Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses how the story of a periodical is not the story of its editors; it is also a narrative of intersections and adjacencies, of timeliness and accident, and of labour behind the scenes that is not visible in the finished product. A magazine is an ‘unstable compound’, a shifting terrain of verbal, visual and historical contingencies that arise from its internal workings (procedures for editing, checking, and production); in its published form (juxtapositions of editorial, cartoons, and advertising, arrangement into ‘departments’, visual constituents and page layouts); and in its external relations (readership, affiliations, and competition with other media). The chapter reads across and between The New Yorker departments, with particular weighting towards fiction and poetry.

Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing

This chapter explores The New Yorker's distinctive relationship with the Manhattan cityscape within which it was conceived and produced. It suggests ways in which both the magazine's treatments of the value of readable social indicators, and the larger cultural cachet of the magazine itself in the 1950s and 1960s, offered the young Philip Roth an early engagement with ideas that were to become defining imaginative preoccupations across his fictional and critical oeuvre, from Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis. The chapter shows how there remains an important difference between textual cityscapes and Times Square in the middle of the twentieth century. Reading a nineteenth-century poster or a handbill may have been fascinating or disorientating to a passerby, but for the most part, the implicit power relationship of conventional reading would not have been challenged.

‘We Stand Corrected’: New Yorker Fact-checking and the Business of American Accuracy

This chapter looks at how modern journalistic writing is fact checked for publication. Supported by what is perhaps the most famous department of fact checking in publishing history, New Yorker editorial philosophy is founded precisely in a sense that ‘the challenge, and the art, lies in confronting the facts and shaping them into something beautiful’. The New Yorker's reputation for fastidiousness over ‘points of fact’ continues to this day. Fact checkers are integral to the editorial process: their purpose is not only to prevent errors from appearing in the magazine, but also to mediate between writer, editor, copy editor, and lawyers. Since The New Yorker does not tend to have assistant or associate editors, checkers fill an essential gap in the editorial machinery.

The New Yorker, the Middlebrow, and the Periodical Marketplace in 1925

This chapter focuses on The New Yorker in its first year, exploring its mediation of the whole range of the city's print culture. Balancing between fascination and ironic detachment in its attitude to the celebrity gossip and sensation disseminated in the tabloids, and similarly in its attitude to the high culture disseminated in avant garde and smart magazines, The New Yorker adopted an intermediate position which affiliates it with middlebrow culture. The chapter shows how, as multiauthored collages, incorporating a diverse mix of content and evolving over time, magazines are always difficult to position in relation to cultural hierarchies. The New Yorker, for example, has been classed, in different critical accounts, as modernist, as mass market, and as middlebrow.

On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism and The New Yorker

This chapter considers US critic Dwight Macdonald's celebrated two-part hatchet job on so called middlebrow culture: ‘Masscult and Midcult’. However, it loses its edge when it comes to assessing The New Yorker, the middlebrow magazine for which Macdonald, at the time he wrote the articles in 1960, had been a staff writer for eight years. Like all middlebrow products, Macdonald says, The New Yorker is produced to a formula that makes it monotonous, except that its formula is better than the one used in editing its ‘Midcult brethren’. The chapter shows how Macdonald's prose emblematises a midcentury middlebrow literary mode called blustering. Blusterers, who appear all over middlebrow US prose of the early Cold War, aim to talk with the appearance of forthrightness, but they get so bogged down that they end up muddled and mired in self contradiction.

The New Yorker Life of Hannah Arendt’s Mind

This chapter illustrates how, in the annals of The New Yorker, the ‘Reporter at Large’ feature has been central, often dealing with major subjects of truly global significance, and occasionally taking up the entire magazine itself. Yet although each of the essays included in the feature transformed entire fields of inquiry, few have matched the provocative impact of Hannah Arendt's series of five features concerning ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’. Her essays, when published in book form, carried the subtitle ‘the banality of evil’ that made them infamous on a broader, more global scale than the more local disturbances among New York intellectuals that the magazine publication provoked. Her analysis of the Nazi bureaucrat has been incessantly studied ever since.

Sports at The New Yorker

This chapter illustrates how, in the years leading up to the launch of The New Yorker, sport had assumed an increasingly important place in American mass leisure. Joseph Pulitzer became the first publisher of a New York daily paper to establish a distinct sports department — one of a series of measures that saw the circulation of the World rise from 11,000 in 1883 to 1.3 million in 1898. Although Pulitzer recruited regular contributors on forty different sports, it was the popularity of baseball and boxing (decried as barbaric on the editorial page but heavily represented in the sports pages) that transformed casual readers into fervent fans. William Randolph Hearst followed Pulitzer's example when he took over the New York Journal in 1895, expanding the sports section and even placing sports stories on the front page.

Portrait of the Rabbit as a Young Beau: John Updike, New Yorker Humorist

This chapter argues that New Yorker humorist John Updike was able to develop a fifth column position by drawing upon discontents already implicit in New Yorker humour. In its cartoons and light verse, Updike found a humorous cloud of secular anxiety which he could distil, with deceptive courtesy, into an internal critique of The New Yorker's culture. Cartoons showing savages acting like Manhattanites, or vice versa, betrayed a sense of the hidden affinity between civilisation and the discontented primitive instincts; cartoons about cannibals, the fearful possibility that life was a violent matter of survival; cartoons about urban anxiety, the false support of work, and works; while light verse playing on speed and slowness hinted at an underlying desire to see in a human life an unmodern norm of shape and pace.

The Distractions of John Cheever

This chapter considers John Cheever's Rolex advertisement, which can be read as the writer's comment, poised between self mockery and self congratulation, on his lifelong tussle with the marketplace and the conditions of magazine publication, considering Cheever's engagement with The New Yorker. While this was an affiliation from which Cheever frequently benefited, it was also one increasingly marked by financial frustration, creative limitation, and personal discord with the editors with whom he was most closely associated. More damagingly, Cheever's reputation, both during his lifetime and in subsequent decades, was perceived as so deeply entangled with that of the magazine that the association undoubtedly hindered, and may continue to unsettle, a just evaluation of his work.

Sylvia Plath and ‘The Blessed Glossy New Yorker’

This chapter examines the making of Sylvia Plath in the context of The New Yorker, as well as her sense of her own materiality, or immateriality, as a writer in that context. In Jacqueline Rose's positioning of Plath in the terrain of contemporary periodicals, The New Yorker figures as the most desirable destination for her writing, even though her work appears more frequently in other periodicals such as the Ladies' Home Journal, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen. Rose points out that Plath published in a range of magazines with quite different markets. She went for highbrow and middlebrow, literary and popular, with exposure as her overriding concern. The New Yorker's initial reluctance to publish Plath made acceptance in its pages all the more attractive.