I have a new “Accidental Critic” piece up at Escape Into Life, a review of the book Cast of Characters, which examines the early years of The New Yorker magazine.
I hope you find it interesting, insightful, or some combination of the two. Without giving away the punch line, I can tell you that the book hasn’t yet been returned to the library because my husband now wants to read some or all of it. Fortunately, it’s not yet overdue.
I followed up Cast of Characters by tracking down a collection of essays by (Oliver) Wolcott Gibbs, one of Harold Ross’ first and key hires at The New Yorker. I wanted to read his profile of Henry R. Luce, “Time… Fortune… Life… Luce,” which is most famous for one sentence in which Gibbs mocked the writing style in the Time magazine of his era: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” Continue reading
I’m not the only one. Neil Steinberg does, too. So do a lot of other people—presumably including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who wrote of thinking to himself “God, I am in Chicago” after first arriving in the city for a visit at the age of 15.
The year is 1914. Three sisters are driving a carriage down the street in Paterson, N.J., when an automobile appears and barrels straight into them, overturning their carriage, breaking it apart, and pinning them beneath it. When passersby scramble to right the vehicle and help free the sisters, oen of the sisters confronts the automobile driver and demands reimbursement for the damage done to the carriage.