Henry Seidel Canby established the publication in 1924.
Bernard DeVoto was the editor in 1936–1938. In 1950,
John Barkham became book reviewer there. Until 1952, it was known as
The Saturday Review of Literature. The magazine was purchased by the
McCall Corporation in 1961. Cousins resigned when it was sold, along with McCall Books, to a group led by the two co-founders of
Psychology Today, which they had recently sold to
Boise Cascade. They split the magazine into four separate monthlies and renamed the publishing company Saturday Review Press, but the experiment ended in insolvency two years later. Former editor Cousins purchased it and recombined the units with
World, a new magazine that he had started in the meantime. Briefly it was called
SR World before it reverted to
Saturday Review. Saturday Review Press was sold separately to
E. P. Dutton. The magazine was sold in 1977 to a group led by Carll Tucker, who sold it in 1980 to Macro Communications, the owner of the business magazine
Financial World. It was insolvent again in 1982 and was sold to Missouri entrepreneur
Jeffrey Gluck . A new group of investors in 1984 resurrected it briefly. According to Greg Lindsay writing for
Folio twenty years later, most people consider 1982 "the year
Saturday Review died".
Penthouse publisher
Bob Guccione acquired all properties in 1987 and used the title briefly from 1993 for an online publication at
AOL. ==Revival==