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About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made
For more than seven decades, the New Yorker has been the embodiment of urban sophistication and literary accomplishment, the magazine where the best work of virtually every prose giant of the century first appeared. With all the authority and elegance such a subject demands, Yagoda tells the fascinating story of the tiny journal that grew into a literary enterprise of epic proportions. Incorporating interviews with more than fifty former and current New Yorker writers, including the late Joseph Mitchell, Roger Angell, the late Pauline Kael, Calvin Trillin, and Ann Beattie, Yagoda is the first author to make extensive use of the New Yorker 's archives. About Town penetrates the inner workings of the New Yorker as no other book has done, opening a window on a lost age.
496 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 2000
About the author
Ben Yagoda
20 books23 followersBen Yagoda (born 22 February 1954 in New York City) is a professor of journalism at the University of Delaware.
Born to Louis Yagoda and the former Harriet Lewis, he grew up in New Rochelle, New York and entered Yale University to study English in 1971. He became a freelance journalist for publications such as The New Leader, The New York Times, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone, and published a number of books including About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made. Yagoda currently lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania with his wife and two daughters.
Born to Louis Yagoda and the former Harriet Lewis, he grew up in New Rochelle, New York and entered Yale University to study English in 1971. He became a freelance journalist for publications such as The New Leader, The New York Times, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone, and published a number of books including About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made. Yagoda currently lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania with his wife and two daughters.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
March 15, 2011
It was a funny thing with this book. I read the first 100 pages or so and enjoyed most of it quite a bit, but then I suddenly started getting tired of some of the minutia about the intra-editor correspondence and then I even started getting tired of the correspondence between the editors and the authors. And it was getting kind of repetitive. So I abandoned it kind of abruptly. But before I could complete abandon it, I had to go through the very copious and detailed index, and by the time I was out of the C's (cf. e.g. this *very* small sampling just from the A's and B's:
A&P (Updike)
Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner)
Agnew, Spiro T.
Albee, Edward
Allen, Woody
Anderson, Sherwood
Angell, Roger
Arendt, Hannah
Armies of the night, The (Mailer)
Arno, Peter
Ashe, Arthur
Baker, Nicholson
Barth, John
Barthelme, Donald
Beattie, Anne
Beatty, Warren
Beckett, Samuel
Bell for Adano, A (Hersey)
Bellow, Saul
Benchley, Robert
Berlin, Irving
Bogart, Humphrey
Borges, Jorge Luis
Bradley, Bill
Brando, Marlon
Bright lights, big city (McInerney)
Buckley, William F.
Buffett, Warren
Butler, Nicholas Murray
I realized that by the time I finished that exercise, I would probably have read every page of the book 5 times. So I went back to a more linear reading from where I had left off when I abandoned it, and I ended up mostly enjoying the book, though I was still quite bored by all the editorial stuff, and I'm sure a more serious New Yorker aficionado would appreciate that stuff more than I did.
The best parts for me were about the authors (especially Cheever, Salinger, and Updike in my case) and the least interesting parts were about the editors and thye business end of the magazine.
I have to give it t least 3 stars for effort, and the author certainly expended plenty of that--he went through 3,000 boxes of correspondence and inter-office memoranda and interviewed 50 people.
A&P (Updike)
Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner)
Agnew, Spiro T.
Albee, Edward
Allen, Woody
Anderson, Sherwood
Angell, Roger
Arendt, Hannah
Armies of the night, The (Mailer)
Arno, Peter
Ashe, Arthur
Baker, Nicholson
Barth, John
Barthelme, Donald
Beattie, Anne
Beatty, Warren
Beckett, Samuel
Bell for Adano, A (Hersey)
Bellow, Saul
Benchley, Robert
Berlin, Irving
Bogart, Humphrey
Borges, Jorge Luis
Bradley, Bill
Brando, Marlon
Bright lights, big city (McInerney)
Buckley, William F.
Buffett, Warren
Butler, Nicholas Murray
I realized that by the time I finished that exercise, I would probably have read every page of the book 5 times. So I went back to a more linear reading from where I had left off when I abandoned it, and I ended up mostly enjoying the book, though I was still quite bored by all the editorial stuff, and I'm sure a more serious New Yorker aficionado would appreciate that stuff more than I did.
The best parts for me were about the authors (especially Cheever, Salinger, and Updike in my case) and the least interesting parts were about the editors and thye business end of the magazine.
I have to give it t least 3 stars for effort, and the author certainly expended plenty of that--he went through 3,000 boxes of correspondence and inter-office memoranda and interviewed 50 people.
February 6, 2021
The eventual recognition that New Yorker stories were in fact short stories, and had substantial value as such, can be traced to a single event: the publication, late in 1940, of the magazine's own anthology, Short Stories from the New Yorker. This was a project directed by Mrs. [Katharine] White, and she clearly saw it as a way to announce that, yes, the New Yorker was a forum for first-class fiction. In a 1939 memo to [editor Harold] Ross, she wrote, "What this book should be, as I see it, is a distinguished collection of short stories which, though we didn't set out to do it, we seem to have amassed during the years. It would be mostly savage, serious, moving, or just well written fiction with some that are funny in part." To underscore this point, she omitted from the book reminiscences, humorous casuals, and stories that were parts of series - all the things, in other words, for which the New Yorker was best known. The strategy worked. Reviews of the anthology invariably noted, with surprise, the high quality of the fiction, and in 1941 Edward O'Brien chose three New Yorker stories for Best American Short Stories. O'Brien died before the next edition, and his successor, Martha Foley, took four selections from the New Yorker. She rhetorically wondered in her introduction if the reading public was aware of "the fine character of the fiction published by the magazine."
Why, at this late date, was there any doubt? One reason is that the strength of the magazine's identity as a humorous publication - an identity bolstered by the cartoons, the Newsbreaks, the ironic Talk of the Town pieces and profiles, and by all the light casuals and reminiscences - created a sort of literary camouflage in the midst of which writing of a very different kind tended to go undetected. At the same time, the "serious" short stories were sent out into the world under their own protective coloration. No visual cue alerted readers to a dark piece by Morey Callaghan or Kay Boyle or Robert Coates - it would have the same position in the magazine, the same typographical treatment, more or less the same length, and the same lack of illustration, labeling, byline, subheading, or any other graphic apparatus as a casual by Benchley or Perelman. In other words, readers had to work to orient themselves in a piece of writing - a sharp contrast to most other magazines, then and now, where they are led by the hand and sometimes elbowed in the ribs lest they miss the point.
I first started reading The New Yorker in the 1960s. I eventually became a subscriber and remained a subscriber until I realized that I was drowning. If this had been a monthly magazine, I would have been fine. It was weekly, though. It was too good to skim so I tried to read all of each issue and found myself unable to do so and also have a life aside from the magazine. And the damned things were so good that I hung on to them, rereading them as I would books, until my small apartment became filled with boxes of back issues of The New Yorker. I faced my addiction and (more-or-less) conquered it. I no longer read the magazine regularly. Of course, one glimpse in, say, a doctor's waiting room, and the old hunger is aroused again. Because The New Yorker was, and I suspect still is, a marvelous magazine.
Ben Yagoda's About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made is one of a number of books about The New Yorker. I have read four of these, the others being The Years with Ross by James Thurber, Here at the New Yorker by Brendan Gill, and Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker by Thomas Vinciguerra. I just read the Vinciguerra book a few weeks ago and that prompted me to reread About Town for perhaps the fourth time.
About Town is a remarkably thorough and comprehensive portrait of the magazine from its foundation in 1925 up until the time this book was written in 1999. It includes as close to everything as one could reasonably get in under five hundred pages, covering the fiction, the non-fiction, the cartoons, the covers, the reviews, the poetry, the editorial commentary, coverage of the world in peace and at war - everything. Not, of course, everything in the depth it deserved, but a fine overview of the strange and complex history of The New Yorker.
I began this review with the two quoted paragraphs above for multiple reasons. First, to demonstrate that About Town is not merely a dull list of "and then they wrote..." It interprets and takes positions on what appeared in the magazine. Yagoda's viewpoint is the generally liberal one which I share. However, he is not overly dogmatic.
Second, as I have already said, it strives to include all salient developments in the life of the magazine. Fiction was not originally one of the strong points of The New Yorker, but the work of many fine authors and editors changed that situation.
Next, Yagoda himself writes well. Phrases such as "a sort of literary camouflage" and "led by the hand and sometimes elbowed in the ribs" are artful without being pretentious.
It would have been nice to have even more - more information about the people who worked there, more quotes, more cartoons, more photographs. Ideally, there would have been reproductions in color of New Yorker covers. (I should note that the cover of the book itself by Harry Bliss is splendid and witty, paying tribute to artist Saul Steinberg.) I wish that more than one sentence were devoted to the 1976 article "Friendly Fire" by C. D. B. Bryan, which stands fine and firm in my memory, but I am sure that every frequent reader of the magazine will have similar regrets about other material not dealt with in depth. In short, I wish that this book were accompanied by bound volumes of every issue of The New Yorker - but where would I put them?
This is an excellent book on a wonderful subject. I love it.
Why, at this late date, was there any doubt? One reason is that the strength of the magazine's identity as a humorous publication - an identity bolstered by the cartoons, the Newsbreaks, the ironic Talk of the Town pieces and profiles, and by all the light casuals and reminiscences - created a sort of literary camouflage in the midst of which writing of a very different kind tended to go undetected. At the same time, the "serious" short stories were sent out into the world under their own protective coloration. No visual cue alerted readers to a dark piece by Morey Callaghan or Kay Boyle or Robert Coates - it would have the same position in the magazine, the same typographical treatment, more or less the same length, and the same lack of illustration, labeling, byline, subheading, or any other graphic apparatus as a casual by Benchley or Perelman. In other words, readers had to work to orient themselves in a piece of writing - a sharp contrast to most other magazines, then and now, where they are led by the hand and sometimes elbowed in the ribs lest they miss the point.
I first started reading The New Yorker in the 1960s. I eventually became a subscriber and remained a subscriber until I realized that I was drowning. If this had been a monthly magazine, I would have been fine. It was weekly, though. It was too good to skim so I tried to read all of each issue and found myself unable to do so and also have a life aside from the magazine. And the damned things were so good that I hung on to them, rereading them as I would books, until my small apartment became filled with boxes of back issues of The New Yorker. I faced my addiction and (more-or-less) conquered it. I no longer read the magazine regularly. Of course, one glimpse in, say, a doctor's waiting room, and the old hunger is aroused again. Because The New Yorker was, and I suspect still is, a marvelous magazine.
Ben Yagoda's About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made is one of a number of books about The New Yorker. I have read four of these, the others being The Years with Ross by James Thurber, Here at the New Yorker by Brendan Gill, and Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker by Thomas Vinciguerra. I just read the Vinciguerra book a few weeks ago and that prompted me to reread About Town for perhaps the fourth time.
About Town is a remarkably thorough and comprehensive portrait of the magazine from its foundation in 1925 up until the time this book was written in 1999. It includes as close to everything as one could reasonably get in under five hundred pages, covering the fiction, the non-fiction, the cartoons, the covers, the reviews, the poetry, the editorial commentary, coverage of the world in peace and at war - everything. Not, of course, everything in the depth it deserved, but a fine overview of the strange and complex history of The New Yorker.
I began this review with the two quoted paragraphs above for multiple reasons. First, to demonstrate that About Town is not merely a dull list of "and then they wrote..." It interprets and takes positions on what appeared in the magazine. Yagoda's viewpoint is the generally liberal one which I share. However, he is not overly dogmatic.
Second, as I have already said, it strives to include all salient developments in the life of the magazine. Fiction was not originally one of the strong points of The New Yorker, but the work of many fine authors and editors changed that situation.
Next, Yagoda himself writes well. Phrases such as "a sort of literary camouflage" and "led by the hand and sometimes elbowed in the ribs" are artful without being pretentious.
It would have been nice to have even more - more information about the people who worked there, more quotes, more cartoons, more photographs. Ideally, there would have been reproductions in color of New Yorker covers. (I should note that the cover of the book itself by Harry Bliss is splendid and witty, paying tribute to artist Saul Steinberg.) I wish that more than one sentence were devoted to the 1976 article "Friendly Fire" by C. D. B. Bryan, which stands fine and firm in my memory, but I am sure that every frequent reader of the magazine will have similar regrets about other material not dealt with in depth. In short, I wish that this book were accompanied by bound volumes of every issue of The New Yorker - but where would I put them?
This is an excellent book on a wonderful subject. I love it.
October 22, 2009
I'll be honest, I didn't read past the first chapter. Being a big fan of James Thurber, Garrison Keillor, and Calvin Trillin (and the New Yorker itself), I thought it would be interesting to read about the history of the magazine. The first chapter gives an account of a survey the author sent to New Yorker readers to find out what they liked/did not like about the magazine, and many of those readers' memories of how they grew to love the magazine. In other words, a veritable New Yorker love-fest filled with stories of how fans (literally!) papered spare rooms of their houses with pages from the magazine, how Mummy always read hers on Sunday afternoon after tea, etc.
I ended up scanning through the photo pages, where I did find some interesting images of past editors and contributors to the magazine, along with examples of heavily-edited pages from stories submitted by well-known writers. Nabokov, for example. I would have been interested to read more about this aspect, as well as information about great authors who got their start writing for or being rejected by the New Yorker, but I didn't want to have to slog through the gushing love letter to the magazine in order to glean those tidbits.
I ended up scanning through the photo pages, where I did find some interesting images of past editors and contributors to the magazine, along with examples of heavily-edited pages from stories submitted by well-known writers. Nabokov, for example. I would have been interested to read more about this aspect, as well as information about great authors who got their start writing for or being rejected by the New Yorker, but I didn't want to have to slog through the gushing love letter to the magazine in order to glean those tidbits.
January 13, 2010
Would recommend: Yes, but only to someone who is really interested
I know, could I be any more wishy-washy? I think someone who is very invested in the history of The New Yorker would enjoy this book; it's incredibly well-researched, and knowing the background story makes the current magazine make a lot of sense. But for those who prefer a less, ah, dense telling, this book is not for you, and that's okay. There are a lot of books out there chronicling people's experiences with this publication, so I don't think it's a big deal.
I loved reading about the beginning stages of the magazine, but the last quarter of the book was rough for me. The entire book is pretty dense (it would take me a very long time to read just one page, and I could only go for ten pages at a time without feeling a strain), so that's a struggle, but the ending part was about the turmoil in changing editors. Dealing with the difficult of the text itself along with difficult content was a little much for me.
Overall, though, it was enjoyable, informative, and engaging for me. But, then, I am a big nerd.
I know, could I be any more wishy-washy? I think someone who is very invested in the history of The New Yorker would enjoy this book; it's incredibly well-researched, and knowing the background story makes the current magazine make a lot of sense. But for those who prefer a less, ah, dense telling, this book is not for you, and that's okay. There are a lot of books out there chronicling people's experiences with this publication, so I don't think it's a big deal.
I loved reading about the beginning stages of the magazine, but the last quarter of the book was rough for me. The entire book is pretty dense (it would take me a very long time to read just one page, and I could only go for ten pages at a time without feeling a strain), so that's a struggle, but the ending part was about the turmoil in changing editors. Dealing with the difficult of the text itself along with difficult content was a little much for me.
Overall, though, it was enjoyable, informative, and engaging for me. But, then, I am a big nerd.
April 21, 2015
3.5 stars. I haven't read any other New Yorker history books, so I can't compare this one to any of them. It was interesting material, for the most part, just a little dull or dry in places. I enjoyed reading about certain writers' journeys to get their work into the magazine, as well as the editorial decisions that went into the text and the look of the publication, over the years. A decent read for fans of twentieth century literature, journalism, and publishing, so long as you don't expect action and dramatics all the way through.
June 4, 2016
Interesting book about The New Yorker through the decades (from its inception in 1925 through 1999). It made me want to read some of the articles that Ben Yagoda talked about and excerpted in this book. I realized that through my subscription I can actually go online in the archives back to 1925. It will be interesting to see the differences between the early years and now.
January 5, 2024
Ben Yagoda, Professor of Journalism and English at the University of Delaware, writes a detailed history of the New Yorker from its inception to 1999. The New Yorker is a magazine that is known for its sophistication, high-quality literary works, and admirable artworks. Yagoda explains how this reputation came to be, how the magazine was able to achieve such quality, and how it managed to create such a loyal readership. Yagoda also includes a variety of interviews, letter records, and correspondences between editors and other contributors to the magazine to paint a holistic picture of the behind-the-scenes of the magazine. The most fascinating aspect of the New Yorker is how successful the magazine has been from the very beginning, with high circulation and subscriptions from even those who have no connection to the city. The magazine initially started as a humorous venture known for its cartoons/artwork and it was also troubled by the frequent reorganization of staff with editors being fired left and right, but it eventually found its footing as the loyal readership grew and WW2 and the Vietnam War gave it a more political stance. While Yagoda’s scholarship on the New Yorker ends in 1999, it provides an important background on one of the most successful magazines in the United States, if not the world.
February 15, 2019
Though not named as such, this is basically the history of The New Yorker magazine, official or otherwise. Comprehensive and readable, it covers the heyday of the magazine and sweeps through its transformation from highbrow humor magazine to journalistic powerhouse. From it I added many items to my reading list, which grows longer and longer largely because if the magazine itself. Sadly, my chances of reading through the entire archives grow dimmer by the day. But everyone needs a dream.
December 27, 2011
Far better than the Flannery bio, I think because of the author's emotional connection to the subject. It has inspired me to start re-reading White's essays and some Thurber. I read all that stuff, and Benchley, etc. when I was a kid, inspired by, of course, The New Yorker. Reading all this history has just made me exclaim once again plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Government, check. Corporations, check. Though I think some social progress has been made through the centuries, I don't see any change in human nature, people still being as mean and terrible and as kind and wonderful as ever.
And I have to give the New Yorker credit and blame for inspiring a communal literary voice. Very thought-provoking and inspirational, too.
And I have to give the New Yorker credit and blame for inspiring a communal literary voice. Very thought-provoking and inspirational, too.
July 20, 2012
I've read about the New Yorker before, but this book astounded me in its detail. In an even-handed approach, the author let documentation (what memos!) and conversations with writers speak for themselves.
I was surprised to learn that I unknowingly had read New Yorker writers at the age of about 10 or 11 years (Fashion is Spinach, which contained an infamous cartoon, and H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N), and the book led me through reminiscence of my entire reading life.
That's all for now. I have to go find some commas to sprinkle into this review.
July 2, 2014
A great book made greater if you've ever read the "New Yorker", the "New Yorker Book of War Pieces", "Secret Ingredient", James Thurber's collections, essays by E.B.White, "Years with Ross", etc. It's long, 425 pages of history of a magazine started in 1925. (Most of those quotations should be underlinings or italics. They're books.)
January 1, 2012
An interesting book, but not for people who don't already know some New Yorker history - Mr. Yagoda pretty much assumes that you have some context for White, Thurber, etc. Information on the last few decades is pretty scant.
Read
June 14, 2013I wanted to like this book. I was expecting all sorts of amusing stories and excerpts from the history of this singular magazine, but the book is bogged down by endless name-dropping and descriptions of who edited what on which day. It is worth skimming for some of the anecdotes.
January 6, 2014
Glad I was in this mode for this title; it was quite good. It wove together some of my favorite things - writing, history and The New Yorker.
Read more: http://knowledgeiscool.blogspot.com/2...
Read more: http://knowledgeiscool.blogspot.com/2...
June 13, 2007
Loved getting the history of my favorite magazine. Plus, this must have been a pretty fun book to write.
June 12, 2008
Wonderful history of my favourite magazine. Equal parts history and anecdotes, with a real feel for what The New Yorker is, and what it represents.
February 24, 2016
A wonderful history of "The New Yorker" - funny and absorbing.
December 11, 2016
I love The New Yorker and hoped that this book would be as interesting as the magazine. Unfortunately, it wasn't.
September 19, 2019
Oddly enough, I've never been a reader of The New Yorker. I've been aware of the magazine since my teens and have read references to it quite often, but I've never sat down and actually read through a single issue. So it was surprising that I enjoyed this book so much--or maybe not surprising. Even in my teens, I read James Thurber's books with glee. I've loved E.B. White since my third-grade teacher read Charlotte's Web to our class. I am familiar with the writers and cartoonists of The New Yorker the way I am familiar with classical music. It has always been in the background of my life and I've heard it, but often haven't paid attention to it.
Yagoda gained access to the archives of The New Yorker when they were donated to the New York Public Library. He recognized a good story when he saw it. He covers the events of the magazine from its beginnings with the legendary editor Harold Ross until the late 1990s. He goes into fascinating descriptions of the people involved in the magazine and how their personalities and quirks shaped it. To me, the book was as engrossing as a good novel. For decades, I've looked at many of its writers as mythical figures. It was humbling and somehow heartening to find that they were human after all.
Now I need to find his book on Will Rogers.
Yagoda gained access to the archives of The New Yorker when they were donated to the New York Public Library. He recognized a good story when he saw it. He covers the events of the magazine from its beginnings with the legendary editor Harold Ross until the late 1990s. He goes into fascinating descriptions of the people involved in the magazine and how their personalities and quirks shaped it. To me, the book was as engrossing as a good novel. For decades, I've looked at many of its writers as mythical figures. It was humbling and somehow heartening to find that they were human after all.
Now I need to find his book on Will Rogers.
Want to read
July 18, 2020I haven't read this yet. I just found it again in my bookshelf. However, I look forward to reading it.
I originally picked this book up based on the sample of correspondence to the editor that was shown on the back of the dust jacket. Contributor John O'Hara wrote to request improved remuneration: "I want more money I want more money I want more money . . . " O'Hara then goes on to compare his contribution to that of other authors. A comment handwritten on the bottom of the letter from the administrative editor suggests that John O'Hara is their "highest paid author on a word basis." I take from this that O'Hara is still being paid by the word, while others may be paid by the piece.
I originally picked this book up based on the sample of correspondence to the editor that was shown on the back of the dust jacket. Contributor John O'Hara wrote to request improved remuneration: "I want more money I want more money I want more money . . . " O'Hara then goes on to compare his contribution to that of other authors. A comment handwritten on the bottom of the letter from the administrative editor suggests that John O'Hara is their "highest paid author on a word basis." I take from this that O'Hara is still being paid by the word, while others may be paid by the piece.
July 5, 2021
I liked all the insider's details of this New Yorker Magazine history. This is an in-depth comprehensive and critical analysis of this unique weekly, and of the editors and contributors who shaped it into a foremost cultural force of 20th century American magazine publishing.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews