About Town : The New Yorker and The World It Made

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.