Katharine S. White — Shaping The New Yorker, with Amy Reading

One hundred years ago this week, The New Yorker published its first issue. A few months later, the magazine’s first (and for decades, only) female editor joined the staff. Katharine S. White spent the better part of the next 50 years wielding her pen and her editorial influence there, carefully tending to an ever-growing stable of talented (sometimes high-maintenance) writers and shaping the magazine into a cultural powerhouse. Biographer Amy Reading joins us to discuss White’s life, legacy and undeniable importance in the history of 20th-century American letters.

Mentioned in this episode:

The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading

Katharine S. White

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant

E.B. White

Katharine and E.B. White’s farm in Blue Hill, Maine

St. Nicholas magazine

American Heritage article on St. Nicholas magazine

Women authors discovered/edited by Katharine White

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 187 on Kay Boyle

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 184 on Elizabeth Taylor

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 158 on Sylvia Townsend Warner

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 168 on Mary McCarthy

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 131 on Dorothy Parker

Henry Seidel Canby

Fillmore Hyde

Harold Ross

The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, an

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated; please pardon typograhical errors.

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our future bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit. com and click "Become a patron" to find out more. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers, and in today's case, a forgotten magazine editor who discovered and cultivated some of the most important writers in 20th century American literature.

I'm Kim Askew here with my co host Amy Helmes, and Amy, maybe we should kick things off by pointing out that this week's episode coincides with a momentous anniversary.

AMY: That's right. One hundred years ago this week, The New Yorker published its first issue. A few months later, in the summer of 1925, a young woman named Katharine Sergeant Angell walked into the office and asked for a job, becoming the first woman on the editorial staff. She proceeded to spend the better part of the next 50 years wielding her pen and her editorial influence there shaping the magazine's signature, pithy voice, and carefully tending to an ever-growing stable of talented sometimes high maintenance writers, including one she married and spent the rest of her life with E.B. White.

KIM: Everyone knows E. B. White of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little fame, and he was actually called Andy White by everyone who knew him. In fact, Amy, I just started reading Charlotte's Web to Cleo this week, so I'm excited to talk about this. But I'd never heard of Katharine White. I certainly didn't know how important she is in the history of American letters.

AMY: Yeah, though she was frequently described as formidable, an adjective I'm certain we're going to be unpacking today, her lifetime of editorial work falls under the invisible, quote unquote, nature of editing, which is something we talked about last year in a previous episode.

KIM: Yes, rarely do editors get the credit they deserve, but you can't celebrate the history of The New Yorker without telling the story of Katharine White. They go hand in hand. Lucky for us, there's a new biography on White published last fall by HarperCollins Mariner Books. It's called The World She Edited, Katharine S.

White at The New Yorker, and the author of that book, Amy Reading, is with us today to talk about it.

AMY: Okay, I cannot wait. So, let's raid the magazine archives and get started. Today's guest, Dr. Amy Reading, is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She wrote a 2012 book on American con artistry called The Mark Inside.

A perfect swindle, a cunning revenge, and a small history of the big con. Hmm, Kim, why am I thinking right now might be a really good time to read this book?

KIM: Yeah, I don't know.

AMY: But anyway, that's not the book we're here to discuss. we're going to be talking about Amy's latest book, The World She Edited, which Booklist calls a literary landmark, and the Boston Globe also named it one of the best books of 2024. Amy is also a fierce champion of the independent bookstore, and her Substack open book chronicles the state of that industry, as well as her own personal adventures as an executive board member of a cooperative bookstore in upstate New York.

We'll link to that Substack in our show notes. Amy, welcome to the show, my apologies for, in previous episodes of this podcast, mispronouncing your last name.

AMY READING: I'm thrilled to be here and I forgive you for that tiny indiscretion.

AMY: Okay. 

KIM: So Amy, what prompted you to want to write this biography? And would you agree that Katherine White is a lost lady of lit?

AMY READING: Yes and no. She's certainly mentioned in histories of The New Yorker. She's there in, um, you know, for instance, Ben Yegoda's book about town all throughout the book. But she's only mentioned, she's only gestured to, as a kind of due diligence to the fact that she was in the room. No one has ever asked what the fact that there was this powerful, authoritative woman at The New Yorker, almost from the beginning, means for the history of the magazine.

No one has ever tried to read the magazine over her shoulder, as it were, to see her work. As a coherent body of work that arises from her own life experiences and her own taste and her own understanding of her times and who she was editing the magazine for. I think if you do that work, it changes the history of the magazine.

So she hasn't been forgotten, but she hasn't been paid attention to.

AMY: Okay, So let's get into her story then. Born in 1892, just outside of Boston. Katharine had a privileged middle class upbringing, though it was not without some tragedy. Yet her father and an influential aunt made sure that she was surrounded by literature. And, Amy, you tell a really cute story in the book about how her dad used to send her to the library each week to pick out two books for him to read, which is kind of a high pressure task, I think, for a little girl.

But there's also such a through line here in what she would go on to do for her career. So I love that story. Then we also see sparks of Katharine's literary talent as a little girl in a famous children's magazine of the time. Can you tell us about that?

AMY READING: St. Nicholas was a longstanding magazine when she came onto the scene in the late 1890s. You could fairly call it The New Yorker for the school kid set. It was read by all the erudite little children, and it had a very popular column called the St. Nicholas League that each month would publish the winners in a bunch of competitions that it sponsored in different categories like poetry, prose, photography, puzzles.

And Katharine's older sister, Rosamund, had won three honorable mentions for her photography, and I think Katharine was a little competitive. And she submitted her own writing, and in 1902, when she was just nine years old, she won a silver badge for a short piece of prose. 

This moment is delightful to me because she hadn't even begun her formal schooling yet. She was still being tutored at home by her aunt. And yet, she managed to beat both of her future husbands into the St. Nicholas League. Both Ernest Angell and E.

B. White would go on to win badges, but she did it first. And this is too good to be believed, she did it first with a little piece of prose about a spider in its web. You can't write this stuff.

KIM: It's so perfect. I love that. It's so great.

AMY: So it's kind of like our Highlights magazine.

AMY READING: I would say it's a little more highbrow than

AMY: Oh, in, the ranking of these things. Yes.

KIM: Yeah. Okay. went on to receive a fine education. She attended Bryn Mawr College as an English major. She was following in the footsteps of her big sister, the future writer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. She graduated in 1914, and as you wrote in your book, she really, um, graduated, As one of the new women hoping to have it all or planning to have it all, marriage, family, career.

We've talked about the new woman in past episodes. So she graduates, she marries her teenage sweetheart, Ernest Angell, and then motherhood becomes her immediate focus. She and Ernest had two children. Yet, this marriage wasn't a happy one. so, can you talk about how and why she ended up applying for a job at a fledgling new magazine in New York City?

How did that all come about?

AMY READING: Well, in hindsight, it seems really obvious that she would have a literary career. You know, you can start with the St. Nicholas League, and then you can look through to her time at Bryn Mawr when she edited the monthly Bryn Mawr literary magazine, Tipyn O’Bob. She wrote steadily during and after college, mainly book reviews.

Um, she had the example of her older sister, Elsie Shepley Sergeant, as you mentioned. Uh, but she spent a good ten years after graduating from college casting about. She had two children. Um, she had a number of odd jobs, or at least in hindsight, they seemed that way. She tried her hand at a number of different things, but she never found the thing that would really light her up. Then, As you say, her marriage to Ernest became very unhappy, specifically after he returned from serving in France during the First World War.

He came home with the idea that he would like to do it the way the French did it, and he would like to have a wife and a mistress. And he had a number of affairs that Katharine knew about, and was very unhappy about but tolerated because she wanted to stay married to him. She wanted the conventional family.

And she tried for As long as she could, but their relationship got worse and worse. So that was the backdrop. She needed something to do outside of the home that would be an antidote to the unhappiness in her home, that would give her a sense of purpose, that would fulfill the promise of her education 

but she didn't know what that was until it was the summer of 1925. She and Ernest were at their summer home in Sneeden's Landing, which is across the Hudson River and just a little bit north of New York City. And a neighbor of hers, Philmore Hyde, who was writing for this brand new publication that was started, as we say, in February 1925, said to her, Hey, why don't you try your hand at writing for The New Yorker?

And she thought it sounded kind of interesting. She ran the idea by another colleague of hers, Henry Seidel Canby, who edited the Saturday Review of Literature, and he said, oh no, you don't want to work for that magazine. It's nothing. And then, armed with that information, what did she do but march down to The New Yorker offices in Midtown and walk right into Harold Ross's door and ask him for a job.

And he gave it to her. And it was not in any way. set up for success. And yet she went on to have this illustrious career.

AMY: So as you kind of implied, The New Yorker was flailing even as it started. You know, people kind of thought this was a hopeless startup that was never going to go anywhere 

but You write in your book that women actually proved key to the magazine's success. How did Katharine recognize that fact that women were going to be so important?

And what did she do to tap into that?

AMY READING: Katherine came of age at an especially time for women in a window that was just about to close. So she was part of the second generation of women to attend women's colleges. Her aunt Crowley, who helped raise and educate her, was part of the first generation.

She graduated from Smith College. And Katharine graduated with a sense of purpose that her, education fitted her and sort of mandated that she contribute to public life to find a career or a calling that would contribute to the greater good, but not long after the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, opportunities for women in the workforce began to narrow.

So the door closed behind her, but when she began working at The New Yorker, she could rely on a healthy network of women agents who represented women writers who often knew each other through this vast network of women who met at college, who knew each other from social clubs in the major cities of the Northeast, or who had family connections.

And so for Katharine, it was the most natural thing in the world to bring women like herself and her friends and colleagues into print and to edit a magazine that was aimed at exactly this cohort who she knew so well. And so we know in hindsight, that The New Yorker published men and women in equal numbers, and the magazine was filled with stories and features on women's issues, but they were never marked as such.

So The New Yorker was idiosyncratic for much of its history in that way. It didn't have a table of contents, and the bylines for each of its articles were at the end of an article, and they were often, in the early years, they were often pseudonymous, or they were often just listed as initials, so you didn't know the gender of the writer.

And you didn't necessarily know when you began reading a piece that it was specifically for women, because it wasn't, it was for anyone, but it was about women. And this has been a little bit unacknowledged or overlooked when we look at The New Yorker, the fact that, The New Yorker appealed to women and had as many women subscribers as men that meant it could survive when other magazines that didn't do that, dropped by the wayside, especially in the early years of the Great Depression.

So, Katharine just got on with what she had been doing in college, what she had been doing kind of her whole life, which is Reading and publishing women, her natural constituency,

KIM: So let's talk a little bit about some of the big name writers, both men and women whose talent Katherine discovered in those years that followed. Serve us up a list of some of the names listeners would probably recognize. It's a pretty great list. Yeah.

AMY READING: them in roughly chronological order. You may have heard of John O'Hara, John Cheever, Janet Flanner, Ogden Nash, Kay Boyle, Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, John Updike, Nadine Gordimer, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Hardwick.

Those are just a few.

AMY: I mean, I was trying to highlight in your book, all the writers that came up just to kind of keep track of them. And I had to give up at a certain point because there were so many women writers. That I was unfamiliar with. You know, you said Kay Boyle, we have done an episode on her, Mary McCarthy, but there were so many other women , that I now have to go back and explore who these writers were.

You know, your book alone just gave us a whole year's worth of episodes, I feel like. So who were some of the Women writers popping up in Katharine's story that are maybe lesser known, but who might have piqued your interest as you were writing this book. Ha

AMY READING: I am so glad for this invitation to nerd out with you on this question. Get, you know, get comfortable because I have a long answer

to this. Yeah, so there were lots of writers that I had heard of but I had never read, and this project gave me the pretext to dive into their writing. So you mentioned Kay Boyle, of course, I had heard the name, um, I thought of her as a novelist.

I did not know about her short stories. Um, Nancy Hale, who was really a master of the short story, Christine Weston, um, these were all writers who were writing intense stories that were firmly lodged in their time, but they now. to me, read as quite modern, and it was a delight to sort of discover that I could relate and be sort of aesthetically excited by these stories.

They weren't, you know, antique. But then there were plenty of other women I'd never heard of, and so another category would be fizzy writers who helped Give The New Yorker its reputation for very clever, au courant humor in the 20s and the 30s. People like Ruth McKinney, who wrote My Sister Eileen, this series that was published in The New Yorker and then became a book — it's very funny. Sally Benson, who wrote Meet Me in St. Louis. And then there's another category of writers that was completely brand new to me, and I just feel sort of, um, retroactively grateful to Katherine for her editorial work to introduce me to them, and that would be British writers that she worked very hard to pull across the pond into our readership.

So, Elizabeth Taylor, not that one, but the other one. Sylvia Townsend Warner. Um, I'm not sure how you say this woman's name, Rumer Godden. I'd never heard of these women. Um, they're, I think, beginning to be rediscovered by American readers now, they are all masters of the short story. All three of those women published stories in The New Yorker for decades.

They were mainstays of the magazine. And they all wrote, I mean, they're fairly different, so I don't want to make them all sound the same, but they did often write about women's domestic issues, and they often used humor, and they're delightful. So, you know, give any one of those a try, you won't be disappointed.

KIM: Yeah, we did an episode on Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Taylor. Yep.

AMY: Yeah, yeah. So some names were familiar, but yeah, definitely. There were so many more than you just mentioned too. I mean, it was just the, and the one that you mentioned, Ruth, um, 

AMY READING: Ruth McKinney, My Sister Eileen.

AMY: Yes, I, that one I had particularly flagged because I love that it's a series.

So I'm like, Oh, I've got to dive into that. I hope that's available out there still, in print somewhere. So thanks for going through that list. And, um, if I have time, listeners, maybe I'll try to flip through the book a little bit, and come up with, a list that I can add to our show notes in a separate document, um, that might be helpful for people to see some of these other women that wrote for The New Yorker.

so As an editor, Katherine had a really nurturing and very personal relationship with her writers. She was sort of maternal in some ways. And this wasn't just a matter of her being a thoughtful person, it was actually a deliberate editorial strategy for her, wasn't it?

AMY READING: Yes, it was a deliberate editorial strategy, and it was also one that she evolved over time in direct response to The New Yorker's position in culture and its needs for editorial material. So first of all, The New Yorker is and was a weekly, as any subscribers know. issues just pile up. They keep coming in your mailbox, but all their competitors were monthlies.

So they had this rapacious need for new stories, new poems. Um, but in the very beginning, The New Yorker had no money to pay contributors. So you're not going to find, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edna St. Vincent Millay in the pages of The New Yorker because they couldn't afford Those, you know, marquee names, which meant that Katherine's job was to sift through the slush pile, all the unsolicited manuscripts, and find the gems and nurture those writers to become New Yorker authors.

And that took time, and that took the kind of caring, personal attention that would keep somebody writing for her. And then that changed again in the 30s, as The New Yorker became much more successful, and as some of its writers Authors that she had nurtured from the slush pile then became brand name authors that other magazines wanted to poach.

Suddenly her job became keeping them loyal to The New Yorker. And again, that required this personal touch, meeting the needs of these writers so that they could write the stories that she could publish. It became just the cornerstone of her editorial practice, which was to get to know a writer at this intimate, dimensional level. Her letters are long and very personal so that the writer would know who it is who's sitting at the editorial desk receiving their work.

And so they're writing not to, you know, some scary dragon lady who exists to gatekeep, uh, they’re writing to a person who knows them, who is intimate with them, who is right down there in the act of composition with them, who cares about You know, every single comma, there are many, um, editorial letters between Katherine White and John Updike about commas, um, as well as the larger arc of a story or how it should end or what its tone should be.

Somebody who is familiar with the trials and tribulations and the art of writing and deeply interested in the outcome. If you are writing with such a person. On the other end of the line at that desk that changes what you can produce and she knew that she knew that because of the dozens and dozens of writers that she edited.

She also knew that because she was married to a writer and she knew what it would take for him to produce his best work. So this again as you say so beautifully, this was not a question of her personality. This was a question of what it meant. To be there nurturing the work as it's produced, and that changes the arc of 20th century American literature.

KIM: Wow.

AMY: Wow, yeah. And I loved getting to see What some of her rejection letters were like because it's never just a form. This isn't for us. Sorry. Too bad. She always has a like, hey, think about this and resubmit, you know, 

and she also would notice if she wasn't getting submissions from somebody and be like, What's going on? Okay, you had a breakup? Let me be your shrink for a second. Um, and then let's get you writing, 

AMY READING: yes, she had an intricate follow up system. That was the name of it, the follow up system, and there were, um, different categories of writers. If you were an A writer, B writer, C writer, um, depending on what category you were in, that would dictate how often she would follow up if she hadn't heard from you.

So if it was Mary McCarthy who she had Doored, she would bug her almost every month, , or at least her agent, every month. When's Mary gonna submit something new? Um, and yes, if she hadn't heard, she would want to know why. And if you were going through a breakup, which all of her authors did all of the time, or a breakdown There are many letters of Katherine writing to an author in a hospital or a mental institution, and she's working to get them back on their feet, working to bring them back to their desk, back to their craft. That was, to her, part of the work of an editor. It wasn't just the red pencil in the margins of a manuscript.

It was all of this other work to buoy and support. And nurture the writer behind the typewriter, behind the pencil.

AMY: Okay, so then, you know, we're talking about the nurturer, but there's also this word that keeps popping up to describe Katherine, and that is formidable, and it's a word that you admit really bugs you. Talk about that.

AMY READING: It bugs me because that is not a word you ever hear used to describe men. It is a word that you hear to describe women in power to cast shade. on that power. So it's supposed to be a compliment. It's trying to say this woman is impressive, but there's a little backhanded emphasis on the fact that perhaps she is wielding that power improperly.

And that was absolutely the case for people describing Katharine in The New Yorker offices. I will right away hasten to say that none of her authors ever described her as formidable. It was only other people who were outside of that relationship who saw her that way. And my interpretation is that this is because as she walked the halls of The New Yorker, she did not wield her power lightly.

She did not defer or she did not sort of laugh off herself or make it easy for people to, uh, uh, minimize her power. She was only ever the only woman in the room in a room full of men, often behaving quite badly. Um, New Yorker in the twenties and thirties. There's plenty of hijinks going on, but she was the center of gravity. The only way for her to have authority was to wield it, and not defer even to herself or diminish her own authority.

And for that, For having the exact same power that a man would have, she was called formidable, whereas Harold Ross has been called a genius for his authority, for the way he used his taste to curate and cultivate a magazine. Doing exactly the same thing that Katharine did. So that's just the beginning of my beef with that word.

KIM: Yeah, that completely makes sense. Um, so, do you have any favorite anecdotes, you know, looking through Katharine's correspondence or editing notes? Were there any things you found humorous or gave you a chuckle?

AMY READING: Yeah, quite a lot of them. One of the pleasures is to get to know a subject so well that you turn a page and you see even just a check mark or a couple words and you're like, oh, that's so Katharine. Because you know, you know what she was thinking when she did that.

But another pleasure is to open up a folder and See a letter that strikes you as very different from what you've come to know. And I had that experience when I read the letters that Katharine wrote to Andy White in the summer of 1929 when she was in Reno, Nevada for three months, to get her divorce from Earnest Angell.

So this was a time when. She was away from her job, away from New York, away from her family, her kids were staying with relatives, and she was away from Andy White, with whom she'd had an affair, but they had broken it off, they had no intention to get married, and in fact they had pledged to not write to each other while she was in Reno, and they immediately backtracked on that pledge and began sending each other dozens of letters, and these letters are Katharine in a totally different mood.

She is very funny. She is very light. She is very, um, sarcastic and ironic and wry. And these letters sound to me like she's writing her own little personal song. And. New Yorkers from Reno because she's describing everything she sees and she's sort of learning to love life again after being quite depressed and oppressed in her marriage for so long.

And so one of those passages goes something like this. Andy, when you're around, the world looks all silver and mauve and pearlescent. I'm looking very beautiful today, Andy, and I love you. And this is just a pitch perfect parody of the kind of sentimental writing that she would have encountered elsewhere in, you know, 20th century literary New York.

Um, but she's just giving her own spin on it because she's becoming a kind of character to herself, and it was in that mood that she returned to New York after her divorce, and then just two months later, she and Andy eloped, and the rest is history.

AMY: Their courtship and the epistolary relics of these early years in their relationship are so adorable.

A lot of times on this podcast, we're like, Ugh, that husband, you know what I mean? Like, there's always some guy in the background that's like mistreating the lost lady, and in this case, Andy, he's got some stuff going on, but he's got our seal of approval, I think. 

AMY READING: Yes, indeed, and he was a true gift of this project because he couldn't write a bad sentence if he tried, and so every letter, no matter how trivial, was quotable, and my, big, uh, struggle was to try to keep him off the page so yes, he was far from a villain. He was too charming.

KIM: The good guys are out there, listeners.

AMY: Yes, yeah. Um, although he was kind of a hypochondriac and, 

KIM: Nobody's perfect. 

AMY: …maybe we'll get into it, but, um, I remember there was some letter that she wrote back to a writer I can't remember specifically, but she said something in the book. In the response, like, oh, this was written like a true alcoholic she always had kind of little quips that reminded me a little bit of Dorothy Parker. But it's interesting it didn't seem from your book that she had that much involvement in editing Dorothy Parker at The New Yorker.

AMY READING: Right. Dorothy Parker was, uh, edited almost exclusively by Harold Ross, who was her friend. So Harold Ross was Lucy. Mostly a member of the Algonquin group, the round table of the Algonquin, the famous group of wits, out of which The New Yorker grew. Uh, and, you know, when Harold Ross started the magazine, he thought he could rely on these friends to publish in his magazine, and in fact they didn't, very often.

And there's a famous line where, you know, somebody asked Dorothy Parker why she didn't write for The New Yorker more, and she said, well, somebody else was using the pencil. They were so poor, they had to share the pencil. And so, Katharine did not edit Dorothy Parker because Harold Ross thought that Dorothy Parker would eat Katharine White alive.

And maybe that's true, maybe not. They were both pretty strong women, but Katharine's job was to find new writers. That was her genius. And so any of the writers that we know about, you know, that have become canonical, it's because she identified them from outside of this very storied circle that Harold Ross was located in.

AMY: There were a lot of writers, though, also, that were up and coming that Katharine rejected. I don't know if she had regrets later but do you want to talk about a few of the people that did not make Katharine's list?

AMY READING: Yeah, that's another pleasure of researching a magazine is that you get to see all of the missed opportunities, all the writers who are. Submitting, you know, long before they're famous when they're just struggling writers and seeing them get rejections. There were two categories of writers that she never expressed any interest in bringing into the magazine.

With hindsight, this is very clear. She wasn't particularly interested in modernist writers who were difficult to read. So Gertrude Stein and Juna Barnes were both interested in publishing The New Yorker. They thought that they had something to say to The New Yorker readership, but Katharine disagreed.

And then another category of writers. who consistently did try to break into The New Yorker without success were black writers, men and women, starting with writers of the Harlem Renaissance and continuing into the 1950s. so there is a very long list of writers who were not published in The New Yorker, though they were trying, so Langston Hughes did publish in The New Yorker, but just a few stories and poems. And what I was astonished to see were the dozens and dozens and dozens of rejections. of Other writers that didn't make it in, like Richard Wright or Alex Haley. And I think to my knowledge, and this is a difficult thing to say with any kind of certainty because we don't know.

Who are behind, you know, pseudonyms or, pieces that were published in initials. But, I think that the first Black woman writer to be published in The New Yorker as a short story writer was Anne Petrie in the 1950s as Katharine is ending her career and sort of the baton is passing and there's a new set of editors who are willing to take chances on a new set of writers.

But for all of Katharine's career, Black writers were not. writers that she was interested in cultivating, though she was very interested in publishing articles and stories about race, but only ones by white writers.

AMY: Was that surprising to you based on what you knew about Katherine outside of her job as an editor? 

AMY READING: I wouldn't say it was surprising. It was very in keeping with her time with the other editors, on the staff. Um, she was interested in race and she considered herself a liberal, but she seems to have felt that there were different realms, that The New Yorker really was speaking to a white readership and that She was firmly on the side of racial progress, but believed that white writers were the best ones to pontificate on that to their white readers, And I looked for clues about this and for things that would give me access to her worldview 

and one clue is that she and both of her husbands had domestic help in their homes all her lifetime. They always had cooks and sometimes cleaners and governesses, and none of those were ever Black. She was hiring white, domestic help. So that's a little bit of a clue that she felt herself to be in this white world.

KIM: So, maybe more than any other American magazine, The New Yorker has its own signature style and tone. What elements of the magazine that we still see today do you think can be traced back to Katharine's particular influence?

AMY READING: Without question, she is responsible for the serious literature and poetry in the magazine. Harold Ross conceived of this magazine as a light humor magazine that would reflect and comment on its times, that it would be very specific to New York City, but Katherine was the one who, um, pushed him to expand from light verse to more serious poetry and to think of this as something that would speak beyond its, present moment to something that would in fact shape its times and not just comment on its times.

 She is known as the first and longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker, but for the first 10 years of her career, she edited everything. And she had a very strong hand in its non fiction. it Was Katharine who pushed Harold Ross to include important figures, not just, you know, sort of light, fizzy, cultural figures. but people who were shaping the news of the day. So very famously, Harold Ross turned down an interview with Mussolini in the 30s. But then it was Katharine who edited Janet Flanner's groundbreaking three part profile of Adolf Hitler in 1936, long before we knew what he was up to.

And so this was very serious. cutting edge journalism that she had a very strong influence on. And I would even name one more, which is that she's partially responsible for the magazine's idea that really anything can be sort of interpreted or given a cultural take on, and this is a crucial part of The New Yorkers understanding of itself as a kind of roving eye.

First, it was very interested in describing the city in this kind of experiential way, and then it has since burst the bounds of New York to be something a lot more national. But Katharine was very interested in The New Yorkers power of cultural interpretation, and she helped start a column called Onward and Upward in the Arts, which gave itself the mandate to read anything.

It wasn't specific to the arts. And she herself eventually participated in that column. In the 1950s, when she began writing about gardening, but specifically about gardening catalogs. She treated them as a kind of literature and that's a perfect example of a New Yorker take on the world, the way it brought other things into its purview.

And so I think her influence really has to do with this kind of deepening and enriching of what counts as literature.

AMY: Okay, so, we talked a little bit about E. B. White, Andy White, her husband, undoubtedly, being married to a coworker slash contributor to the magazine is going to complicate. things for Katharine, all the ways that you can imagine, you know, but, 

She was very supportive of him as a writer, and he could be really high maintenance at times. How much do you think she sacrificed her own work? Oh,

AMY READING: I was really interested in what they each got from the marriage. And again, this is a question of interpretation because it's not like Katharine left a bunch of letters that directly told me this, right? But what I can see pretty clearly is the difference in her life from her first to her second marriage, one of the big tensions in her first marriage was that she was more successful than her husband and he begrudged her her career, both because she earned more and because she had more authority.

And so one of the things she got when she married Eeb White, who was seven years her junior, was a guarantee that her job was not at stake, that her job was sort of grandfathered in as part of the deal.

Right. She actually hired him at The New Yorker. She was his boss, and she was always going to be in that position of authority. And then what he got from that marriage is a built-in editor, in the fullest sense of the word, that she was going to do for him what she did for her authors, which was nurture and sustain the writing life, as well as read his drafts.

But we do see times when Katharine's ability to work is sacrificed to Andy's ability to work. And the big moment comes in the late 30s when E.

B. White decides that he cannot produce whatever work he's put on this earth to write while being chained to The New Yorker's relentless weekly rhythm and that he needs to do something entirely different. And it's a long story, but the short version is he decides that he wants to move full time up to Maine to the saltwater farm that they had purchased earlier in the decade and where they went for summers.

 And Katharine instantly agreed to this, possibly knowing how much power she was going to lose at The New Yorker.

She retained her job, but she went down to part time, and she corresponded with the editorial staff at The New Yorker, uh, but she didn't have as much say in what they published because she wasn't there in the office. 

So this move. was incredibly beneficial for Andy White, and it was a loss of power for her at The New Yorker, a loss of standing and authority. And she lost the ability to do what she loved, which was finding and cultivating new authors. That was what lit her up every day. And so this was a sacrifice.

It didn't last very long, because then the war came along, and eventually the wartime shortages of personnel in New York were so great that Harold Ross was begging both whites to move down to New York and resume their place. In the office. And they did, and, and that changed Katharine's career and that began the era of what I'm calling her greatest influence.

You know, the era in which she's editing the authors that we've heard of, the John Updikes and the Mary McCarthys. Uh, but it came after this moment of incredible sacrifice.

KIM: That could have been the end for her, really. I mean, , it's kind of amazing that it ended up working out and she came back and did all this other great stuff,

AMY READING: That's right. It was a, it was a moment when she easily could have been let go. It would have been easier for Howard Ross to let her go. And he didn't, which is a testament to how much he relied on her. 

And there are other moments too. There are moments where she was offered Harold Ross's job. Three times she was offered the editorship of The New Yorker, and three times she turned it down. So there are other times when you can see potentially a bigger role for her, a bigger moment where history could have gone differently.

AMY: It seemed like she did attempt to retire from the magazine several times over the years. 

But she never really did step away. It was too much part of her life. But what I love is that as she was easing out of her job in her old age, another member of the family wound up stepping in at The New Yorker. Tell us about that.

AMY READING: Yes. So her son, Roger Angell. from her first marriage to Ernest Angell was a true student of The New Yorker. He was raised by the magazine, this was revealed to Katharine and Andy when Roger was 15 and he told them that he could remember every single cartoon that the magazine had yet published.

And they tested him on this. They would give him a caption and he would describe the illustration or vice versa. He had this encyclopedic understanding of the magazine. And Katharine used that over the course of her career. So when she was Collecting New Yorker stories for the first edited volume, the first volume that was going to sort of announce to the world.

Here is the excellence that is The New Yorker short story. She asked for Roger's help. What are the short stories that you've liked the most? And he was so versed in the magazine that he could play this editorial role as a teenager. 

He consistently tried to get an editorial job at The New Yorker, and he was turned down several times in the 1950s. But in 1956, Katharine really was trying to step away from the role for reasons of her health. She was beginning the long, gradual process of her retirement, and she was looking very hard for a new fiction editor.

 The letters on this are hilarious because she was asking about the children of a lot of her writers and, you know, just really trying for anyone who had this worldview, this sensibility, as well as this taste and this education in 20th century American literature, and she couldn't find anyone.

And in fact, Roger was the perfect candidate. And the only argument against him was the optics of it, of his being her son and Andy White's stepson. And Katharine wrote that she felt guilty because she had deprived Roger of his natural habitat. Um, but there are many, many memos between her and her boss at the time, who was William Shawn, debating the advisability of hiring Roger.

And eventually they did. And he came to work in The New Yorker in, um, October of 1956. so for a short period of time, they overlapped. He eventually took over many of her authors, including Nadine Gordimer and John Updike. And eventually long after that, he took over her very office, which is something he said his therapist had a field day about when eventually he made his way into therapy.

So, uh, so Roger was just the perfect heir to her career, and he was therefore the perfect source for me as the biographer of Katharine. He knew her as a son, he knew her as an employee, he knew her as a fellow editor who had performed her job and knew her authors. He also was himself a writer, so he knew how writers should be treated.

So he never tried to write this biography for me. And he knew, obviously, everything about New Yorker lore from, you know, before he was born to the end of his career. So Katharine did a very good job in creating the Roger Angell that he became.

KIM: That makes me wonder about your own process of writing this biography, Amy. Do you feel like she was looking over your shoulder from beyond the grave, and maybe judging every word a little bit?

AMY READING: That is a great question. And the answer is no, I really didn't. I had a different sensation about where Katharine was in this whole researching and writing process. So, you know, I've read thousands of her letters. I, I didn't read all of them because she spent 36 plus years dictating and typing letters from morning till night.

I would need 36 plus years to read them all, but I read quite a few of them, and, you know, she did not write grammatically. She did not care about the perfect word in her letters. It was only when it came to fine tuning a piece for publication that she would really drill down into the smallest units of composition, but she understood writing as about communicating, and so did I.

But I definitely felt her. I felt her because she at the end of her life, one of her many projects we haven't even discussed. I mean, you know, it's impossible to describe everything that she did with her time. And one of them was that she curated five, not one, not two, but five different archives, different piles of letters to donate to different research institutions.

Her letters, which went to Bryn Mawr, her alma mater, E. B. White's letters, which went to Cornell, his alma mater, and three other sets of family papers, all of which I consulted. And it would happen again and again. I would, you know, open a box, pull out a folder, and there would be a little note clipped to the first letter.

And it would be written on this small rectangular pink piece of paper that would have a T on it, so what it was was a New Yorker routing slip that they would use to route interoffice memos to one another, and the T meant timely. But Katherine would take it and use it for something very not timely, which is that she would write a note to whoever was going to be reading this folder in the future.

to me, and it would be a note that would explain why this letter or this batch of letters was important. So, I really felt not that Katharine was reading over my shoulder, but that she had gone before me every step of the way, and she had read everything that I was reading before me, and had already interpreted it, and was going to tell me what it meant.

And so, that was often very helpful. And as you can imagine, often maddening and unhelpful because I kind of sometimes needed to push her out of the way in order to see the history. She was very clear. She made many notes about what she destroyed. And so I would often have to infer from Absence or silence, sometimes I had the benefit of material that was donated after her death that she never had the chance to destroy, but I would also really just have to pose questions that I couldn't necessarily answer, but was worth indulging in to ask about how she might have been feeling or why she might have done what she did or not done what she did. So she was in front of me, but she was also sometimes blocking the view or maintaining a veil of privacy that, uh, I felt a little bit empowered to try to, if not penetrate at least to wonder about, to interpret that that was my role as her biographer.

So she was very much there. She was a very, very strong presence throughout the writing of this book.

KIM: That is fascinating, because in some ways you must have felt a little bit like what it was like having her as your editor, because she's guiding you or trying to guide some of your decision making.

AMY READING: would have loved to have had her as an editor, and I do end the book with a bit of speculation about how she would have edited this book, and she would have been fearsome. It would not be as long as it is, um, but she would have, she would have wanted to cut out a lot of the parts about her life that were painful.

And, you know, I think it's a feminist thing to include them. So I'm glad she didn't get her hands on this book. but in terms of the way she nurtured and encouraged writers, yes, absolutely. hunger for that as a writer and that is where I began this project was learning about her particular style of editing and feeling like I craved that and was going to maybe get that vicariously through writing about her, which I do think I did.

AMY: Amy, congratulations on all the positive press you've been getting for this book and thank you so much for telling Katharine's story so beautifully.

Again, listeners, the book is called The World She Edited and we highly recommend it.

AMY READING: Thank you so much for having me. 

You're the ideal readers for Katherine and for this book. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. I'll be back next week with another bonus episode. You can get that by subscribing wherever you listen or visit our Patreon page. Patreon also now sells all of our bonus episodes individually .

So feel free to pick and choose if that's your preference.

KIM: And in two weeks, we'll be back with another free, full length episode.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jenny Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.