A version of The New Yorker’s history could be told through auteur theory, a focus on the editors who’ve helmed the ship over the past hundred years. Such an approach wouldn’t work at every magazine, considering the cutthroat capriciousness of the publishing industry, but The New Yorker has only had five editors: Ross, William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick. Remnick, the current editor, has been there since 1998. (A stability in institutional leadership is only matched by my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers.) The Manhattanite from Colorado set the template, however, as Ross edited with exuberant, comma-happy, memo-writing pluck. Thomas Kunkel in Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker describes his subject well, writing that a “more unlikely literary avatar than Harold Ross is hard to imagine…a man of spectacular contradictions and wondrous complexities.” Ross, always embarrassed by his lack of education, was nonetheless the editor who discovered James Thurber, E.B. White, Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson, Ogden Nash, John McPhee, A.J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell, among dozens of others. Ross’s great genius was his ability to recognize talent and to improve on it.
Stringent and demanding, Ross was not an intellectual, but that did not prevent him from understanding the importance of running John Hersey’s gargantuan single-issue 1946 piece on Hiroshima or Janet Flanner’s profile of Adolf Hitler. The neurotic Shawn was temperamentally Ross’s opposite, but he oversaw the magazine during the period of its greatest influence, having the chutzpah to send the philosopher Hannah Arendt to cover Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel and the foresight to provide column inches to a young J.D. Salinger, as well as the loyalty to let Joseph Mitchell maintain an office even when that eccentric genius didn’t write a word for three decades. Such loyalty was not extended to Shawn, unceremoniously dumped in 1985 after Conde Nast purchased the magazine. Gottlieb, when he wasn’t red-pen sparring with Robert Caro over wayward sentences, had less overall influence, but he maintained the brand. Arguably, the flashy Brit from Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, was the greatest outlier among the five (because you must never go full Eustace), but she added color and readers’ letters, both of which endure. More than anything, The New Yorker is defined by its layout, which despite those Brownian alterations remains remarkably consistent. The variable covers, the gossipy “Talk of the Town” section, “Shouts and Murmurs” (worth skipping if you don’t like David Sedaris or Andy Borowitz), the handful of features and profiles, the book, art, theater, and film reviews—all of it concluded with a crossword puzzle and the cartoon caption contest.