About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made
A definitive history of The New Yorker--the greatest and most influential American magazine--published to coincide with its 75th anniversary, in 2000. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
A definitive history of The New Yorker--the greatest and most influential American magazine--published to coincide with its 75th anniversary, in 2000. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Praise for "About Town":
"Equable, affectionate and comprehensive.... Yagoda ... burrows like a mad mole in 2,500 archival bins and is blessed with a genius for apt quotation."
--John Leonard, New York Times Book Review
"An awesomely comprehensive biography of an American institution."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Enchanting.... Of all the new books coming out to mark The New Yorker's 75th anniversary (and there are too many), Yagoda's history has the advantage: it is most like the magazine it professes to celebrate.... Everything about this book communicates the impression that, for the gracious duration of its 430 pages, the ghost of the 'old' New Yorker--the New Yorker of Ross and Shawn, Parker and White, Thurber and Mitchell and Liebling--is alive again."
--Philadelphia Inquirer
"Based on the recently opened New Yorker archives, Yagoda's compelling ... volume follows the workings and fortunes of the famous weekly magazine. Yagoda begins in 1924, just before the New Yorker's start as a humor journal. Founder Harold Ross's stylistic conservatism, his meticulous editing and his ability to delegate authority helped build up the magazine, creating what Yagoda considers its Golden Age in the late 1930s. WWII gave it new reach and seriousness. William Shawn's ascent to editor-in-chief in 1951 brought, at first, a prosperous complacency; his devotion to serious, long essays, and editor Roger Angell's eye for new fiction, created in the '70s, Yagoda argues, the magazine's second great period. But Shawn's eccentric secretiveness, his odd financial arrangements with writers and his unwillingness to allot power laid the grounds for the New Yorker's latter-day troubles.... "Whole new graphic and literary genres"--the long profile, John O'Hara's short stories, James Thurber's humor, Roz Chast's cartoons--"would not have come to be without the New Yorker"; Yagoda shows why and how they arose. Rich details illuminate the careers of essayists, humorists, critics and journalists, short story writers and cartoonists. Combining anecdote, biography, literary history and a serious look at the business side of the magazine, Yagoda ... explores "the New Yorker as an institution," its "effect on the creative artists linked to it" and the way the magazine came to epitomize "the educated American middle and upper-middle classes"; all three stories emerge and shine.
--Publishers Weekly
"Yagoda's graceful and engrossing narrative resembles one of those multi-part New Yorker profiles of the 1940s or '50s: stately, definitive, working carefully within close limits toward cumulatively powerful effects."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"A detail-besotted, often funny, and deliciously juicy biography of the country's most influential yet strangely secretive and quirky publication.... Yagoda, with the right balance of humor, dish and seriousness, has given us the character that is this unusual and by turns cherished and reviled magazine, and explains in often vivid and compelling detail what makes it tick."
--Hartford Courant
