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

Thomas Karshan

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

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

Sarah Cain

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

A Band of His Own

Ate van Delden

in Adrian Rollini: The Life and Music of a Jazz Rambler

In the fall of 1927, Rollini was in a position to set up a top band and he selected an all-star team. From Jean Goldkette's band he had a.o. Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, and Don Murray. Others ... More

In the fall of 1927, Rollini was in a position to set up a top band and he selected an all-star team. From Jean Goldkette's band he had a.o. Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, and Don Murray. Others include Sylvester Ahola, Frank Signorelli, and Bobby Davis. He called his band the New Yorkers after the Club where they worked. Their music was quite advanced and not suited for the general public.Publicity was good, colleagues came to listen, but the public stayed away, so it ended after a few weeks. During those weeks several recordings were made under various names, including Rollini's and Trumbauer's and Red Nichols'. When it ended, his band members went their various ways and Rollini accepted an offer to go abroad.Less

Sports at The New Yorker

Kasia Boddy

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

Literary Contexts

Luke Ferretter

in Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study

This chapter examines the influences that shaped Plath as a fiction writer. There are five sections, each of which examines one of the major such influences. These are: (1) Virginia Woolf (2) The New ... More

This chapter examines the influences that shaped Plath as a fiction writer. There are five sections, each of which examines one of the major such influences. These are: (1) Virginia Woolf (2) The New Yorker. Previous critics have examined Salinger's influence on Plath. Here I add a discussion of the women writers for the New Yorker that influenced Plath most – Jean Stafford, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mavis Gallant. The latter's Green Water, Green Sky is a particularly significant precursor of The Bell Jar. (3) Women's magazine fiction of the 1950s (4) Women's madness narratives, such as Mary Jane Ward's The Snake Pit. (5) Ted Hughes, who wrote numerous plot sketches for Plath to write up into stories. The mutual influence of Plath's and Hughes' stories, particularly in the genre of fable, is also discussed.Less

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

Faye Hammill

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

Sylvia Plath and ‘The Blessed Glossy New Yorker’

Linda Freedman

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

Introduction

Fiona Green

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism and The New Yorker

Tom Perrin

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

What’s So Funny?: Zen Cartoons, Zen Humor, and Bodhi-Characters

Gregory P. A. Levine

in Long Strange Journey: On Modern Zen, Zen Art, and Other Predicaments

Chapter Seven takes up the topic of Zen cartoons, which provide further glimpses of Zen and Zen art concepts, perceptions, and desires in operation away from the canon, even as they draw at times ... More

Chapter Seven takes up the topic of Zen cartoons, which provide further glimpses of Zen and Zen art concepts, perceptions, and desires in operation away from the canon, even as they draw at times from canonical works and have their own “canonical” tropes. The chapter also explores the larger question of Buddhist/Zen humor in order to think through the very question of cartooning Zen. It proposes the category, “Bodhi-characters,” various figures drawn from the classical Chan/Zen pantheon along with recent Zen-master-esque figures, such as The Dude from The Big Lebowski (1997), who perform and are adored for their counter-normative if not absurdist attitudes and utterances that intimate (to some) Zen philosophical and spiritual truths. These figures create, I suggest, a modern-contemporary neo-“pantheon,” that embodies often the conception of Zen as residing in particular attitudes and demeanors, often linked to the comedic.Less

The New Yorker Life of Hannah Arendt’s Mind

Duncan Kelly

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

Marianne Moore and the Hidden Persuaders

Fiona Green

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

This chapter analyses the ‘Ford Motor Correspondence’ along with the characterization of the poet Marianne Moore. It asks whether the poet is as remote from the modern world as the letters indicate, ... More

This chapter analyses the ‘Ford Motor Correspondence’ along with the characterization of the poet Marianne Moore. It asks whether the poet is as remote from the modern world as the letters indicate, or if she is the savvy performer of a Chaplinesque dance through the cog wheels of midcentury consumerism. In bringing out certain continuities between modernist Moore — sometime contributor to and editor of The Dial — and ‘preposterous’ Moore — one time naming consultant at Ford marketing, the chapter offers a close up on the complex relations between modernist poetry, the commercial sphere, and periodical culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This analysis brings the Ford letters into correspondence with the elements of style that are everywhere felt, yet nowhere seen, in The New Yorker, and which serve as the magazine's most enduring self promotional device.Less

Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing

Bharat Tandon

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

The Distractions of John Cheever

Tamara Follini

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

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 ... More

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.Less

The Piano Man was it! the Man in Charge: Black Nightclubs and Ragtime Identities in New York’s Tenderloin

David Gilbert

in The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace

This chapter explores some of the social and cultural influences that shaped new forms of black identity in New York during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Ragtime identities ... More

This chapter explores some of the social and cultural influences that shaped new forms of black identity in New York during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Ragtime identities called attention to the ways Tenderloin residents participated in the formation of Manhattan commercial leisure, and how they shaped their entertainments through their pocketbooks and personal tastes as much as popular entertainments fueled their own sense of themselves as modern New Yorkers. When Tenderloin residents spent their nights out, they financed the development of black-owned nightclubs, cafes, saloons, and cabarets—new commercial spaces that provided the terrain for the cultural innovation and social interactions that led to black New Yorkers' crafting of new senses of self.Less

Abraham Lincoln's New York City Funeral

Richard E. Sloan

in The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory A Lincoln Forum Book

After his death, a special funeral train carried Lincoln's remains north and west over a thousand-mile journey home to Illinois, stopping for ceremonies in the leading cities of seven states. This ... More

After his death, a special funeral train carried Lincoln's remains north and west over a thousand-mile journey home to Illinois, stopping for ceremonies in the leading cities of seven states. This chapter describes the passage of Lincoln's body through New York. The city had never seen so elaborate, and so crowded, an event for any hero, and the chapter helps transport the modern reader onto the Broadway of the mid-19th century, with its famously gaudy signs and shops now draped in black and adorned with Lincoln images for his last “visit” to the nation's largest metropolis. Among the many mourners were surely New Yorkers who had long and bitterly opposed the Republican president in politics; but unlike the unapologetic critics who found themselves in legal difficulties elsewhere for openly demonstrating their hostility, the chapter shows an overwhelmingly Democratic city united in sorrow.Less

Modernism and the Quality Magazines: Vanity Fair (1914–36); American Mercury (1924–81); New Yorker (1925– ); Esquire (1933– )

Faye Hammill and Karen Leick

in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960

This chapter examines four magazines — Vanity Fair, American Mercury,New Yorker, and Esquire — that engaged with modernism in varying ways. Vanity Fair showcased modernist art and literature and was ... More

This chapter examines four magazines — Vanity Fair, American Mercury,New Yorker, and Esquire — that engaged with modernism in varying ways. Vanity Fair showcased modernist art and literature and was prepared to print challenging poetry and controversial paintings, but these images and texts appeared alongside celebrity portraits and cartoons. Esquire published many stories and essays by leading modernist authors, but eschewed radically experimental work and presented a distinctly gendered version of modernism. The American Mercury concentrated on American writing and was a particularly important outlet for Harlem Renaissance authors, while the New Yorker discussed, reviewed, and parodied modernists rather than publishing their work.Less

Slavery in Colonial New York

in In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863

Enslavement dominated every facet of colonial black New Yorkers' lives—the work they did, their ability to form families, their religious practices, even how they defined themselves. But black men ... More

Enslavement dominated every facet of colonial black New Yorkers' lives—the work they did, their ability to form families, their religious practices, even how they defined themselves. But black men and women did not simply acquiesce to enslavement or to an inferior racial status. Throughout Dutch and British slavery, enslaved Africans demonstrated through their labor, their resistance to bondage, and their creation of families and communities that the racial stereotypes of inferiority promulgated by Europeans had no basis in reality. Black New Yorkers used Europeans' reliance on their labor, as well as their own knowledge of European ways, to ameliorate the conditions of slavery and to push for full freedom. Recognition of blacks' centrality to colonial New York's economic system and of blacks' continual pursuit of freedom gives the lie to Europeans' claims of African inferiority.Less