The Review was founded in 1939[1][2] by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959.

[3] In 1959 Robie Macauley succeeded Ransom as editor of The Kenyon Review,[8][9] where he published fiction and poetry by John Barth, T. S. Eliot, Nadine Gordimer, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, Richmond Lattimore, Doris Lessing, Robert Lowell, V. S. Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates, Frank O'Connor, V. S. Pritchett, Thomas Pynchon, J. F. Powers, Karl Shapiro, Jean Stafford, Christina Stead, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren,[10][11] as well as articles, essays and book reviews by Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Ellmann, Leslie Fiedler, Martin Green, and Raymond Williams.

[3] In April 1994, the college trustees directed that costs be cut and revenues increased in various ways.

The publication's finances have stabilized and improved, and a Kenyon Review Board of Trustees has been set up.

[14] Cara Blue Adams won the inaugural contest, judged by novelist Alice Hoffman, while Nick Ripatrazone and Megan Mayhew Bergman were named runners-up.

Novelist and short-story writer Joyce Carol Oates received the award in 2003, while poet Seamus Heaney won it in 2004.

The 2005 honorees were Umberto Eco, the novelist, and Roger Angell, the New Yorker fiction editor and baseball writer.

In 2006 Ian McEwan received the award; Margaret Atwood followed in 2007, and Pulitzer Prize winning Independence Day author Richard Ford in 2008.

In 2019, novelist, short story writer and USC Distinguished Professor of English T. C. Boyle received the award.