The World She Edited
"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, Professor Emerita, author of Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist and curator of the Substack newsletter “Audacious Women, Creative Lives” |
Katharine White aboard the Astrid in the 1930s,
filmed by her husband, E.B. White
filmed by her husband, E.B. White