Book Of Interest…A New Biography Of Katharine S. White
Linda Davis’s Onward And Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White, published in 1987, has been one of my major go-to New Yorker biographies since its publication in 1987. It’ll be interesting to compare Amy Reading’s The World She Edited (HarperCollins).
Ms. White relationship to The New Yorker‘s cartoons began early in the magazine’s history (she began working there in the summer of 1925). After a short stint as the artists “hand-holder” — giving the artists the bad news if they did not sell work in a given week — she became, in her position as head of the fiction department (quoting the magazine’s former Art Editor, Lee Lorenz here*): “A powerful voice in the selection of the magazine’s art.” The cartoons fell under the auspices of the fiction department until 1939 when James Geraghty became the Art Editor, and created a new department devoted to the magazine’s art (cartoons, covers, spot drawings, and illustrations).
Further Reading:
— Linda Davis’s splendid biography of Katharine White, Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White.
— Katharine White’s Onward and Upward In the Garden (edited by E.B. White).
Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross, Genius In Disguise details Ms. White’s importance to The New Yorker’s development.
— For a little more on Katharine White’s involvement with The New Yorker’s cartoons in its earliest days, here’s the Spill‘s 2012 piece, “The New Yorker’s Art Meeting: A Potted History”
— Wikipedia’s entry for Katharine White here.
*”…powerful voice…” from Lee Lorenz’s The Art Of The New Yorker: 1925-1995.