Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Exuberant . . . elegantly conjures an evocative group dynamic.” —Sam Roberts, New York Times
From its birth in 1925 to the early days of the Cold War, The New Yorker slowly but surely took hold as the country’s most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra paints a portrait of the magazine’s cadre of charming, wisecracking, driven, troubled, brilliant writers and editors.
He introduces us to Wolcott Gibbs, theater critic, all-around wit, and author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine. We meet the demanding and eccentric founding editor Harold Ross, who would routinely tell his underlings, "I'm firing you because you are not a genius," and who once mailed a pair of his underwear to Walter Winchell, who had accused him of preferring to go bare-bottomed under his slacks. Joining the cast are the mercurial, blind James Thurber, a brilliant cartoonist and wildly inventive fabulist, and the enigmatic E. B. White—an incomparable prose stylist and Ross's favorite son—who married The New Yorker's formidable fiction editor, Katharine Angell. Then there is the dashing St. Clair McKelway, who was married five times and claimed to have no fewer than twelve personalities, but was nonetheless a superb reporter and managing editor alike. Many of these characters became legends in their own right, but Vinciguerra also shows how, as a group, The New Yorker’s inner circle brought forth a profound transformation in how life was perceived, interpreted, written about, and published in America.
Cast of Characters may be the most revealing—and entertaining—book yet about the unique personalities who built what Ross called not a magazine but a "movement."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vinciguerra's (Backward Ran Sentences) sprawling history of the New Yorker's early luminaries captures the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of its editors and writers Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, and James Thurber, as well as founder Harold Ross and various other "fabled oddballs." Created to provide "smart, urbane journalism," the magazine quickly became noted for its sharp editing, rigorous fact-checking, and witty cartoons. Ross and Gibbs, the New Yorker's theater critic, were chiefly responsible for its success, as Vinciguerra painstakingly demonstrates. Anecdotes about fact-checking a story on Walter Winchell or a parody of Time demonstrate how reputations were built and undone. The most amusing sections focus on the writers' wit, office romances, and sometimes outrageous behavior, such as Gibbs's penchant for getting drunk before attending plays he was reviewing. There are also more serious passages, such as a discussion of WWII's effect on the magazine's writers, editors, and content, culminating with the landmark publication of John Hersey's Hiroshima in its entirety in the New Yorker, before its appearance as a book. But in general, Vinciguerra's tone is more nostalgic than elegiac, and for that reason his book, while slow-going at times, will be embraced by faithful New Yorker readers. 8 pages of illus.