Win McCormack had been in the magazine business since 1976, publishing Oregon Magazine, helping launch Mother Jones, and building a career that took him from Portland to the corridors of political journalism. In the summer of 1998, he decided that literary magazines had become what he called castor oil — worthy but grim, the kind of thing you endured rather than enjoyed. He wanted to create something for passionate readers who were not literary academics or publishing professionals. He recruited Rob Spillman, a former book columnist for Details who had written for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Book Review, and Elissa Schappell, a senior editor at The Paris Review. Together they launched Tin House in Portland in the spring of 1999.
The name came from the corrugated zinc siding on the Victorian building that housed the Portland office. The magazine came from an impulse to make literary publishing funkier, more political, more engaged with pop culture, and more visually adventurous than anyone thought a literary quarterly had the right to be. McCormack called it the love child of an eclectic literary journal and a beautiful glossy magazine. Spillman described the writers he sought as "brilliant weirdos." The inaugural issue featured Francine Prose, recipes, puzzles, and a layout that looked nothing like the austere pages of the journals it was designed to upend.
Over twenty years, Tin House published early or significant work by Jesmyn Ward, Karen Russell, George Saunders, Stephen King, Colson Whitehead, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Hanif Abdurraqib. Kristen Arnett's novel Mostly Dead Things, published by Tin House Books, became the press's first New York Times bestseller. The thematic issues — Memory, Rejection, Evil, Rehab, True Crime — became a signature: literary anthologies disguised as magazines, each one a curated world. In 2002, Tin House expanded into book publishing as an imprint of Bloomsbury; by 2005 it was a fully independent press. The annual Summer Writers Workshop at Reed College became one of the most respected in the country.
The magazine published its final issue in June 2019, twenty years after its debut. McCormack's attention had migrated toward the New Republic, which he purchased in 2016, and the financial realities of literary publishing had not grown kinder. But Tin House Books continues, and the workshop endures, and the magazine's legacy — as a place that proved literary publishing could be serious and fun, inclusive and rigorous, Portland and global, all at the same time — remains one of the most important contributions to American letters in the twenty-first century.
Explore Tin House at <a href="https://tinhouse.com/" target="\_blank">tinhouse.com