Word: yorkerism
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...charming confluence of circumstances and skill that made him one of the most admired, imitated and influential writers of his time. After graduating from college, White took odd jobs in journalism, advertising and public relations. He was, in retrospect, simply waiting for Harold Ross to dream up The New Yorker. Nine weeks after the inaugural issue appeared in February 1925, the first of thousands of White contributions graced its pages. When he was invited to join the magazine's staff, his interviewer was Ross's assistant, Katharine Angell. She was seven years older than White, and a mother...
During the Depression, he bought a 40-acre farm in North Brooklin on the Maine sea-coast (where he lives to this day), and beat the first of several retreats from the tender trap of The New Yorker. A mystified Ross was heard to complain: "He just sails around in some God damn boat." During his sabbaticals White also compiled (with Katharine) the enormously successful A Subtreasury of American Humor; he revised and updated the yellowing strictures of one of his Cornell English professors into The Elements of Style, a tiny textbook that has sold in the millions; he wrote...
...itinerary, different shadowy characters but the same cosmopolitan, distanced voice. It belongs, of course, to Adler herself, a former student at some of the world's leading universities, including the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Yale Law School, and, at 45, an astute observer and listener based at The New Yorker. Like Speedboat, the new book is an artful arrangement of discontinuous parts. Its narrator exemplifies the fugitive detachment nurtured by young intellectuals in the 1950s. Her name is Kate Ennis, though her identity is never as clear as her prose. At one point, Ennis, or someone who sounds like...
Robison has been grouped with the bleak, minimalist school of New Yorker writers who have succeeded Updike, Cheever, and Salinger. Though Robison writes the occasional Salingeresque sentence ("One morning I was fixing cinammon toast of something and I had to practically he on the counter to keep from going into a complete faint") such puppyish exaggeration is rare. Like Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme, she casts a cold and detached eye on her characters, and tends to write spare prose about her spare people. People, what's more, who are distanced from their emotions. We see them the outside, largely...
...verbal tour de force. Bartleby speaks only 37 times in a story of 16,000 words concerning himself, and each time he speaks he does so in a variation of the phrase "I would prefer not to." Hardwick convincingly equates Bartleby's character with the modern New Yorker; his footlessness is the predecessor...