 Steiner wrote The Portage to San <unk> of <unk> in 1975 and 1976 in Geneva , Switzerland , and the 120 @-@ page work originally appeared in the Spring 1979 issue of the United States literary magazine , The Kenyon Review . It also appeared in the Spring 1980 issue of <unk> , the British literary magazine . Its first publication in book form , with minor revisions by Steiner , was in May 1981 by <unk> and <unk> in the United Kingdom — and as requested by Steiner , it was a paperback original . The first United States edition was published in hardcover in April 1982 by Simon & Schuster . 
