Word: yorkers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...YORKER is probably the only magazine in America that does not publish a masthead, the theory being that readers are supposed to know who's who on the staff. So, of course, when the magazine reached its 50th birthday with last week's issue, it did not actually announce the occasion on its cover, or anywhere else in the magazine. That sort of self-promotion is for other magazines: for The New Republic, whose cover logotype recently sported a superimposed "60th Year" in colored ink; for People, whose publisher spends a full page in the current issue celebrating the magazine...
Molelike Creatures. On the opening page Gill seems to side with Ross. New Yorker writers, he claims, "tend to be lonely, molelike creatures, who work in their own portable darkness and who seldom utter a sound above a groan." In theory, no one who was not there gives a damn about this loving reliquary -anecdotes, old cartoons, floor plans and interoffice memos. Might it not be more fun to curl up with a rollicking treatise on varieties of corn blight or infrastructure at the Bank of America...
...decidedly not. A seasoned New Yorker writer can make even New Yorker writers interesting. Besides, from the beginning, Ross's humor magazine attracted remarkable talents: Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, S.J. Perelman, John O'Hara, Edmund Wilson, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, George Price. The list can (and in Gill's telling does...
Inevitably, the book is more concerned with The New Yorker then than now. Gill's memories are mostly ebullient. They include, of course, Ross, that "aggressively ignorant" Midwesterner who bullied The New Yorker into shape. Thurber's portrait remains definitive, but Gill adds amusing embellishments. Once Gill included the Tennysonian phrase "nature, red in tooth and claw" in a "Talk of the Town" item. Ross's notorious innocence in literary matters ("Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?") prompted him to change the reference to "nature, red in claw and tooth." Gill explains as best...
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...