 House served as editor from 1927 until his retirement in 1949 and was succeeded by the German critic and novelist Ernst Erich Noth, who went on to edit the journal for ten productive and formative years.As a European-born writer and editor, Noth was the first of a series of cosmopolitan, foreign-born intellectuals who would continue to lead the journal's editorial staff for more than forty years.One of Noth's major contributions to the ongoing process of establishing a distinctive identity for the quarterly was the move to narrow the editorial scope to focus solely on writers of the twentieth century, and to review only books that had been published no more than two years earlier.