The Yale Review is the oldest literary journal in the United States.

At the same time, editor Henry Wolcott Farnam gave the periodical a focus on American and international politics, economics, and history.

The modern history of the journal starts in 1911 under the editorship of Wilbur Cross.

Contributors during this period, according to the Review's website, included Thomas Mann, Henry Adams, Virginia Woolf, George Santayana, Robert Frost, José Ortega y Gasset, Eugene O'Neill, Leon Trotsky, H. G. Wells, Thomas Wolfe, John Maynard Keynes, H. L. Mencken, A. E. Housman, Ford Madox Ford, and Wallace Stevens.

[2] The current editor is Meghan O'Rourke, nonfiction writer, poet, and critic.