The World She Edited
This beautifully written book elegantly demonstrates the vital role hidden figures play in shaping cultural taste. New Yorker editor Katharine White encouraged a world of writers--women writers especially--to produce their finest work. This sensitive, compelling book does White justice, revealing the remarkable labor of pulling something better from those who believe they've already done their best. American literature as we know it owes Katharine White. |
|
|
Naunced, discerning...An entertaining and expansive study of a pioneering literary editor and the era that shaped her legendary tenure.
Kirkus Review (starred) |
Harold Ross, James Thurber, and E. B. White usually get all the credit for the creation and shaping of The New Yorker magazine. Amy Reading's book, carefully researched and lucidly written, makes a powerful case that Katharine White was every bit as important. They gave the magazine a tone and a style. She gave it a brain.
Chip McGrath, former deputy editor of The New Yorker |
|
Reading convincingly portrays White as a feminist pioneer who built a career in which she embodied the urbane, ambitious women who read the New Yorker and populated its fiction. The prose is lucid and elegant, evoking the style White infused into the magazine (she loved to read “an intense moment distinctively told, a small, well-rounded exercise of a writer’s personality and wit”). The result is a fine portrait of one of the New Yorker’s leading lights that nails the magazine’s hothouse sensibility.
Publishers Weekly Amy Reading has recreated a lost, gilded literary world in her smart and evocative biography of Katharine White, the longtime editor at The New Yorker who helped shape postwar American literature. As we read over White’s shoulder, we gain deeper insight into the lives and work of the women writers White cultivated—Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, May Sarton, Djuna Barnes, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Stafford, Adrienne Rich, and many others—and that of her husband, E. B. White. One finishes this book with enormous gratitude for Katharine White’s quiet but fierce commitment to reading, writing, and women, and for Amy Reading’s determination to recognize White’s achievement. Gratitude, too, for all the drama, humor, and literary gossip that make The World She Edited the next best thing to cocktails at the Algonquin.
Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath |
Amy Reading’s fascinating biography of the editor Katharine White is an important, overdue corrective to the persistently male-dominated histories of American literature as it developed over much of the twentieth century and, particularly, of the magazine that most fostered its growth: The New Yorker. Read it and you will be astonished to learn of the extensive networks of women supporting each other and playing important roles in the literary world from the 1920s-1950s. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, The World She Edited is an enlightening, enthralling read, revealing White’s powerful influence and development of generations of writers, many of them women who are very little known today—but deserve to be, as does White herself.
Anne Boyd Rioux, author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist and Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters As elegant and judicious as its subject, The World She Edited draws a luminous portrait.... White’s creative brilliance as an editor, the care with which she nurtured challenging personal and professional relationships (including with her equally brilliant but sometimes unstable husband), and her central place in the history of American letters have been too little recognized—an injustice that Amy Reading’s essential book has finally corrected. Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life |
Katharine White aboard the Astrid in the 1930s,
filmed by her husband, E.B. White
filmed by her husband, E.B. White
|
|
|
In The World She Edited, Amy Reading harnesses years of deep research, granular attention, and a refreshingly critical eye to examine the life of Katharine S. White, renowned editor of The New Yorker. By reading over White’s shoulder, Reading explores the motivations behind White’s decades of devotion to her authors (as well as her better-known second husband, the beloved writer, E.B. White) and the elusive art of editing, both. In detailing White’s immense talent, fastidiousness, rigor, and, perhaps most groundbreakingly and movingly of all, her deep relational acuity, Reading reveals White’s tremendous savvy—and, equally, her sacrifice—in choosing to exercise her power from the wings rather than center stage. In so doing, Reading reminds us to pull back the curtain and look carefully at who, and what, is behind the stories that shape us all. A thorough, nuanced, and deeply human excavation of an extraordinary life.
Sara B. Franklin, author of The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America |
This beautifully written book elegantly demonstrates the vital role hidden figures play in shaping cultural taste. New Yorker editor Katharine White encouraged a world of writers--women writers especially--to produce their finest work. This sensitive, compelling book does White justice, revealing the remarkable labor of pulling something better from those who believe they've already done their best. American literature as we know it owes Katharine White.
Amy Reading’s stunning new biography is both revealing and revelatory. With delicacy and insight, Reading opens a closely guarded personal life to empathic scrutiny, while proving definitively that White’s was nothing short of a brilliant career.” Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast |