The editorial credo of The New York Review of Books, which began publication in February 1963, was what one might expect of a highbrow journal.

Almost immediately it achieved its modest though difficult ambition of becoming the only serious review of books in America. Against middlebrow art and taste, the NYR insisted on the necessity of making intellectually and aesthetically scrupulous judgments and of being invidious and dismissive when necessary – which was often, given the plenitude of bad and mediocre works. The fault of the New York Times Book Review (which in part provoked the existence of the NYR) was that it showed an undiscriminating hospitality to books good and bad.

The high, dismissive tone of the NYR, especially in its first two years, was an equivocal virtue. On the negative side, the reviews tended to be self-congratulating and condescending, and the acrimony in the correspondence columns often went beyond the bounds of normal intellectual aggressiveness. One sensed from the beginning an editorial impulse to exhibit the reviewer at the expense of revealing the book. The review was to be so impressive, it might even satisfy the appetite for the book itself.