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This
page highlights accounts of the New Yorker magazine.
It covers -
studies
Writing about The New
Yorker is as entertaining (or as boring) as writing
about other cult objects such as the Bloomsbury Group
and Bill Gates.
On a bad day Renata Adler's Gone: The Last Days of
the New Yorker (New York: Simon & Schuster 2000)
has all the charm of being chewed up by the business end
of a fast speedboat. Burnrate's Michael Wolff described
her earlier novel - Speedboat - as a masterpiece
of "urban chic minimalist angst" and an ungenerous
observer might consider that Ms Adler seems determined
to leave no turn unstoned in her deconstruction of the
US equivalent of the Bloomsbury cult. Her Reckless
Disregard: Westmoreland v CBS et al; Sharon v Time
(New York: Knopf 1987) carried less personal baggage.
She's joined by John Seabrook's onanistic Nowbrow:
The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture
(Knopf: New York 2000) which blames the decline &
fall on Tina Brown
- wife of exMurdoch editor Harold Evans - and publisher
Si Newhouse and of course the
internet.
Newhouse is defended in Carol Felsenthal's Citizen
Newhouse: Portrait of a Media Merchant (New York:
Seven Stories 1998). Brown is slammed in Dish: How
Gossip became the News and the News became just another
Show (New York: Perrennial 2000) by Jeannette Walls
and in Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American
Politics (New York: Morrow 1998) by Gailand Collins.
We have considered the 'culture of celebrity' and privacy
in a separate profile
on the Caslon Analytics site.
Adler's model is arguably the hatchet job by Tom Wolfe,
reprinted in Hooking Up (New York: FSG 2000), more
spleen from the little boy in the ice-cream coloured suit.
For those in search of kinder, gentler times we recommend
Brendan Gill's slight but charming Here At The New
Yorker (London: Michael Joseph 1975), About Town:
The New Yorker & the World It Made (New York:
Scribners 2000) by Ben Yagoda and the more recent Let
Me Finish (New York: Harcourt 2006) by Roger Angell.
The World Through A Monocle: The New Yorker At Mid
Century (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1999) by Mary
Corey is more scholarly but, we think, less perceptive.
Shawn
Prior to Adler's attack the chattering classes were
chattering, but of course, about Here But Not Here:
A Love Story (New York: Random 1998) by Lillian Ross,
author of the brilliant Picture (New York: Modern
Library reprint 1997) and partner of fabled editor William
Shawn, who gave her his love but went home each night
to his slippers and Mrs Shawn. C'est la vie.
Towards the end of his regime he was described as running
the magazine
the
way Algerian terrorist cells were organised in the Battle
of Algiers - no one knew who anybody else was or what
anybody else was doing
though our recollection of Algiers features bombs, shouting,
bloodshed and goats with cut throats - not, we suggest,
quite the New Yorker style.
There is a more positive account in Gardner Botsford's
A Life Of Privilege, Mostly (New York: St Martin's
Press 2003), a memoir by the stepson of the majority owner,
and in William Maxwell: A Literary Life (Urbana:
Uni of illinois Press 2005) by Barbara Burkhardt.
Shawn was immortalised, or perhaps merely embalmed, by
Ved Mehta's Remembering Mr Shawn's New Yorker: The
Invisible Art of Editing (New York: Overlook 1999).
He deserves credit for much of the fiction and other writing
featured in Friends Talking In The Night: 60 Years
of Writing for the New Yorker (New York: Knopf 1999)
edited by Philip Hamburger and Life Stories: Profiles
From The New Yorker (New York: Random 2000) edited
by David Remnick. Alexander Chancellor's Some Times
In America (New York: Carroll & Graf 2000) is
an account of the New Yorker under Brown. Insights
are offered in Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a
Phobic Life (New York: Viking 2007) by son and composer
Allen Shawn.
Ross
While the literati squabble and spit over the corpse,
New Yorker founder Harold Ross, portrayed by James
Thurber in The Years With Ross as a dyslexic curmudgeon,
is achieving a sort of literary sainthood.
Reviewers of Letters From The Editor: The New Yorker's
Harold Ross (New York: Modern Library 2000) edited
by Thomas Kunkel describe them as equal to work by Faulkner
and Dreiser. Kunkel's intelligent and persuasive Genius
in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker (New York:
Carroll & Graff 1996) sets the tone. Apart from works
by Gill and others noted above, memoirs include Jane Grant's
Ross, The New Yorker & Me (New York: Morrow
1968) and E J Kahn Jr's About the New Yorker &
Me: A Sentimental Journal (New York: Putnam 1979).
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