In an interview at The Paris Review, we found a historic moment when famous authors wrote for free in a completely unknown publication. When the legendary editor Robert Silvers launched The New York Review of Books in 1962, he went straight to the most talented writers in the country and asked them to work for free.

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Our thought was to think of the best writers in the world to review the books of the season—even people who hadn’t written book reviews for years or ever. Many of them we knew—Norman Mailer, [William] Styron, W. H. Auden, Edmund Wilson. We said, “Look, we have three weeks, we can’t pay a penny, will you do it?” And they all did.

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At New York City’s Joe’s Pub last night, novelist and actor Steve Martin performed with his bluegrass band–The Steep Canyon Rangers.

Using an iPad propped on a special stand to view the set list, Martin and the musicians performed songs from their new album, “Rare Bird Alert.” The band played two songs for the encore.

The first song set a W.H. Auden poem to music. Martin explained that his wife read the Auden piece to him. He thought it would make a great country song and called Auden’s estate for permission. The video embedded above features the second encore, “Orange Blossom Special.”

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Smart said: “None of the poems I’ve found I could claim was a great poem.” But, he added that the juxtaposition of “Evening and Night on Primrose Hill” and the more traditional “Dawn” in 1922, the year in which T S Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce‘s Ulysses were published, showed “the modern, put against the old way – two totally different styles”.

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Although Auden’s work has been published by Random House since 1934, there’s been, in the words of Auden’s literary executor Edward Mendelson, a sort of literary tug-of-war between the US and UK for who gets first dibs on him. This old dispute seems to be mostly over by now,” he said. “Readers on either side of the Atlantic who prefer Auden’s early poetry—before he left for America in 1939—tend to think of him as British; readers on either side of the Atlantic who prefer his later poetry tend to think of him as American.”

Though the centenary will be “low key,” there are a number of new volumes in the pipeline. Modern Library and Vintage have published COLLECTED POEMS and SELECTED POEMS, respectively; Princeton University Press, which has six Auden titles, will publish Volume III of THE COMPLETE WORKS later this year. “The complete works editions are primarily for an institutional market and libraries,” said PUP editor Hanne Winarsky. “But the volumes are also bought by enthusiasts as they become available. That’s one reason we’ve done some things out of the complete works series, such as Lectures on Shakespeare and Juvenilia—these are newly published works that general readers want to see.”

As part of the promotion for the Selected Poems, Mendelson will be taking part in a five-city tour. He will also be taking part in the 92nd Street Y’s panel on March 5 as well as a Yale event tonight. Speaking of tonight, the Cooper Union has assembled an all-star lineup to celebrate the centennial, including John Ashbery, Michael Cunningham, Katha Pollitt, Francine Prose, and scads more literary talent.

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