Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing

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.

He stood fast against all forms of intellectual debasement. But, even more important, he was, in the deepest and truest sense of the word, a creator. 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. Indeed, a generation of American and British writers had implicit faith in his judgment. They wrote, in every sense of the phrase, for him

Through their work, his influence became as deep and wide as it was anonymous. Among them were writers as various in style and approach as Edmund Wilson, A. J. Liebling, Rachel Carson, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, V. S. Pritchard, Penelope Mortimer, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, Jonathan Schell, John McPhee, Jamaica Kincaid, Ann Beattie, and Roger Angell. Though William Shawn shunned publicity, he in fact stands obliquely revealed in the issues of The New Yorker during the time of his editorship. Many believe that this body of work, taken as a whole, constitutes the historical high-water mark of journalistic and literary writing.

Although the relationship between a writer and an editor is both private and mysterious, the glimpse that Mr. Mehta offers of this singular genius at work illumines it. As Mr. Mehta pulls back the curtain, we see the workings of The New Yorker behind the scenes. The book will give intense pleasure to all who love reading and writing, for it is at once a tribute to William Shawn, a close look at the relationship between writer and editor, and a joyful homage to the inextricably linked arts of editing, writing, and reading.