The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading

The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words. White’s biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life. Based on years of scrupulous research, acclaimed author Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her incredible tenure at The New Yorker, and her famous marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.

About the Speakers

Amy Reading is the author of The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, and The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New York Public Library, among others, and has appeared in such places as the Wall Street Journal and LitHub. She lives and writes in upstate New York. Her name is an aptonym.

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of two books: Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, which won the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the 2019 NSW Premier’s General History Award, and a memoir, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Library of Australia, she teaches writing at Harvard University Extension.