Word: shawns
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...will hate bunk," and would not be "edited for the old lady in Dubuque.") Its clever, brittle style survived the Depression but seemed frivolously out of sync when World War II began. So, war coverage was introduced, culminating in an unsparing report on Hiroshima by John Hersey, to which Shawn persuaded Ross to devote an entire issue...
That was only the beginning. When Ross died and was succeeded by Shawn in 1952, other lengthy reports, some of them prescient, began to appear: Rachel Carson documenting environmental destruction, James Baldwin warning whites of The Fire Next Time. No longer resounding with gaiety and wit, The New Yorker had become a serious magazine with cartoons. For a time, in its outrage over Viet Nam and Nixon, The New Yorker abandoned ironical urbanity and bared its anger. Older readers protested not only the opinions but the shrillness, and for the first time the magazine's circulation fell...
...Shawn laments the magazine's current scarcity of humor and fiction, which he sees as symptomatic of the times: "The problem is to find enough that fits our standards." Fiction can range widely from I.B. Singer's shtetl in Poland to the adulterous suburbia of John Cheever. But there is a recognizable New Yorker kind of story. It usually involves a middle-class woman who registers a sad little recognition after some incident in which not very much happened...
Nearly every issue contains a major article or two of "fact," as the staff calls anything that is not fiction or humor. "Fact" pieces increasingly run on longer, are more pedestrian in the telling, and are heavily weighted toward the scientific. Shawn acknowledges that some articles can be hard going. "We don't want them to be any more accessible than a piece is that does not distort the science that is being written about." (On that ground, why not staves of music in the music reviews? Shawn smiles: "If it did come up, I'm afraid...
...long in two parts now run for three-there is frustration in the writers' paradise. No one can be as savage a critic of the prolixity, or the lack of merit, of what does get published than a writer whose own work has been waiting months to appear. Shawn acknowledges that "we are tempted to hold for two, three or four years'' articles that have no topicality, "but we don't want to make writers unhappy." The backlog of unprinted articles "always seems a little longer every year." Some writers who esteem brevity are convinced that...