About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made

Rating:
Summary: Da Bomb
Review: I've started reading this book and it is wonderful! and I am not saying this 'cause my dad wrote it

Rating:
Summary: Excellent work of literary criticism and history
Review: Since the 1920's The New Yorker magazine has ebbed and flowed in and out of the nation's conscience. On occasion The New Yorker itself is splashed across the front page of major newspapers with stories either by or about the magazine. What other periodical is there whose change in editorship is chronicled with unfleeting attention as was recently the case when Editor Tina Brown was deposed.

The supposed demise of The New Yorker magazine has been chronicled many times and the subject is old hat. It interestingly parallels the decline of our culture brought on by the decline of reading lamented by Alan Bloom, Harold Bloom and other cultural critics. But The New Yorker still survives some 80 years after it was founded by Harold Bloom. To appreciate it's place in the American psyche it is worth revisiting it's decades long history as Ben Yagoda has done in "About Town: The New Yorker and The World It Made".

Mr. Yagoda had free reign of the internal papers and correspondence of The New Yorker and willing participation from many of her former writers and editors. His meticulously researched book is replete with facts and anecdotes that makes for a wonderful read. Further he casts a critical eye at the magazine on it's literary merits and offers a well-read analysis of it's fiction in the manner of The New Yorker's own great literary critic Edmund Wilson.

It is difficult today to appreciate the impact that The New Yorker had on American culture in it's heydays of the 1930s through the 1950s. That a humor magazine lacking a table of contents or photographs and whose articles were often without byline could sweep past such stalwarts as "Life" and "The Saturday Evening Post" is prima facie difficult to understand. In recent years the magazine lost it's poignancy and fell apart with spiraling financial losses (which continue today) and a dull demeanor that was famously mocked by recent editor Tina Brown when she criticized the "50,000 word article on sapphires".

Some of us like to read 50,000 word magazine articles and The New Yorker appears to be the only mass circulation forum to find such lengthy works. Some of The New Yorker's long fact pieces-the distinction between "fact" and "fiction" is made clear in The New Yorker with an editor being assigned to head up each department-have been reprinted as famous books. My personal favorite is the spine tingling murder tale "In Cold Blood" related by Truman Capote. More famous is John Hershey's account of the atomic bomb dropped on Japan in "Hirsohima". These articles read with a breathless pace that is steady and lends itself to reading in a single setting. There is neither wasted adjective nor adverb. These were heavily edited by William Shawn and others and retold in the famous New Yorker voice which reads as if many of the works in the magazine had been written by one person. Some writers, such as Thomas Wolfe, have mocked that aspect of the magazine.

Some New Yorker writers did not appreciate such heavy-handed editing. Vladimir Nabokov, author of the novel of illicit love "Lolita", complained to the editor and founder Harold Ross about Katherine White who wanted to alter his fiction. Mrs. White was the patrician beauty and wife of the New Yorker writer E.B. White. She, James Thurber, Harold Ross, and E.B. White set the pace for the magazine in it's early years. White wrote the famous books "Charlotte's Web", "The Elements of Style", and "Stuart Little".

Brendan Gill in his 1975 book "Here at The New Yorker" openly disparages the fact side of the magazine while praising the fiction. This is quite odd and overboard since Gill as a writer of fiction, Talk of the Town reporter, and the magazine's theater critic no doubt would have appreciated such newsworthy, well-written articles as "The Massacre at El Mozote". This chronicled the massacre of hundreds of civilizians in El Salvador by the American-backed government. This article is not ordinary journalism but is literary journalism such as was written by Truman Capote. The article does not relate the facts in newspaper pyramid style fashion with short column inch paragraphs. Rather the prose is written like a novel and makes a more interesting read albeit a much longer one than would fit into the conventional daily press. Another great work of literary journalism described by Ben Yagoda is Lillian Ross's description of the making of the John Huston movie "The Red Badge of Courage". And it is quite amazing that Edmund Wilson, author of the Marxist History "To the Finland Station" and the book of Civil War literature "Patriotic Gore", learned Hebrew so that he could document the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The import of fiction to the New Yorker seems to have waned. Currently issues contain only one fiction piece while other works are relegated to-or perhaps made prominent in--a fiction-dominated version of the magazine which appears every few months. Gone are the days when eager readers poured over each new issue looking for a story by John O'Hara or J.D. Salinger. Not unfallable, The New Yorker has made some obvious gaffes when it turned down short stories by Flanner O'Connor and rejected a work by J.D. Salinger that would eventually become "The Catcher in the Rye".

Harold Ross was the magazine's founder and served as it's editor until 1951. He is by far a more colorful figure than William Shawn and his legacy is greater. Ross was something of a country redneck, sporting a crew cut, who hailed from what at that time was a rural village: Aspen, Colorado. His dislike of Black people is describe by Yagoda. Ross's gift was surrounding himself with talented writers and editors and giving then somewhat free reign to innovate. Yet even he engaged in wholesale editing. Brendan Gill recalls being called to the mat for using the word "indescribable". "Nothing is indescribable" Harold Ross roared.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent work of literary criticism and history
Review: Since the 1920's The New Yorker magazine has ebbed and flowed in and out of the nation's conscience. On occasion The New Yorker itself is splashed across the front page of major newspapers with stories either by or about the magazine. What other periodical is there whose change in editorship is chronicled with unfleeting attention as was recently the case when Editor Tina Brown was deposed.

The supposed demise of The New Yorker magazine has been chronicled many times and the subject is old hat. It interestingly parallels the decline of our culture brought on by the decline of reading lamented by Alan Bloom, Harold Bloom and other cultural critics. But The New Yorker still survives some 80 years after it was founded by Harold Bloom. To appreciate it's place in the American psyche it is worth revisiting it's decades long history as Ben Yagoda has done in "About Town: The New Yorker and The World It Made".

Mr. Yagoda had free reign of the internal papers and correspondence of The New Yorker and willing participation from many of her former writers and editors. His meticulously researched book is replete with facts and anecdotes that makes for a wonderful read. Further he casts a critical eye at the magazine on it's literary merits and offers a well-read analysis of it's fiction in the manner of The New Yorker's own great literary critic Edmund Wilson.

It is difficult today to appreciate the impact that The New Yorker had on American culture in it's heydays of the 1930s through the 1950s. That a humor magazine lacking a table of contents or photographs and whose articles were often without byline could sweep past such stalwarts as "Life" and "The Saturday Evening Post" is prima facie difficult to understand. In recent years the magazine lost it's poignancy and fell apart with spiraling financial losses (which continue today) and a dull demeanor that was famously mocked by recent editor Tina Brown when she criticized the "50,000 word article on sapphires".

Some of us like to read 50,000 word magazine articles and The New Yorker appears to be the only mass circulation forum to find such lengthy works. Some of The New Yorker's long fact pieces-the distinction between "fact" and "fiction" is made clear in The New Yorker with an editor being assigned to head up each department-have been reprinted as famous books. My personal favorite is the spine tingling murder tale "In Cold Blood" related by Truman Capote. More famous is John Hershey's account of the atomic bomb dropped on Japan in "Hirsohima". These articles read with a breathless pace that is steady and lends itself to reading in a single setting. There is neither wasted adjective nor adverb. These were heavily edited by William Shawn and others and retold in the famous New Yorker voice which reads as if many of the works in the magazine had been written by one person. Some writers, such as Thomas Wolfe, have mocked that aspect of the magazine.

Some New Yorker writers did not appreciate such heavy-handed editing. Vladimir Nabokov, author of the novel of illicit love "Lolita", complained to the editor and founder Harold Ross about Katherine White who wanted to alter his fiction. Mrs. White was the patrician beauty and wife of the New Yorker writer E.B. White. She, James Thurber, Harold Ross, and E.B. White set the pace for the magazine in it's early years. White wrote the famous books "Charlotte's Web", "The Elements of Style", and "Stuart Little".

Brendan Gill in his 1975 book "Here at The New Yorker" openly disparages the fact side of the magazine while praising the fiction. This is quite odd and overboard since Gill as a writer of fiction, Talk of the Town reporter, and the magazine's theater critic no doubt would have appreciated such newsworthy, well-written articles as "The Massacre at El Mozote". This chronicled the massacre of hundreds of civilizians in El Salvador by the American-backed government. This article is not ordinary journalism but is literary journalism such as was written by Truman Capote. The article does not relate the facts in newspaper pyramid style fashion with short column inch paragraphs. Rather the prose is written like a novel and makes a more interesting read albeit a much longer one than would fit into the conventional daily press. Another great work of literary journalism described by Ben Yagoda is Lillian Ross's description of the making of the John Huston movie "The Red Badge of Courage". And it is quite amazing that Edmund Wilson, author of the Marxist History "To the Finland Station" and the book of Civil War literature "Patriotic Gore", learned Hebrew so that he could document the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The import of fiction to the New Yorker seems to have waned. Currently issues contain only one fiction piece while other works are relegated to-or perhaps made prominent in--a fiction-dominated version of the magazine which appears every few months. Gone are the days when eager readers poured over each new issue looking for a story by John O'Hara or J.D. Salinger. Not unfallable, The New Yorker has made some obvious gaffes when it turned down short stories by Flanner O'Connor and rejected a work by J.D. Salinger that would eventually become "The Catcher in the Rye".

Harold Ross was the magazine's founder and served as it's editor until 1951. He is by far a more colorful figure than William Shawn and his legacy is greater. Ross was something of a country redneck, sporting a crew cut, who hailed from what at that time was a rural village: Aspen, Colorado. His dislike of Black people is describe by Yagoda. Ross's gift was surrounding himself with talented writers and editors and giving then somewhat free reign to innovate. Yet even he engaged in wholesale editing. Brendan Gill recalls being called to the mat for using the word "indescribable". "Nothing is indescribable" Harold Ross roared.

Rating:
Summary: A "must" for all fans of the New Yorker magazine.
Review: The New Yorker was founded in the Jazz Age and grew to literary proportions, coming to represent the arts of the city and the major participants in these arts. Yagoda is the first to use the New Yorker's archives, donated to the NY Public Library in 1991: his picks from these archives, supplemented by interviews with over fifty literary figures, makes for a lively coverage.

Rating:
Summary: Metamorphosis...
Review: There are at least two ways to view Ben Yagoda's book ABOUT TOWN: 1) as the history of The New Yorker Magazine, how it was conceived and developed and changed over time, and 2) as a social document reflecting its times. The subtitle of the book "and the World it Made" does not seem quite as accurate unless one considers that "world" to be the corporate culture created by the staff led by Ross and Shawn, the two longtime editors who built the magazine. The New Yorker certainly has influenced the world within which it existed along with many other magazines.

Harold Ross, the founder and first editor of the magazine, with the help of Katherine and E.B.White, Thurber, Dorothy Parker, and many other fine editors and writers launched the magazine in the 1920s. The sophisticated and literary focus of the magazine soon captured the fancy of New Yorkers. During the hard days of the depression the magazine actually gained subscribers as readers enjoyed the humorous repartee and cartoons that helped them laugh at their troubles. Many new readers learned of the magazine during WWII as it was handed around the barracks. The GI bill produced many educated readers who remembering their wartime contact with the magazine now subscibed to it. Following WWII, the magazine included more and more "social conscience" articles, for example, John Hershey's essay on "Hiroshima."

Ross died in the early 1950s, and during the fifties under the editorship of William Shawn, the magazine became relatively banal according to Yagoda who says it appealed to stay-at-home wives who enjoyed articles that reminded them of their college days (among other pieces, Mary McCarthy's tales of her Italian travels were featured). In the 1960s, the magazine once again became more vocal about social issues and the environment.

Yagoda says the best years of the magazine came in the 1970s when writers like Woody Allen wrote wonderful wacky pieces and investigative journalists covered the scandals in
Washington. Following a downturn in subscriptions in 1980s, the magazine was purchased by a media mogul and William Shawn departed. With Tina Brown's arrival, the magazine metamorphed into a Conde Nast publication. Garrison Keillor's comments about Brown's arrival (as he left) are amusing.

Over the years, I have read John Updike, Alice Munro, Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine White, and many of the writers who once wrote for the New Yorker. When I was a child, my mother used to quote Dorothy Parker regularly ("Rivers are damp..."), but I had no idea Parker wrote for The New Yorker until years later (we lived in a rural area and subscribed to the Progressive Farmer!!). When I read Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING, it changed my life, but I read it in book form when it was first published as a Book of the Month Club selection. I only became aware of The New Yorker magazine when I was in my thirties and a college writing instructor suggested it. Yagoda says many people discovered the magazine when they were students.

As a social document, The New Yorker articles very much reflect the times, and to some extent, at least under Ross, the magazine seemed to be ahead of the times. In reading this book, I was reminded of National Public Radio, which seems to be the main innovator in broadcast journalism these days--though I am told there are all sorts of happenings on the Internet. The in-depth news stories, the essays by various knowledgeable citizens, the political commentaries and Garrison Keilor are all comparable to The New Yorker magazine.

If you are interested in a snapshot of the 20th Century from an educated New Yorker magazine perspective, or in writing and magazine development in general, you will find much of interest in this book. The tales concerning the origins of many innovative features of the magazine are quite good.

Yagoda suggests the magazine pretty much ended with Shawn's departure in the late 1980s. He devotes eight pages at the end of the book to the three editors who followed Shawn. He says the median age of the readership grows older every year (not replacing subscribers) and most of current readership as such is owing to the retention of loyal readers. He quotes some of these readers who no longer actually read the magazine but have not given up their subscriptions. His book goes a long way toward explaining to me why I dropped my subscription a few years ago.

Rating:
Summary: Tiny Mummies revealed
Review: There are two types of writers: those who aspire, no, dream of being published in the "New Yorker", and those who, after several rejections, bitterly deride the very institution they hoped to conquer. I am solidly of the first camp, though give it a few years and I might be a latter-day grouch.

The work of Ben Yagoda brings the magazine alive, from the heyday of such luminaries as Thurber and White to the tough war years, right up through the Shawn era and even right up to (for 1999) the present. Through it all, Yagoda examines the many lives who devoted themselves to this literary exercise in humor and good faith. The most compelling character studies, however, are the two main editors throughout the magazine's history, Harold Ross and William Shawn.

Ross, who founded the magazine in 1925 and managed it through its first twenty-six years, comes across as a gruff, thoroughly Western man who nonetheless saw the need for a magazine like "The New Yorker", and brought it to being through sheer will and fortitude. He also happened to publish significant works by James Thurber, E.B. White, and J.D. Salinger among others. Shawn, taking the reins after Ross's death in 1951, saw the magazine through 30+ years of challange and triumph, only to be forced out in 1987. Throughout the book, Yagoda makes these men the central focus of his tale, but he includes brief looks at literary and other lights of the twentieth century, some who did get published (like Donald Barthleme, Veronica Geng, and John Updike) and some who didn't (Tom Wolfe, whose scandelous expose on the magazine shook it out of its fuddiness).

Overall, the book looks fondly back at the magazine's past, with a hint that it might never reach the same heights of importance it once had. That may very well be, but there's still something to be said for a magazine that is such an institution no one could imagine starting a writing career without considering the possibility of submitting to it.

"The New Yorker" is still the premier magazine in America, and this book explains why, after almost a century, it still carries the weight it does.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing feat, by fermed
Review: Writing a book about the New Yorker must be one of the world's most complex tasks. The subject is a semi-live, organically strange, symbolically rich, ever shifting protean being that stays still like a rock and at the same time is in perpetual motion. That Ben Yagoda was able to capture its likeness in a portrait made of words is in itself utterly amazing: but that this portrait is a work of art, quite independent of its subject matter, is a small miracle for which we should all be grateful. Like other readers who have commented, I could not put the book down; and this work will reverberate with me for many months, or even years. As I read, I started jotting down a small list of New Yorker writers whose work I "must" read (again or for the first time). By the end of the book it was a long list that will easily see me through 2001. This is a great book and a reference work that will be frequently consulted.