the units with World, a new magazine he had started in his time away from the Review. The combined magazine was called SR World, but soon reverted to the Saturday Review name. The...
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