Katharine S. White wanted to remain invisible. She had a horror of seeming egotistical or self-promoting, but even more than that, she believed her wo

Editing Without Ego: How Katharine S. White Quietly Shaped The New Yorker’s Writers

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2024-09-05 23:30:05

Katharine S. White wanted to remain invisible. She had a horror of seeming egotistical or self-promoting, but even more than that, she believed her work belonged in the background. Her husband, E.B. White, was the writer whose beloved books caused readers to flood their Maine farmhouse with tidal waves of letters. Her work, as the editor of The New Yorker, was meant to be undetectable, and never struck her as artistic, creative, or worthy of scrutiny.

So perhaps one reason why she was a superb editor is because her personality so completely concorded with the wider cultural understanding of editing as belonging off-stage. And yet that view is entirely incorrect.

White invented her own job at The New Yorker when she joined the magazine a few months after Harold Ross founded it in 1925, and a magnificent portion of the magazine’s success came from the way she defined the job of editor, a job she held until her retirement in 1961. The New Yorker had no money to pay the famous authors of the 1920s—Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were too rich for their blood—so she read every poem, cartoon, and short story in the slush pile, sifting the dross and finding authors to cultivate, via letters and lunches at the Algonquin, over months and years.

By the 1930s, The New Yorker was profitable while other magazines folded, and suddenly they had to find ways to keep their stable of authors from being poached by the competition. But note the terms of this success story: money, profit, competition.