This Day in Literary History (“The New Yorker” First Published)

February 21, 1925—The first issue of The New Yorker—featuring on its inaugural issue this date, though it appeared two days before, on a Thursday—was a somewhat different beast than it is now.

Most strikingly, Harold Ross, the first editor of the magazine that would revolutionize the American short story by publishing the likes of “the three Johns” (Cheever, O’Hara, and Updike), did not mention fiction in his initial prospectus of the magazine. It took a couple of years and the key addition of Katherine White, the magazine’s first fiction editor, to move it in this direction.

The tone—amused sophistication, “not for the lady from Dubuque,” in Ross’ pungent phrase—was also different from the at-times turgid, colorless periodical that Tom Wolfe sent up in 1965 in an enormously controversial profile of Ross successor William Shawn, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”

A later complaint by Michael Kinsley—that Shawn made a fetish out of lumpy globs of fact, relevant and arcane alike—was implicitly contrasted in Wolfe’s description of Ross’ sophistication—and what this meant for the quality of his magazine:

“Ross was moody, explosive, naïve about many things, and had many blind spots when it came to literature and the arts—and all of this partially disguised the real nature of his sophistication. Ross’ sophistication actually had a rather refined English—Anglo-Saxon—cast to it. To Ross, sophistication involved not merely understanding culture and fashion but avoidance of excesses, including literary and artistic excesses. He didn’t want anything in the magazine that was too cerebral, Kantian, or too exuberant, angry, gushing, too 'arty,' 'pretentious,' or 'serious.'….He didn’t want it to seem as if anybody were straining his brain and showing off or wringing his heart out and pouring soul all over you. This idea was very special, very English.”

Wolfe’s point about the magazine's irrelevance was overstated—the magazine would, later that year, print the last published short story of J.D. Salinger, and it would continue to present distinguished fiction and nonfiction by Alice Munro, Truman Capote, Jonathan Schell, and many others—but, from subsequent accounts even from old hands of the magazine, he absolutely nailed the positively recessive, sometimes phobic qualities of Shawn that made this most storied of great American magazines an insular, even inbred creative workplace.

That eccentricity even crept into its hiring practices. More than a quarter century ago, looking for a job after my undergraduate days came to their inevitable end, I applied, like thousands of English majors over the years, a oThe New Yorker. Hearing nothing, I assumed that was the end of it.

Until, that is, I received a call—a year later, when I had not only accepted but became entrenched as a copywriter in a publishing company.

When I first received the message at home about the affiliation of my caller, my first thought was, Oh my God—The New Yorker! A job offer, maybe?

My second thought was, Why is he calling now—one year after I applied, after 9 pm on a Sunday, on the Fourth of July weekend, when most normal people my age from New Jersey are at the shore partying?

The editor began to quiz me on the phone, gauging my capacity for a fact-checking job. The questions, for the most part, needed no more than a simple yes or no, and with each yes my excitement built. Was it my imagination that arrangements would be made for a job interview—or maybe that even a full-fledged job offer, right then and there, might occur?

And then one little question with what I sensed was obscure but deadly import: “Do you know German?”

My heart stood still. I successfully resisted the urge to ask if “Ich bin ein Berliner?” or that cherished Christmas carol, “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”) might count. Instead, my guttural grunts resembled those by Ralph Kramden on a quiz show before he offered the first thought that came into his head, the (of course) incorrect answer, “Ed Norton.”

Finally, I offered the only correct response: “No, I don’t.”

The rejoinder from the voice was what I feared--kindly but unmistakably disappointed: “Oh, I’m sorry. You see, the opening we have is for someone who knows German. Not an expert necessarily, just a good working knowledge for fact-checking any manuscript that might come in.”

After I got off the phone, I racked my brains to recall any New Yorker piece where a “working knowledge” of German was necessary. I couldn’t. But subsequent accounts of Shawn—including Jay McInerney’s hilarious roman a clef about his own disastrous stint as a fact-checker late in that regime, Bright Lights, Big City--have convinced me that this was the type of gratuitous knowledge the would love to have at his beck and call, just in case.

Well, no matter. Even with its faults, The New Yorker has remained the ongoing weekly that, against all odds of changing tastes in demographics, reading tastes and technology, continues to produce the best in American fiction, magazine journalism, commentary and humor.

Oh, yes—humor. That was a big part of what Ross wanted to bring the New York sophisticate who was his ideal reader: a "reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life . . . with gaiety, wit, and satire." Wolfe’s summary—“never anything more than a rather slavish copy of Punch”—may or may not be accurate, but there are far worse things to be.

Consider the stable of humor writers who joined Ross in the magazine’s early days: people like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Alexander Woolcott, Ogden Nash, and Clarence Day. And remember that Ross was instrumental in the creation of the one-line caption for cartoons.

The Kindle I received for Christmas misses many of the graphic elements of other newspapers and magazines, but life would be inconceivably poorer for me if my new high-tech toy couldn’t bring up for me the week’s New Yorker cartoons. I’m glad the magazine is still around, even if I never had the chance to work for it.