Here at The New Yorker

The book[edit]

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of The New Yorker, Gill's book is a semi-autobiographical memoir built around his time as an editor and writer at the magazine and written in the style of the "Talk of the Town" section to which Gill contributed for many years. Much of the book is devoted to anecdotes about his best-known colleagues, such as cartoonists Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and James Thurber; writers Truman Capote, John Updike, S.J. Perelman, and John O'Hara; critics Wolcott Gibbs and Robert Benchley; and editors Katharine White, Harold Ross, and William Shawn.


Gill admits in the introduction that his view of his colleagues is at times highly biased. He detested James Thurber, for instance, calling him a "malicious man"^[1] who for his own amusement instigated a number of feuds between New Yorker writers, including one between Gill himself and writer John O'Hara over a book review.^[2] Despite respecting Harold Ross for his work on the magazine, Gill reveals his "primitive" and "embarrassing" racism, which excluded blacks from even the most menial positions with the magazine and kept black writers and even article subjects out of its pages.^[3] His portrait of William Shawn, however, appeared unsound to some reviewers; Gill portrayed Shawn as a gentle and kind man, but also showed Shawn firing an employee simply for displaying mildly bad taste while off duty.^[4] Gill also describes Shawn's well-known prudery, including his reactions to the phrase "cow paddies" and to Henry Green's inspiration for his novel Loving,^[5] yet refrains from mentioning that for many years Shawn was leading a double life, with a wife and children in the suburbs and a mistress (Lillian Ross, a colleague who later wrote about the affair) and stepson in the city.^[6]