The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker
By Taylor Jasmine | On September 3, 2024 | Comments (0)
In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse.
This towering but behind-the scenes figure in the history of 20th-century literature finally gets the first-rate biography she deserves in The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading (Mariner Books, September 3, 2024; thanks to Mariner Books for supplying the content of this post).
In The World She Edited, Amy Reading brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent.
She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words.
White’s biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more.
She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life.
Based on these years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.
About Amy Reading: Amy Reading is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She is the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. She lives in upstate New York, where she has served on the executive board of Buffalo Street Books, an indie cooperative bookstore, since 2018.
Fascinating facts about Katharine S. White
She hired E.B. White; then reader, she married him
Katharine hired E.B. White (who went by Andy all his life) as a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1926, a year after the magazine was founded and she joined as an editor. They began an affair in 1928, and in 1929, less than three months after Katharine divorced Ernest Angell, they eloped and would stay together until her death in 1977.
It was Katharine’s role as children’s book reviewer at The New Yorker and her encouragement and industry connections that led Andy to try his hand at children’s books, thus giving the world classics such as Charlotte’s Web.
Katharine was the only woman on the The New Yorker masthead for thirty years
Katharine was 32 and the magazine was a few months old when she walked in and asked for a job. She was hired as a very part-me manuscript reader but within weeks was promoted to full-time editor. She invented her job out of nothing, at a magazine which was struggling to survive.
From the summer of 1925, when she joined the magazine a few months after its founding, to the summer of 1956, a few years before her retirement when she hired Rachel Mackenzie to replace her, Katharine White was the only woman on the masthead at The New Yorker.
Katharine cultivated many women writers
Katherine brought many women authors into the New Yorker fold, including Janet Flanner, Louise Bogan, Kay Boyle, Sally Benson, Nancy Hale, and Emily Hahn.
She adored the stories of Mary McCarthy and exerted a major campaign to get and keep her for The New Yorker; their inmate relationship was crucial for McCarthy to develop the reminiscences that first published in the magazine and eventually collected as Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Katharine acquired and edited the works of poets Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Phyllis McGinley.
She brought to American readers the Indian-born writer Christine Weston and the South African writer Nadine Gordimer, and she persuaded British authors Rumer Godden, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Elizabeth Taylor to write for the magazine. One of her closest friendships was with Jean Stafford; she published Stafford just as she was recovering from her violent marriage to Robert Lowell, thus saving her artistic life, and continued to support her emotionally for years.
Katharine impacted numerous male authors as well
Katharine edited many of the New Yorker’s most recognizable authors, including James Thurber, John O’Hara, Ogden Nash, and Alexander Woollcott in the early years. She discovered authors who would become New Yorker names, like John Cheever, Brendan Gill, and Morley Callaghan.
She published a range of poets including Theodore Roethke and W.H. Auden. She brought a just-graduated John Updike into the magazine and they began an intense, loving, playful relaonship over words and commas and semicolons.
She avidly sought out Vladimir Nabokov, using their mutual friend Edmund Wilson as go-between, and advanced him money before he’d even published a story with her. As with Updike, she exerted a strong hand over his prose for the first few years of their association, before giving him the reins, and two of his books, Pnin and Speak, Memory began as New Yorker serials.
She defined iconic genres for The New Yorker
Katharine invented the term “casual” for a quintessential New Yorker genre, a light or humorous personal essay which could be fiction or memoir. This became a pillar of the New Yorker appeal, and it grew into the serialized reminiscences that also came to define the magazine.
She was a pioneer of Work From Home
In 1938, Andy White decided to move the family to their summer home in Maine, for his mental health and for his ability to keep wring. Katharine had a choice to make about her work-life balance.
She solved a tremendously tense problem by moving with Andy to Maine and stepping down as head of the fiction department but reinventing her job as a consulting editor who worked via the twice-daily delivery of giant mailbags full of manuscripts and letters.
She was so crucial to The New Yorker that Harold Ross and the other editors flexed to accommodate her and keep her experience and critical eye trained on their work. It would have been easy to fire her, but instead she played an enormous role in editing this urban magazine from a saltwater farm in Maine, until the war brought both Whites back to the city.
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The World She Edited is available on Bookshop.org*, Amazon*,
and wherever books are sold
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Praise for The World She Edited
“As elegant and judicious as its subject, The World She Edited draws a luminous portrait of Katharine White and her life’s work: making The New Yorker into the cultural powerhouse it would become. White’s creative brilliance as an editor, the care with which she nurtured challenging personal and professional relationships (including with her equally brilliant but sometimes unstable husband), and her central place in the history of American letters have been too little recognized—an injustice that Amy Reading’s essential book has finally corrected.” —Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
“Amy Reading has recreated a lost, gilded literary world in her smart and evocative biography of Katharine White, the longtime editor at The New Yorker who helped shape postwar American literature. As we read over White’s shoulder, we gain deeper insight into the lives and work of the women writers White cultivated—Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, May Sarton, Djuna Barnes, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Stafford, Adrienne Rich, and many others—and that of her husband, E. B. White.
One finishes this book with enormous gratitude for Katharine White’s quiet but fierce commitment to reading, writing, and women, and for Amy Reading’s determination to recognize White’s achievement. Gratitude, too, for all the drama, humor, and literary gossip that make The World She Edited the next best thing to cocktails at the Algonquin.” —Heather Clark, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
“Harold Ross, James Thurber, and E. B. White usually get all the credit for the creation and shaping of The New Yorker magazine. Amy Reading’s book, carefully researched and lucidly written, makes a powerful case that Katharine White was every bit as important. They gave the magazine a tone and a style. She gave it a brain.” —Chip McGrath, former deputy editor of The New Yorker
“This beautifully written book elegantly demonstrates the vital role hidden figures play in shaping cultural taste. New Yorker editor Katharine White encouraged a world of writers – women writers especially – to produce their finest work. This sensitive, compelling book does White justice, revealing the remarkable labor of pulling something better from those who believe they’ve already done their best. American literature as we know it owes Katharine White.” —Carla Kaplan, author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters and Miss Anne in Harlem
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