Cast of Characters · Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker

Cast of Characters · Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker
Authors
Vinciguerra, Thomas
Publisher
W. W. Norton Company
Tags
history , biography , writing
ISBN
9780393240030
Date
2015-11-09T00:00:00+00:00
Size
0.83 MB
Lang
en
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From its birth in 1925 to the early days of the Cold War, *The New Yorker* slowly but surely took hold as the country’s most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In *Cast of Characters* , Thomas Vinciguerra paints a portrait of the magazine’s cadre of charming, wisecracking, driven, troubled, brilliant writers and editors.

He introduces us to Wolcott Gibbs, theater critic, all-around wit, and author of an infamous 1936 parody of *Time* magazine. We meet the demanding and eccentric founding editor Harold Ross, who would routinely tell his underlings, "I'm firing you because you are not a genius," and who once mailed a pair of his underwear to Walter Winchell, who had accused him of preferring to go bare-bottomed under his slacks. Joining the cast are the mercurial, blind James Thurber, a brilliant cartoonist and wildly inventive fabulist, and the enigmatic E. B. White—an incomparable prose stylist and Ross's favorite son—who married *The New Yorker* 's formidable fiction editor, Katharine Angell. Then there is the dashing St. Clair McKelway, who was married five times and claimed to have no fewer than twelve personalities, but was nonetheless a superb reporter and managing editor alike. Many of these characters became legends in their own right, but Vinciguerra also shows how, as a group, *The New Yorker* ’s inner circle brought forth a profound transformation in how life was perceived, interpreted, written about, and published in America.

*Cast of Characters* may be the most revealing—and entertaining—book yet about the unique personalities who built what Ross called not a magazine but a "movement."