A Guardian reviewer once wrote that one could probably get a Masters degree in New Yorker lit, i.e., books about the legendary New Yorker and its dramatis personae. I’ve been dipping into that canon recently, though I have a way to go before earning a degree.
I started a few weeks ago with The World She Edited: Katharine White at The New Yorker, a recent biography by Amy Reading. Like a lot of women, Katharine White is known to many based on her relationships; her husband was novelist and humorist E.B. White, and her son, Roger Angell, was a writer and another legendary New Yorker editor. And, as with a lot of women, her accomplishments merit more recognition than she usually gets. She worked tirelessly as a fiction editor at the magazine from 1925 (starting merely six months after its founding) to 1960, when she retired. She nurtured and edited such writers as Jean Stafford, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Nadine Gordimer, Marianne Moore, William Maxwell, Ogden Nash, and John Cheever. She also pretty much kept the magazine going.
Reading presents a complex and sympathetic portrait. If you’re interested but don’t feel like tackling 500 pages, check out this graceful 1996 portrait by New Yorker writer Nancy Franklin.
I moved on to her son Roger Angell’s 2007 collection of autobiographical essays, delightfully titled Let Me Finish. Known in later years as a peerless baseball writer, Angell took over his mother’s office as an editor at The New Yorker in the 1950s. (Katharine worked from home after she and E.B. White had moved to Maine.) Angell provides witty, affectionate, graceful anecdotes about all the usual New Yorker characters, including Harold Ross and E.B. White, as well as his father, Ernest Angell, Katharine’s first husband. These pieces appeared in the magazine in the early 2000s. Angell died in 2020 at the age of 101.
Lastly, at Roger Angell’s recommendation, I read Gardner Botsford‘s memoir A Life of Privilege, Mostly. I’d never heard of Botsford, who died in 2004 at the age of eighty-seven, and who, it turns out, was one of the stalwart characters in those hallowed offices.
He led a remarkable life, growing up in remarkable wealth, especially after his mother married Raoul Fleischmann, heir to the yeast company and, as it happens, a longtime funder of The New Yorker. After graduating from Yale, Botsford was drafted in 1942 and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, which he describes vividly. He was wounded and received combat medals for his service. After the war, he bummed around the world with a buddy, romanced many women, slammed down gallons of alcohol, and tried newspaper reporting after he was fired from The New Yorker the first time around.
He eventually returned to the magazine and spent forty years editing such nonfiction luminaries as A.J. Liebling, Janet Malcolm (who became his wife), and Roger Angell. Handsome, witty, and charming, Botsford produced a worthy, beautifully written memoir.
As a footnote, I’ve read a few other New Yorker books over the years, including James Thurber’s My Years with Ross and Brendan Gill’s Here at the New Yorker. Up until now, they provided my view of the magazine’s inner workings. I learned in The World She Edited that Gill’s catty book almost did Katharine White in, and everyone seems to agree that Thurber’s portrait of editor Harold Ross is an inaccurate caricature. The three writers above give fairer (I think) and more nuanced views.
