Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker

(Penguin Petit)

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For more than three decades, a quiet man—some would say almost an invisible man—dwelt at the center of American journalistic and literary life. He was William Shawn, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. Through the writers and artists he gathered around him and worked with, the forms of writing he invented, the pieces he encouraged and published, and his gentle but meticulous editing of those pieces, he expanded—permanently—the range of the possible in journalistic and literary writing. Among his writers were Edmund Wilson, Rachel Carson, John Cheever, V. S. Pritchett, J. D. Salinger, Penelope Mortimer, A. J. Liebling, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Jonathan Schell and Jamaica Kincaid.
In Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, a memoir that in itself is a literary achievement of a high order, Ved Mehta—who started writing for The New Yorker at the age of twenty-five, and over some thirty-three years contributed such historic pieces as his brilliant study of philosophers at Oxford and his biographical portrait of Mahatma Gandhi—gives us the closest and most refined description that has yet been written of Shawn’s editorship of the magazine. He portrays in detail the peculiar, nurturing atmosphere of The New Yorker. And he recounts the series of “tremors” that shook the magazine in the last years of Shawn’s editorship that ended in his abrupt, tragic dismissal by the new owners.