Word: shawne
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...York magazine, then the Sunday supplement of The New York Herald-Tribune. His first installment was headlined "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of The Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of The Walking Dead!" It was a great piece, nasty and accurate. "The Ruler of 43rd Street" was William Shawn. The New Yorker's editor, whom Wolfe called "the museum curator, the mummifier, the preserver-in-amber, the smiling embalmer" of the magazine. Wolfe later explained that he wrote the piece as outrageously as he could, trying to be as sensational as The New Yorker was staid. A sort...
...Harold Ross was a man of many maxims. Among them: "Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer." Assuming that his readers had no interest in reading about his writers, Ross kept intramural gossip out of his magazine, and so has his successor William Shawn. Yet neither editor could stem the tide of moonlight memoirs by New Yorker staffers. James Thurber gave Ross himself a full-dress treatment in The Years with Ross (1959). Now, on the magazine's 50th birthday this week, comes Brendan Gill's account of his nearly 40 years...
...author is considerably more circumspect when it comes to Shawn, who "has become famous by eschewing fame and is today one of the best-known unknown men in the country." As self-effacing as Ross was extraverted, Shawn's best-known and perhaps only offhand mot was uttered to a young "Talk" reporter: "Go out and mill...
Truth and Beauty. A glum view of life at The New Yorker! Gill does not dwell on this paradox, but it is not hard to explain. Ross, Shawn and the rest have successfully set up as taste makers over a 50-year period when cultural presumptions have changed horrendously. The New Yorker remains a throwback to Matthew Arnold's Victorian faith in a secular religion of truth and beauty. Eustace Tilley, the magazine's monocled symbol, is clearly an Arnold disciple turned dandy. To be impeccable, graceful and hard-hitting all at the same time is demanding work...
These are dangers that Gill's book does not always sidestep. In truth, he sometimes rushes to embrace them: "It is obvious that the New Testament would make far more satisfactory reading if it had been the handiwork of Matthew, Mark, Luke and Shawn...