The World She Edited

Katharine S. White at The New Yorker

Amy Reading

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781328595911
• eBook ISBN: 9781328595928
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

"Meticulously researched." —The New York Times

"A first-rate biography." —Washington Post

A lively and intimate biography of trailblazing and era-defining New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, who helped build the magazine’s prestigious legacy and transform the 20^th century literary landscape for women.

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse.

This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words.

White’s biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life.

Based on years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.

“The next best thing to cocktails at the Algonquin.” — Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue: February 1953
• Part I: The Family Glamour (1892–1909)
• Part II: The New Woman Gets It All (1910–1925)
• Part III: Editing a Humor Weekly (1925–1929)
• Part IV: Editing a Literary Powerhouse (1930–1938)
• Part V: Interregnum (1938–1943)
• Part VI: The Years of Greatest Influence (1943–1954)
• Part VII: The Editor Becomes a Writer (1955–1960)
• Part VIII: Retirement on New Yorker Stationery (1961–1977)
• Epilogue: Katharine S. White Forgotten and Remembered
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About Mariner Books
• About the Author
• Also by Amy Reading
• Copyright
• About the Publisher