semesters. Silvers worked as press secretary to Connecticut Governor Chester Bowles in 1950, who was campaigning for reelection. During the Korean War he served in the U.S. Army, which sent him to the SHAPE Headquarters in Paris in 1952 as a speechwriter and press aide. While in Paris, he attended the Sorbonne and Paris Institute of Political Studies (best known as Sciences Po), eventually receiving its certificate. His official duties left him time to work as an editor of a quarterly magazine published by the World Assembly of Youth and as a commissioning editor representing a small publishing company, Noonday Press. In 1954, while working for Noonday, he met and befriended George Plimpton, editor of the new magazine The Paris Review, and after Silvers' discharge from the Army a few months later, Plimpton invited him to become managing editor. Plimpton returned to the US in 1955, leaving Silvers in charge. He later said that Silvers "made The Paris Review what it was". Silvers continued his studies at the same time. In 1958, he returned to New York, becoming associate editor of Harper's Magazine, where he remained until 1963. For an issue of the magazine in 1959 focusing on the state of writing in America, he engaged Elizabeth Hardwick to contribute her essay "The Decline of Book Reviewing", which fifty years later he described as "one of the most thrilling pieces I've ever published". It became an inspiration for the founding of The New York Review of Books. In 1960, he edited the book Writing in America and translated La Gangrene, which describes the brutal torture of seven Algerian men by the Paris Security Police in 1958, shortly after Charles de Gaulle came to power. During the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike, when The New York Times and six other newspapers suspended publication, Hardwick, her husband Robert Lowell, and Jason and Barbara Epstein, saw an opportunity to introduce the sort of vigorous book review that Hardwick had imagined. Jason Epstein knew that book publishers would advertise their books in the new publication, since they had no other outlet for promoting new books. The group asked Silvers, who was still at Harper's, to edit the issue, and Silvers asked Barbara Epstein to co-edit it with him. Silvers and Epstein "became an inseparable double act", editing The New York Review of Books together for the next 43 years, until her death in