About this item

A lively and intimate biography of trailblazing and era-defining New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, who helped build the magazine's prestigious legacy and transform the 20th century literary landscape for women.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.



About the Author

Amy Reading

Amy Reading grew up in Pennsylvania and Washington state. She worked in scholarly publishing before completing a Ph. D. in American studies at Yale University. Her first book, The Mark Inside, grew out of her dissertation on truth and deception in American autobiography, which contains a chapter on swindlers' memoirs. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and two children, and can be found at



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