Mark Singer on John Bainbridge's "The Super-Americans"

"The Super-Americans"

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March 11, 1961

In 1974, a staffer at The New Yorker whom I'd met once called to say that the magazine's editor, William Shawn, wanted to see me. This was unexpected. I was twenty-three, living in Connecticut, working for another publication. I'd grown up in a family that nobody would've described as bookish, and I'd been reading The New Yorker for months, not years. On the train to Grand Central, I crammed James Thurber's “The Years with Ross,” unable to fathom why I'd been brought in. Mr. Shawn, it turned out, had liked a lengthy Norman Mailer parody that I'd inserted into my college thesis, to pad it out; I'd shared it with someone who'd shared it with Shawn. He offered me a job as a Talk of the Town reporter. Afterward, panic leached into my elation. Hadn't Mr. Shawn considered that an aptitude for parody might indicate (as I knew to be the case) that I lacked a voice of my own?