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.

Going Back to T-Town: The Ernie Fields Territory Big Band 

There was a time when countless music patrons in the Midwest, South and Southwest went to dances and stage shows to hear a territory band play. Territory bands traveled from town to town, performing jazz and swing music, and Tulsa-based musician Ernie Fields (1904-97) led one of the best. His daughter, Carmen Fields, tells the story of his emergence less than a decade after Tulsa’s infamous race massacre, to chase his musical dream. The book details his successes, disappointments and perseverance that kept his group alive from the early jazz era to the 1960s. This enlightening account of how Ernie fields navigated the hurdles of racial segregation during the Jim Crow era gives a before now missing account of American popular music and African American history.

About the Speakers

A fixture in the greater Boston journalism community for over 30 years, Carmen Fields has broad experience in both print and broadcast journalism; journalism education and corporate and non-profit media relations. Additionally, Fields is a SAG-AFTRA affiliated actor and voice-over artist. The Tulsa, OK native earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Lincoln University (MO) and a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University. Other achievements include Harvard University’s Nieman Fellowship and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Salem State University.

Joyce Kulhawik, best known as the Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment anchor for CBS-Boston (WBZ-TV 1981-2008), is an arts critic/advocate and cancer crusader as a 3X survivor. The first arts reporter/critic in the U.S. to appear every weeknight as part of a local TV news team, she gave journalistic stature to arts reporting, covering local and national events live from the red carpet including the Oscars, Emmys, and Grammys, from Boston and Broadway to Hollywood and beyond. Kulhawik was inducted into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame, received the N.E. Emmys Governor’s Award for her distinguished career, and an Honorary Doctorate in Communications from Simmons University. Joyce is currently President of the Boston Theater Critics Association, a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, Boston Online Film Critics Association, and appears on Boston’s local NPR station’s The Culture Show (GBH radio 89.7) weekdays at 2PM. Find her reviews at JoycesChoices.com.

Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy

During his seven-decade career in public life, the Brookline-born Massachusetts governor and US Congressman, George Sewall Boutwell, sought to “redeem America’s promise” of racial equality, economic equity, and the principled use of American power abroad. From 1840 to 1905, Boutwell was at the center of efforts to abolish slavery, establish the Republican Party, assist President Lincoln in funding the Union war effort, facilitate Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, impeach President Andrew Johnson, and frame and enact the Fourteenth and Fifteenth civil rights amendments. He helped lay the foundations of the modern American economy with President Grant, investigated white terrorism in Mississippi in the 1870s, and opposed American imperialism following the Spanish-American War alongside Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington. The son of a Massachusetts farming family of modest means, George Boutwell would do battle during his career with American political royalty, including Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Teddy Roosevelt. The first major biography of an important public figure who has long been hiding in plain sight, Boutwell is as much a history of nineteenth-century US politics as it is a critique of the failures of governance during a turbulent and formative period in American history.

About the Speakers

Jeffrey Boutwell is a writer, historian, and public policy specialist whose forty-year career spanned journalism, government, and international scientific research and cooperation. He has written widely on issues relating to nuclear weapons arms control, European politics, Middle East security issues, and environmental degradation and civil conflict. He has a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.A. in history from Yale University, and he worked for many years at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. Jeffrey grew up in Winchester and Concord, Mass., and now lives with his wife, Buthaina Shukri, in Columbia, Maryland. He and George Boutwell share a common ancestor, the indentured servant James Boutwell, who emigrated from England to Salem, Mass. in 1632.

Thomas A. Horrocks is an independent scholar and Editor-in-Chief of The Lincoln Herald, a leading scholarly journal devoted to Lincoln and his times. He received a doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania and spent 30 years working as a library administrator, including positions at Harvard and Brown University. In addition to his library management career, Dr. Horrocks has taught at Harvard University Extension School and has authored, edited, and co-edited eight books, primarily on American political history, with an emphasis on Abraham Lincoln and his time, including Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014) and The Annotated Lincoln (Harvard University Press, 2016). This year, the Baker Street Irregular Press published A West Wind: How America and Americans Influenced the Sherlockian Canon, which Tom co-edited. The book includes a chapter by Tom on Abraham Lincoln and Sherlock Holmes. He is currently working on a book on Abraham Lincoln in 50 Objects.