Volume 47, Number 5 · March 23, 2000
The Love Boat
By Russell Baker
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made
by Ben Yagodam
Scribner, 478 pp., $30.00
Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross
edited by Thomas Kunkel
Modern Library, 428 pp., $26.95
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing
by Ved Mehta
Overlook, 414 pp., $29.95
Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker
by Renata Adler
Simon and Schuster, 252 pp., $25.00
Here But Not Here
by Lillian Ross
Random House, 240 pp., $25.00
Here at The New Yorker
by Brendan Gill
Da Capo, 406 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Years with Ross
by James Thurber
Atlantic/Little, Brown
At the end when everything was crashing down around him William Shawn seems to have been an authentically tragic figure. Hundreds of artists and writers were prepared to attest to his nobility and did so frequently without being asked. He was nearly eighty years old when the fall came and had been editor of The New Yorker for thirty-five years. He had been picked for the job by Harold Ross, the magazine's founder and first editor, and he took command in 1952 shortly after Ross died. The magazine staff, a band of fractious individualists who agreed on little else, accepted Shawn without the faintest rumble of discontent. It seemed the universal opinion that he was the ideal choice for the job.
Review, 3828 words
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