Lewis Hyde writes in his book The Gift about CIA sponsorship of literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad during the 1950s and 60s—a sponsorship that was made famous in recent years after it became more well known that founding editor Peter Mathiesson used The Paris Review as a cover while working for the CIA:

As for “the organizations,” the most famous was the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which covertly sponsored a highbrow intellectual journal, Encounter; paid the expenses of American and European intellectuals to attend international conferences; and supported the foreign distribution of American literary and cultural journals such as Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, and Sewanee Review. In the early 1960s, when The Kenyon Review was edited by Robie Macauley, its circulation jumped from two thousand to six thousand. Macauley had actually worked for the CIA before he took over the Review from its founding editor, John Crowe Ransom, and was later to boast that he had “found ways of making money that Mr. Ransom had never thought of.”