The New Yorker’s enduring aesthetic is largely captured in the magazine’s sempiternal, though occasionally morphing, mascot Eustace Tilley, that top-hat wearing, monocled Regency dandy and inveterate Fleet Street raconteur who was designed by graphic artist Rea Irvin for the inaugural issue a full century ago this February. Inspired by a Victorian caricature of Parisian gallant Alfred d’Orsay, Irvin’s Tilley is ironically stuffy, simultaneously a sophisticate and an empty-headed aristocrat, his preposterously British name suggesting, with wink and a smile, that Tilley was, in a word, twee. The character has been reimagined and recontextualized to reflect changing times—for example, as a pierced slacker in a 1994 illustration by R. Crumb, for example, or as a bearded outer-borough hipster in 2013—but the original figure still rules, on t-shirts and tote bags as well as in and on the magazine, signaling that one hundred years later The New Yorker remains his magazine. And fittingly so for a magazine whose house style insists on an umlaut for the second of two adjacent vowels in a single word.
Apart from its carefully managed tone—imitated only at their peril by other publications—the magazine has made two distinctive contributions to contemporary American letters. The first is the “New Yorker short story,” marked by diegetic narrative in which the psychology of the narrator is privileged over the details of plot and by a subtle volta in the form of a crucial personal realization for the main character. A quintessentially American voice emerges in such stories, as in the phrase, “light was draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from,” from Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Regardless of what this style ignores in terms of formal experimentation, it is at its best capable of saying what it needs to say. The second contribution of The New Yorker is a variety of deeply researched investigative reporting that anticipated what came to be known as the New Journalism (Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was first serialized there in 1965, after all), but that limited the most subjective excesses of that movement. Even a century ago, The New Yorker eschewed the reductionism of the inverted pyramid and the who-what-where-when-why-how of traditional beat reporting in favor of something more essayistic, a sort of belles lettres meets a deadline, all of it bolstered by publication’s formidable thirty-person fact-checking department.
In his About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, Ben Yagoda notes that the magazine “did more than any other entity to create ‘our’ sense of what was proper English prose and what was not, what was in good taste and what was not, what was the appropriate attitude to take, in print, toward personal and global happenings.” There are problems with this, as with any elite institution. Depending on your perspective, The New Yorker short story style either deserves praise for bringing the spirit of Joyce’s “The Dead” and Chekhov’s “The Kiss” to American literature or stands guilty of defenestrating genre fiction and replacing it with the sort of story in which the most exciting moment is a gentle sigh as the narrator reflects on rain dappling a puddle. Regardless of one’s verdict, the tone and thought of a certain type of educated, liberal American was captured in the words that were rendered in Irvin’s distinctive font. Nor was that necessarily a rarefied audience. Even now, when many publications are either folding or folded, The New Yorker can still claim some 1.2 million subscribers.
Less stuffy than Harper’s and less wonky than The Atlantic (especially after the latter traded Beacon Hill for Foggy Bottom, much to the chagrin of many a Boston Brahmin), The New Yorker is responsible for the twentieth-century’s American high-brow voice. The governing aesthetic in 1925 owed everything to the barbs and quips of the Algonquin Round Table, and that chatty, informal, Uptown sensibility still endures in the feuilleton of “The Talk of the Town” section or the gloriously New York provincial events listings that occupy the first few pages of every issue. Despite its (deserved) reputation for intellectualism (though in American letters the middle- and high-brow has long since merged and ceded ground to the broad cultural lumpenproletariat), Tom Wolfe in Hooking Up described The New Yorker as defined by “leisurely meandering understatement, droll…constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the magazine’s pale-gray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause and appository modifier.” Wolfe would know.
Twee Tilley is a parodic avatar of Victorian literature, of Punch or The Edinburgh Review in the United Kingdom, or, in the United States, of Harper’s (founded in 1850) and The Atlantic Monthly (in 1857), but while The New Yorker may have been established by people born in the nineteenth century, the material therein would be of the modern era. Founded by New York Times society reporter Jane Grant (born 1892) and her husband Harold Ross (also born in 1892), who would serve as editor-in-chief until his death in 1951, The New Yorker was described in its prospectus as not intended for the “old lady in Dubuque.” Ross, born in Aspen and trained as a shoe-leather reporter at papers such as The Salt Lake Tribune, Sacramento Union, and the Hoboken Hudson Observer, may have had his own shoulder chip, but part of the Jazz Age optimism of The New Yorker was always aspirational, a sense that survives in any public transit reader who hopes that someone else on the train happens to see a Saul Steinberg or Art Spiegelman cover to advertise the reader’s own urbanity and sophistication.
A version of The New Yorker’s history could be told through auteur theory, a focus on the editors who’ve helmed the ship over the past hundred years. Such an approach wouldn’t work at every magazine, considering the cutthroat capriciousness of the publishing industry, but The New Yorker has only had five editors: Ross, William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick. Remnick, the current editor, has been there since 1998. (A stability in institutional leadership is only matched by my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers.) The Manhattanite from Colorado set the template, however, as Ross edited with exuberant, comma-happy, memo-writing pluck. Thomas Kunkel in Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker describes his subject well, writing that a “more unlikely literary avatar than Harold Ross is hard to imagine…a man of spectacular contradictions and wondrous complexities.” Ross, always embarrassed by his lack of education, was nonetheless the editor who discovered James Thurber, E.B. White, Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson, Ogden Nash, John McPhee, A.J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell, among dozens of others. Ross’s great genius was his ability to recognize talent and to improve on it.
Stringent and demanding, Ross was not an intellectual, but that did not prevent him from understanding the importance of running John Hersey’s gargantuan single-issue 1946 piece on Hiroshima or Janet Flanner’s profile of Adolf Hitler. The neurotic Shawn was temperamentally Ross’s opposite, but he oversaw the magazine during the period of its greatest influence, having the chutzpah to send the philosopher Hannah Arendt to cover Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel and the foresight to provide column inches to a young J.D. Salinger, as well as the loyalty to let Joseph Mitchell maintain an office even when that eccentric genius didn’t write a word for three decades. Such loyalty was not extended to Shawn, unceremoniously dumped in 1985 after Conde Nast purchased the magazine. Gottlieb, when he wasn’t red-pen sparring with Robert Caro over wayward sentences, had less overall influence, but he maintained the brand. Arguably, the flashy Brit from Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, was the greatest outlier among the five (because you must never go full Eustace), but she added color and readers’ letters, both of which endure. More than anything, The New Yorker is defined by its layout, which despite those Brownian alterations remains remarkably consistent. The variable covers, the gossipy “Talk of the Town” section, “Shouts and Murmurs” (worth skipping if you don’t like David Sedaris or Andy Borowitz), the handful of features and profiles, the book, art, theater, and film reviews—all of it concluded with a crossword puzzle and the cartoon caption contest.
Then, of course, there are the short stories. Multiple stories per issue were published when Ross was editor; today, barring special editions, the limit is one a week. It is still the most important venue for an aspiring writer. A professor of the contemporary American short story could teach only works first published in The New Yorker and provide her students with a remarkably thorough reading list. Shirley Jackson’s 1948 “The Lottery,” an exquisite example of the New England gothic with its still-harrowing tale of groupthink and barely concealed malice, where even though the denizens of this remote hamlet forget their reasons for an annual pagan sacrifice, “they still remembered to use stones.” It is as perfect a horror story as ever written. Or Annie Proulx’s 1997 “Brokeback Mountain,” which contrary to John Updike’s claim about (New Yorker contributor) Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita being the greatest love story of the twentieth century, actually happens to be the greatest love story of the twentieth century—a heartbreaking evocation of the “open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe.” John Cheever’s 1964 “The Swimmer” remains the most perfect encapsulation of an alcoholic’s psychology (I can confirm this), its being “so disciplined…in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth.” More recently, Kristen Roupenian’s skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, #MeToo parable “Cat Person” from 2017 went viral, and Zoomer readers unaccustomed to the possibilities of fiction assumed it to be memoir—proof that The New Yorker short story style still has vitality in it.
“If I were told: / By evening you will die, / so what will you do until then?” asked Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish in a poem whose translation by Fady Joudah was published by The New Yorker in 2007. “I’d look at my wristwatch,” answers Darwish, “and there’d be time left for reading.” Lots of jokes aside about subscriptions unconsummated, or The New Yorker as a status symbol, or cartoons about castaways on desert islands, what the magazine has exemplified for a century is that desire to have “time left for reading,” that time in which we make a space for the strange alchemy of words. Few publications maintain a commitment not only to voice but also length, as a mark of respect for the reader. Far from a perfect magazine—because what would that even mean?—The New Yorker still somehow remains an indispensable one.
Saul Steinberg’s 1976 cover “View of the World from Ninth Avenue” is a potent sendup of Manhattan provincialism, the wide north-to-south thoroughfares of the island broader than the Hudson River, and Jersey, and the North American continent beyond, marked by “flyover” locations such as Chicago, Kansas City, and even Los Angeles, the Pacific a mere tributary and the rest of the world beyond hidden in an undifferentiated west. From another perspective, though, the cartoon illustrates that there is a view of the entire world from this perch, that from Ninth Avenue there is a telescopic ambition to see the wider world. That is The New Yorker too, a universe of paper and print—some roughly sixty-eight pages forty-seven times a year, concluding with a crossword puzzle—that somehow still records the world a century later.