Cast of Characters: Golden Age of The New Yorker

Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber

• Author: T. Vinciguerra
• Title: Cast of Characters: Golden Age of the New Yorker
• Published: 2016
• Trivia: #NonFicNov
• Trivia: List Reading Challenges 2017

Conclusion:

1. The New Yorker has and still is beyond rivalry to a
2. position of supremacy among American magazines.
3. It has attained this  by its the quality of writing.
4. Of course, aspects of the New Yorker have always irritated people
5. …its arrogant elegance.
6. Raymond Chandler wrote:
7. “Beyond the superficial sophistication the whole attitude of the
8. New Yorker seems to me to have that same touch
9. …of under-graduate sarcasm. (Ouch!)  (pg 206)

1. But I have not lived a day of my life without the magazine.
2. It was in our house in 1950’s.
3. I adored the cartoons of Charles Addams as a child.
4. I am still  addicted to the short fiction and profiles pieces.
5. Book and movie, theater reviews?
6. The New Yorker is my ‘first go-to source’.
7. Hilton Als  is the current theater critic.
8. He  has been awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
9. Hilton Als never disappoints
10. His reviews are literary works of art, magnificiant!
11. He introduced me to some new  American Theater playwrights
12. …who are  serious, original, and deeply ambitious.
13. Here are only a few worth reading….
14. Annie Baker, Thomas Bradshaw, Lucas Hnath, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins,
15. ,….Richard Maxwell, Sarah Ruhl, and Young Jean Lee.

1. I have had a subscription to the New Yorker
2. …for more than 40 years here in The Netherlands.
3. It is my most treasured ‘link and contact’  to the old country.
4. I’ve read a biography of Dorothy Parker,
5. What Fresh Hell is This
6. Collection of Essays by E.B. White  and
7. …many books by James Thurber.
8. But I knew nothing about the abrasive Wolcott Gibbs.
9. He was the  theater critic from 1938 until his death in 1958.
10. Wolcott wrote  some of the magazine’s most remembered pieces.
11. Wolcott Gibbs is by far the central character in this book
12. .…followed by
13. E.B. White, James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, Harold Ross, William Shawn
14. …Charles Addams and Katherine White.
15. Curiously…there was very little mention of Dorothy Parker
16. …and Richard Bentley!
17. If you love the New Yorker this is a …
18. #MustRead