Literary critic Joe David Bellamy wrote that the series was "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world.

An editorial statement by William Styron in the inaugural Spring 1953 issue described the magazine's intended aim:[2] The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines.

So long as they're good.The Review's founding editors include Humes, Matthiessen, Plimpton, William Pène du Bois, Thomas Guinzburg and John P. C. Train.

The magazine's first office was located in a small room of the publishing house Éditions de la Table ronde.

Other notable locations of The Paris Review include a Thames River grain carrier anchored on the Seine from 1956 to 1957.

[4] In January 2007, an article published by The New York Times supported the claim that founding editor Matthiessen was in the Central Intelligence Agency, but reported that the magazine was used as a cover, rather than a collaborator, for his spying activities.

[5] In a May 27, 2008 interview with Charlie Rose, Matthiessen stated that he "invented The Paris Review as cover" for his CIA activities.

[22] In late 2021, for the first issue with Stokes as editor-in-chief and Na Kim as art director, the journal was given a redesign by Matt Willey of Pentagram that hearkened back to the look that it had in the late 1960s and early 1970s: a minimalist style, a cover with a sans serif font and a great deal of white space, a smaller trim size, and paper that was physically softer.

Naipaul, Philip Roth, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, Edward P. Jones, and Rick Moody.

Other works making their first appearance in The Paris Review include Italo Calvino's Last Comes the Raven, Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, Donald Barthelme's Alice, Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

In the half century since its inception, the series has featured notable New York artists of the postwar decades, including Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaler, Keith Haring, Robert Indiana, Jimmy Ernst, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol.

The Paris Review Spring Revel is an annual gala held in celebration of American writers and writing.

[28][29] The Revel "brings together leading figures and patrons of American arts and letters from throughout New York to pay tribute to distinguished writers at different stages of their careers".