Phillips, William 1907-2002
PHILLIPS, William 1907-2002
OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born November 14, 1907, in East Harlem, NY; died of pneumonia September 13, 2002, in New York, NY. Editor, educator, and author. Phillips was a cofounder and editor of the literary magazine Partisan Review. He did his undergraduate work at what is now the City College of the City University of New York, where he earned a B.S. in 1928, and completed his master's degree at New York University two years later; he also attended graduate courses at Columbia University from 1930 to 1931. His first job was as an English instructor at New York University from 1929 to 1932. Phillips was interested in literary criticism and modernist writers, and his intellectual pursuits led him to Communism and the John Reed Club, a Greenwich Village-based group that supported the Communist Party. It was there that he met Philip Rahv, with whom he founded Partisan Review in 1934. The purpose of the magazine was to publish stories, literary criticism, and philosophical and political essays by the day's most brilliant intellectuals, combining new radicalism with modernism in what the editors hoped would inspire a new literary movement. Within the first issues of Partisan Review appeared essays and stories by such writers as Delmore Schwartz, Wallace Steven, and Lionel Abel. With the rise of Stalinism in Russia, Phillips and Rahv, who were stoutly against the dictator, had a falling out with the John Reed Club and split from the group in 1937. They managed to find financial support and to gain enough readers to keep the magazine going, continuing to publish such now-famous writers as Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, and Clement Greenberg. Partisan Review was at its most influential in the years immediately preceding and following World War II. The partnership between Phillips and Rahv was contentious, however, and when the editorial board chose Phillips to be editor-in-chief, Rahv fought to regain control. Despite being granted the right to continue to review manuscripts, Rahv resigned his editorship in 1969. By this time, the magazine was in decline, having lost its influence to other rising literary magazines. Phillips managed to get financial support from Rutgers University, where he was also granted a post as professor in 1963. When Rutgers withdrew support of the magazine in 1978, Phillips moved Partisan Review to Boston University and was also a professor there. Even into his nineties, Phillips continued to read manuscript submissions for his magazine, though he had by then relinquished much of the editorial control to others. During his editorial career Phillips was also an associate professor at Columbia in 1945 and at New York University in the early 1960s. He edited several essay and fiction collections, including, with Rahv, The Partisan Reader, 1934-1944 (1946), The New Partisan Reader, 1945-1953 (1953), Partisan Review: The Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (1985), and Sixty Years of Great Fiction from Partisan Review (1996), and was the author of A Sense of Present (1967) and the memoir A Partisan View: Five Decades of Literary Life (1984).
OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:
periodicals
Chicago Tribune, September 14, 2002, section 1, p. 23.
Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2002, p. B20.
New York Times, September 14, 2002, p. A26.
Times (London, England), September 18, 2002.
Washington Post, September 15, 2002, p. C6.