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

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

Amy Reading

The World She Edited won the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist designations. 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 reveals the art of editing by bringing 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 to 20th-century literature, 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, this biography 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 pivotal work with founder Harold Ross—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.