AMERICAN CHRONICLES - WAR OF WORDS

Editors, writers, and the making of a magazine.

- JILL LEPORE

Harold Wallace Ross, who founded The New Yorker a century ago, had a rule that no one should ever write about writers, because writers are boring, except to other writers, and he figured the same was true about editors-only it was more true, because no one should even know an editor's name. That didn't stop William Shawn, who became the editor of the magazine after Ross's death, in 1951, from naming one of his kids Wallace, for Ross. It didn't stop Ann Beattie from naming her car Roger, for her New Yorker editor, Roger Angell. And for all I know there are Chihuahuas and nieces and motorcycles at large named Bob Gottlieb, the magazine's editor from 1987 to 1992; Lady Evans, the titled name of Tina Brown, its editor from 1992 to 1998; and D.R., for David Remnick, its editor since then. (I once had a tuxedo cat named Shaun, with a "u," but that came from "Finnegans Wake" and doesn't count.) Most editors remain unsung. To be unknown is, ordinarily, to be underestimated. "The only great argument I have against writers, generally speaking, is that many of them deny the function of an editor, and I claim editors are important," Ross once wrote. For him, editors were worth more than writers in the way that a great batting coach was worth more than a great batter. "Writers are a dime a dozen," Ross told James Thurber. "What I want is an editor." Writers were children; editors were adults. "I can't find editors," Ross fumed. "Nobody grows up." (The magazine's editorial director, Henry Finder, once said of Remnick, "I think he regards the editor's job as being not crazy," while, on the other hand, "the writer's prerogative is to be, perhaps, a little crazy.") Ross also found it useful-and this was a pretty clever trick-to tell writers who balked at being edited that the more they argued with an editor, the less worthy they were of being published.