The New Yorker

The New Yorker's first cover, which is reprinted most years on the magazine's anniversary. The image comes from the 2004 cover.
The New Yorker's first cover, which is reprinted most years on the magazine's anniversary. The image comes from the 2004 cover.

The New Yorker is an American magazine that publishes reportage, criticism, essays, cartoons, poetry, and fiction. Formerly weekly, the magazine is now published weekly forty times per year with an additional six (usually more expansive) issues covering two week spans.

Although its reviews and events listings focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside of New York thanks to the quality of its writing and journalism. The magazine's cosmopolitan, urbane character is epitomized by the "Talk of the Town" section, which offers brief, breezy commentaries on New York life, popular culture, and eccentric Americana, though this section, in recent years, has increasingly shifted to political commentary. Its short humorous sketches, famous cartoons, and short stories have brought each of these literary forms to a higher level of literary esteem in the United States.

Within the journalism profession, The New Yorker’s fact-checking and copyediting teams have a reputation for rigor. Lastly, The New Yorker is noted for its stable of writers, journalists, contributors, and critics, all in the top of their fields.

Contents

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History

The New Yorker debuted on February 21, 1925. It was founded by Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, a Times reporter. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine—in contrast to the corniness of other humor publications such as Judge, for which he had worked, or Life. Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischman to establish the F-R Publishing Company and established the magazine's first offices at 25 West Forty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Ross would continue to edit the magazine until his death in 1951. For the first, occasionally precarious, years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. The New Yorker came out with its famous declaration in the debut issue: "It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."

While the magazine never lost its touches of humor, The New Yorker soon established itself as a preeminent forum for "serious" journalism and fiction. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue. In subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Ann Beattie, J.D. Salinger, Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and John Updike. Shirley Jackson's The Lottery received more mail after publication than any other story in the New Yorker's history. In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has remained steady at one story per issue. While some styles and themes recur more often than others in New Yorker fiction, the magazine's stories are marked less by uniformity than by their variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic narratives to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme and from parochial accounts of the lives of neurotic New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras and translated from many languages.

The non-fiction feature articles (which usually make up the bulk of the magazine's content) are known for covering an eclectic array of topics. Recent subjects have included eccentric evangelist Creflo Dollar, the different ways in which humans perceive the passage of time, and Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Ross was succeeded by William Shawn (1951-1987), who is credited with raising the New Yorker to a higher level of excellence. Robert Gottlieb (1987-1992) and Tina Brown (1992-1998) followed Shawn. Brown's nearly six-year tenure attracted the most controversy, thanks to Brown's high profile (a marked contrast to that of the retiring Shawn) and to the changes she made to the magazine's format — the introduction of photography, increased focus on current events, and more coverage of "hot" topics such as celebrities and business tycoons. The current editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick, who took over in 1998 from Brown.

The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications in 1985, the media company owned by S.I. Newhouse.

Since the late 1990s, the New Yorker has taken advantage of computer and internet technologies for the release of current and archival material. The New Yorker maintains a web site with some content from the current issue (plus exclusive web-only content) at www.newyorker.com. As well, the New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase at www.cartoonbank.com. Finally, the complete cartoons of the New Yorker (all 68,647 cartoons) were published on two CD-ROMs (with an oversized book of 2,004 cartoons) and the complete back issues of the New Yorker from 1925 to 2005 (4,109 issues, half a million pages) were published on eight DVD-ROMs.

A New Yorker look-alike called Novy Ochevidets (The New Eyewitness) was launched in Russia in 2004. It folded in January 2005 after five months of circulation.

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Eustace Tilley

The magazine's first cover, of a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle, was drawn by Rea Irvin, who also designed the typeface the magazine uses for its nameplate and headlines. The gentleman on the original cover is referred to as "Eustace Tilley," a character created for The New Yorker by Corey Ford. Eustace Tilley was the hero of a series entitled "The Making of a Magazine," which began on the inside front cover of the issue of August 8, that first summer. He was a younger man than the figure of the original cover. His top hat was of a newer style, without the curved brim. He wore a morning coat and striped trousers. Ford borrowed Eustace Tilley's last name from an aunt—he had always found it vaguely humorous. "Eustace" was selected for euphony. Tilley was always busy, and, in the illustrations by Johann Bull, always poised. He might be in Mexico, supervising the vast farms which grew the cactus for binding the magazine's pages together. The Punctuation Farm, where commas were grown in profusion, because Ross had developed a love of them, was naturally in a more fertile region. Tilley might be inspecting the Initial Department, where letters were sent to be capitalized. Or he might be superintending the Emphasis Department, where letters were placed in a vise and forced sideways, for the creation of italics. He would jump to the Sargasso Sea, where by insulting squids he got ink for the printing presses, which were powered by a horse turning a pole. It was told how in the great paper shortage of 1882 he had saved the magazine by getting society matrons to contribute their finery. Thereafter dresses were made at a special factory and girls employed to wear them out, after which the cloth was used for manufacturing paper. Raoul Fleischmann, who had moved into the offices to protect his venture with Ross, gathered the Tilley series into a promotion booklet. Later Ross took a listing for Eustace Tilley in the Manhattan telephone directory.

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Cartoons

The New Yorker's cartoons have a reputation for being slightly surreal and often inscrutable. One popular stereotype is that the cartoons have punchlines so non sequitur that they are impossible to understand. However, the cartoons remain popular, implying that a substantial constituency of readers finds them funny. In addition, certain contemporary New Yorker cartoonists such as Roz Chast break this mold, using humor that almost any reader would find accessible.

The New Yorker's stable of current and former cartoonists includes many important names in American humour, including Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, James Thurber, Charles Barsotti, Lee Lorenz, the aforementioned Roz Chast, Gahan Wilson, Robert Mankoff, P. S. Mueller, and George Booth, among many others.

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Politics

Traditionally, the magazine's politics have been essentially liberal and non-partisan. However, in recent years, the editorial staff has been taking a somewhat more partisan stance. Coverage of the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, led by editorial writer Hendrick Hertzberg and then-political correspondent Philip Gourevitch, strongly favored Democratic candidate John Kerry. In its November 1, 2004 issue, the magazine broke with 80 years of precedent and issued a formal endorsement of Kerry in an unsigned lead editorial.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, cartoonist and New Yorker cover artist, Art Spiegelman (who is married to the current Art Editor of the magazine), resigned in protest of what he saw as the magazine's self-censorship in its political coverage. The magazine later hired investigative journalist Seymour Hersh to report on military and security issues, and he has produced a number of widely-reported articles on the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation by US forces. His revelations in the pages of The New Yorker about abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison and The Pentagon contingency plans for invading Iran were reported around the world.

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Style

Example of former semicolon usage from issue of October 27, 1980. On the third line, the semicolon after "cormorants" appears before the closing quotation mark.
Example of former semicolon usage from issue of October 27, 1980. On the third line, the semicolon after "cormorants" appears before the closing quotation mark.

One uncommonly formal feature of the magazine's in-house style is the placement of diaeresis marks in words with repeating vowels—such as reëlected and coöperate—in which the two vowel letters indicate different vowel sounds. The magazine does not put titles of plays or books in italics, but simply sets them off with quotation marks. Formerly, when a word or phrase in quotation marks came at the end of a phrase or clause that ended with a semicolon, the semicolon would be put before the trailing quotation mark; now, however, the magazine follows the usual American punctuation style and puts the semicolon after the second quotation mark.

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Contributors

Well-known contributors have included:

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See also

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Books

  • Ross and the New Yorker by Dale Kramer (1951)
  • The Years with Ross by James Thurber (1959)
  • Ross, the New Yorker and Me by Jane Grant (1968)
  • Here at the New Yorker by Brendan Gill (1975)
  • About the New Yorker and Me by E.J. Kahn (1979)
  • Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White by Linda H. Davis (1987)
  • At Seventy: More about the New Yorker and Me by E.J. Kahn (1988)
  • Katharine and E.B. White: An Affectionate Memoir by Isabel Russell (1988)
  • The Last Day of New York by Gigi Mahon (1989)
  • Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel (1997)
  • Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing by Ved Mehta (1998)
  • Here But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New Yorker by Lillian Ross (1998)
  • The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury by Mary F. Corey (1999)
  • Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker, by Renata Adler (2000)
  • Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross edited by Thomas Kunkel (2000; letters covering the years 1917 to 1951)
  • Defining New Yorker Humor by Judith Yaross Lee (2000)
  • NoBrow: The Culture of Marketing - the Marketing of Culture by John Seabrook (2000)
  • New Yorker Profiles 1925-1992: A Bibliography compiled by Gail Shivel (2000)
  • About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made by Ben Yagoda (2000)
  • A Life of Privilege, Mostly by Gardner Botsford (2003)
  • Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art ((2003)
  • Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker by Angela Bourke (2004)
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Blogs connected to the New Yorker

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External links


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