![]() Advertisements for cigarettes or whiskey or luxury liners were not seen as inimical to serious articles concerning African-American heroin addicts, unwed mothers, or the bombing of the Bikini Atoll.” “By combining these disparate elements, the magazine was able to transmit a version of the real world that incorporated some of that world’s most troubling features. ” The New Yorker served its postwar audience alternately as a shopping guide, an atlas and a Bible …,” she writes. The definition of a successful magazine is that the ads and editorial content work together, not apart. Few magazines kept the wall intact as The New Yorker did when it came time to write about big business and pollution or the dangers of smoking. She tips her beret to the solidity of the famous wall that separated The New Yorker ‘s editors and writers from its advertising salespeople. She means nothing personal in applying this idea to The New Yorker. The reader takes them in, in the same way. Corey’s heresy–the reason this book will not find a place on the New Yorker buff’s shelf–is that she doesn’t care about the difference between editorial matter and advertising copy. Corey, “meet me at the Century,” she’d think, “Century City?” She does not care if Lillian Ross and William Shawn had a secret alliance. She does not say whether she thinks Tina Brown destroyed William Shawn’s legacy or resurrected the spirit of New Yorker founder Harold Ross. Clair McKelway and John Cheever had in common, but what readers actually took away from the magazine.įirst, a warning: There are many things you won’t find there. She’s trying to find out not only what talented writers as diverse as E.B. Corey had chosen to write about Jane Austen or the Free Speech movement, this approach would be cliché, another squirt from the cultural studies gun, but applied retroactively to The New Yorker in what she defines as its “greatest period of cultural potency,” it’s intriguing. What is the overall message of a magazine, including its advertising? What is its attitude toward women? What is its implicit class voice? If Ms. A lecturer in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she applies her synthesizing vision to questions that editors and writers don’t have the time or the disposition to think about very often. ![]() Corey has more in common with Ninotchka than Brendan Gill or Ved Mehta. Shawn’s ‘New Yorker’, The World Through a Monocle –nothing jarring in that. Here at ‘The New Yorker’, Remembering Mr. It suggests that you’re in for another celebration of the uniqueness of the magazine. But I found it stimulating, not just in thinking about how to think about The New Yorker but about magazines in general. Harvard University Press, 251 pages, $25.95.Īnyone involved in creating or canonizing The New Yorker of the 40’s and 50’s will hate Mary Corey’s The World Through a Monocle: ‘The New Yorker’ at Midcentury. The World Through a Monocle: ‘The New Yorker’ at Midcentury, by Mary F.
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