Katharine White’s Iconic New Yorker

On a May Day in 1925, Katharine Angell walked into the maze of desks at The New Yorker, a three-month old magazine that was losing money, just barely hanging on. Shown into the office of founding editor Harold Ross, Katharine flourished a reference and said she wanted to work for the magazine.

Impressed with her education and patrician bearing, Ross hired her on the spot to read manuscripts for $25 a week. Weeks later he promoted Katherine to full time, doubled her salary, and would soon establish her as second only to himself in shaping the magazine’s voice.

Katharine’s story is the focus of a fascinating new biography, The World She Edited, by Amy Reading. The book introduces us to Katharine Sergeant, born into a well-to-do Boston family, educated at Bryn Mawr, and married at 18 to Earnest Angell, a lawyer who later would chair the ACLU. Rider describes Katharine’s 1929 divorce from Earnest with whom she’d had two children, Nancy and Roger, and her subsequent marriage to E. B. “Andy” White. Katharine met her second husband through his writing, and he met his future wife through her editing of The New Yorker.

During the magazine’s early years, Katherine and Harold Ross, a barely educated newsman from Colorado, met weekly to discuss manuscripts, payments, picture proofs, staff, and ideas. If it was Wednesday, Katharine doled out ideas for the next issue’s Notes and Comment (a lead editorial), Talk of the Town, Reporter at Large, profiles, and “casuals” (the term she coined for short amusing essays about the city).

In between meetings and round table lunches at the nearby Algonquin Hotel, Katharine wrote more letters to Ross than to all the magazine’s authors combined. She wrote Ross about everything from the state of the women’s bathroom (“unsanitary and intolerable”) to year-end bonuses and everything in between. Ross and co-founder Raoul Fleischmann, heir to Fleischmann Yeast company, even leaned on her to oversee the tenor of ads, which she sometimes rejected as dishonest or poorly laid out.

Katharine would continue to shape The New Yorker, nurturing an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent 17 rejections before his first acceptance. Among dozens of others were John O’Hara, John Cheever, James Thurber, Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, and Ogden Nash.  She famously cultivated women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker, including Nadine Gordimer, Mary McCarthy, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, Jean Stafford, Jane Kramer, and more.

The trail-blazing editor worked tirelessly as a de facto agent for her writers. She pulled their best from them, helped them through crises and looked after their health and well-being. Some staffers saw her as “formidable” and “the switch-wielding schoolmarm,” but she also functioned as everyone’s go-to housemother.

The White duo worked together to influence literary tastes. Together they edited the Subtreasury of American Humor in 1962. Katharine encouraged E.B. White’s detour into children’s stories (Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web), also helping edit Every Day Is Saturday, a collection of Andy’s Notes and Comments.

Katharine’s strengths were tested by Andy’s doubts about his writing. As The New Yorker gained power, the couple would alternate for neediness, one of them down with illness and the other forced to step up. At the same time Katharine labored to parent her brood (Nancy and Roger Angell and Joel White, her son with Andy). It was not surprising to find Roger later following his mother’s pathway at The New Yorker, assuming her role editing fiction and her love of baseball.

Book author Amy Reading offers readers a deeply intimate portrait of Katharine. If there’s anything to criticize, it is that she includes almost too much information tracing the prolific editor, her relatives, and even casual acquaintances. While it was interesting to learn about Katharine’s editorship of the Bryn Mawr magazine, we might not have needed to know that President William Taft’s daughter Helen landed the part of King Richard the Lionheart in a campus theatrical.

Reading fills 500 pages, even reporting on the Whites’ reaction to other writers’ characterizations of the magazine and of Harold Ross after the founder’s death in 1951. One of the first assaults came from James Thurber, whose book, The Years with Ross, struck Katharine as a disaster and betrayal. She later told one Thurber biographer what she considered the key to Jim’s twisted relationship to writing: “He embroidered and heightened so well he couldn’t help himself.”

On the magazine’s 50^th anniversary in 1975, no one was more furious than Katharine over Brendan Gill’s Here at The New Yorker.  She was particularly incensed by Gill’s spreading the rumor that she had been prepared to lead a palace revolution against Ross.

She fumed, “Everyone who knows me at all knows that my loyalty to Ross was almost fanatical. Instead of my going to Fleishmann to suggest ousting Ross, Fleishmann three times came to me.”  She found Gill’s description of the editorial culture of the magazine totally flawed. She said that, to the contrary, she and Ross had relished and profited from their arguments.

Reading’s book faithfully follows the Whites’ later-day fortunes as they established their farmhouse home in North Brooklin, Maine, continuing to contribute to the magazine via post. They persevered through Katharine’s increasingly serious health issues, ending with her death in 1977. Two years later, the grieving Andy found comfort in shepherding into print a collection of Katharine’s gardening columns, Onward and Upward in the Garden.

 Afterwards, Andy had his own work to do, assembling Poems and Sketches of E. B. White and revising Elements of Style (the book originally assembled by his Cornell University English professor William Strunk, Jr.). While White continued to receive unlooked-for awards, Andy demurred saying, “Life without Katharine is no bargain, awards or no awards. She was the one great award of my life and I am in awe of having received it.”