[4] It called itself a "little magazine" (although issues spanned about 250 pages) and aimed to bring high quality literature to a mass audience, or in Solotaroff's words, the "democratization of literary culture".
Its list of notable writers includes: Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Gabriel García Márquez, Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, Tom Robbins, Jorge Luis Borges, A. Alvarez, Marshall Berman, E. L. Doctorow, Anna Akhmatova, A. R. Ammons, Max Apple, John Ashbery, Russell Banks, Donald Barthelme, John Berryman, Harold Brodkey, Robert Coover, George Dennison, Richard Eberhart, Stanley Elkin, Ralph Ellison, Leslie Epstein, William Gass, Richard Gilman, Allen Ginsberg, Albert Goldman, Günter Grass, Robert Graves, Peter Handke, Michael Herr, Richard Hugo, Stanley Kauffmann, Ian McEwan, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Leonard Michaels, Kate Millett, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, J. F. Powers, V. S. Pritchett, Mordecai Richler, Theodore Roszak, Lore Segal, Anne Sexton, Wilfrid Sheed, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Stone, James Welch, and Ellen Willis.
[1][2][5] Notable works published in whole or in part in the Review include Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Millett's Sexual Politics, Moore's Catholics, Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Coover's The Public Burning, and Doctorow's Ragtime.
[3][4] In total, the American Review published 26 issues including about 200 short stories, 300 poems, and 130 essays written by 500 authors.
[4] Upon the publication's final issue, Richard Locke praised its content, influence, and ambition in The New York Times, while criticizing elements of Solotaroff's editorial style, such as his disinterest in impersonal forms of writing, never defining his standards, and passively letting writers bring work to him rather than cultivating a stronger guiding concept: "in his admirable reluctance to turn the review into a closed shop or to lay down an ideological line, he reduced his editorial criteria to an unarguable question of taste.