About town - Ben Yagoda

This is the story of "The New Yorker" magazine, which celebrates its 75th birthday this year. But it is also the story of a great literary age which harboured some of this century's greatest writers. Founded on champagne vapour during the jazz age "The New Yorker" grew in its first ten years from a local weekly humour magazine into a major literary enterprise; today it is an international institution.;"The New Yorker" established its reputation by publishing some of this century's most important writers including the humour of E.B. White, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber. The Second World War strengthened the note of seriousness which had begun to be heard in the thirties in the publication of the ground breaking journalism of Janet Flanner and John Hersey, and in later years the work of Mary McCarthy, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, John Cheever, Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason.;Ben Yagoda has devoted years of reserach to unearthing articles from the previously closed archives of "The New Yorker". With access to the complete editorial correspondece from 1925 onwards, internal office correspondence, edited manuscripts, articles and rejection letters, Yagoda has distilled a huge amount of material in an attempt to reproduce the essence of "The New Yorker".