Volume 22, Number 8 · May 15, 1975
Pictures From an Institution
By Michael Wood
Here at The New Yorker
by Brendan Gill
Random House, 406 pp., $12.95
Thurber: A Biography
by Burton Bernstein
Dodd, Mead, 532 pp., $15.00
The New Yorker, in spite of appearances, is not a magazine. When E.B. White once tried to resign from its staff, Harold Ross, founder and first editor of The New Yorker, yelled, 'You can't quit. This isn't a magazine—it's a Movement.' In another version of the same exchange, Ross is supposed to have said, 'This is not a magazine—it's a cause.' Burton Bernstein, in his painstaking biography of Thurber, echoes the notion as if it were a received truth: 'It was a crusade, not a magazine.' Tom Wolfe, in a pair of articles in the Herald Tribune in 1965, said it was not a magazine but a museum and a morgue. And Brendan Gill, in his offhand sequence of memories and anecdotes, evokes a New Yorker that is not a magazine but a precinct of Elysium, the place where good writers go when they die, and where lucky writers go more or less as soon as they graduate from Yale.
Review, 3459 words
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