After having received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the past, The Hudson Review, one of the nation's leading literary quarterlies, was denied a grant in 1993. According to a letter from the NEA, the grant was denied because "writers of color were significantly under-represented in the Hudson Review," and because it had published an article in its summer 1992 issue about novelist Richard Wright that NEA panelists judged to be "isolating and condescending ... This concern was exacerbated... when this essay was compared with the fulsome essay on [Emile] Zola in the same issue."

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