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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mencken's return to his home at 1524 Hollins Street marked the beginning of his critical rehabilitation. With the success of the new edition of The American Language, Mencken began writing a series of nostalgic pieces on his childhood that will form his memoirs and establish the way the next generation would remember him. His opposition against Roosevelt and his New Deal policies did not change as he followed the campaign trail of Kansas Governor Alfred Landon.

This chapter examines John O’Hara’s influence on the flavor of Pal Joey. The musical is loosely based on his “Joey” stories (originally published between 1938 and 1940 in installments in the New Yorker), which reflect a style typical of the author: frank, realistic, and modern in vernacular. One of O’Hara’s specialties was his characterization of the antihero; this type of character features throughout his novels and short stories and was accompanied by a cynical realism that went on to permeate the atmosphere of Pal Joey, the musical. Understanding O’Hara’s literary style and reputation, and his laser-like focus on class relations, illuminates the place of his Joey stories in American literature. It also helps contextualize theater critics’ mixed reaction to O’Hara’s script, and to literary realism on the Broadway stage.

This chapter offers a close reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Armadillo’ and Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ in the light of the recently published letters between the two poets, as well as Bishop’s correspondence with The New Yorker. It looks at letters as ‘the other life that [a poem] might have had’ and a poem as ‘the other life that [letters’ might have had’, concluding that the relationship between Lowell and Bishop was often less benign than we’ve led ourselves to believe.

The Mandelbaum Gate is by some distance the longest novel that the famously economic Muriel Spark ever wrote, and as such is uncharacteristic in its formal design and narrative structure. Spark's novels are full of the insufferable suffocation of the group, the institution and the family, in which all difference is annulled in the name of the collective identity, the comme une as the French has it. Self-mythology suggests that Spark, like Hannah Arendt, had attended the trial as a journalist for the Western media. Hannah Arendt and Muriel Spark both wrote for The New Yorker. It would seem that it is harder for Spark to narrativise the complexity of Gentile Jewish identity and the history of Israel-Palestine in the form of the novella than it is for the proverbial camel to pass through the Mandelbaum Gate. In general, The Mandelbaum Gate is unique amongst Spark's work.

This chapter emphasizes the need for care in speaking onto the page. It begins with an overview of the tradition of care and the doctrine of eternal vigilance before turning to a discussion of why care is essential to speaking onto the page. It then considers two ways to harness care for creating coherence: the use of collage form and the skeleton process. In particular, it explains how the skeleton process can be used to build a coherent, well-organized essay from disorganized exploratory writing. The chapter also shows how to apply care and planning to the process of writing and concludes with an example of a collage from the July 5, 1982 issue of The New Yorker.