New York and Washington., The magazine The New Yorker, Legendary publication, bastion of culture, literature, journalism thoroughly, poetry and cartoon of the United States, turns 100 this week in the middle of the most uneducated and retrograde political environment since its foundation. For many, now more than ever it is an oasis in the middle of an antintelectual storm unleashed since the current government was chosen.
He was born with the concept of being a Comic newspaper
And it almost failed, since it was not the great success that its founders imagined: nobody seemed to want to buy it in the kiosks. Shortly after launching the weekly, its founding director, Harold Ross, sat on a poker table and got drunk; He had very bad luck and ended with a debt of about 20 thousand dollars, which was a fortune, says David Remnick, current director, at the number of this week.
The initial money −25 thousand dollars – Raoul Fleischmann, heir to a fortune obtained from a bakery ingredient company offered, whom he met in a poker game that was made regularly at the famous Algonquin hotel. There, Ross told him his idea of launching a metropolitan weekly – A Comic newspaper
– And, in search of advertising, he told him that the project would offer joy, ingenuity and satire
.
However, Remnick says, Ross did not know how to define his project, and the first numbers were not interesting or attractive. The famous writer Eb White would say later that Ross launched the magazine more to disregard what was being published (in the country), than with a notion of how to improve it
. I mean, he invented while doing so.
After that night of bad luck in the poker and the lack of public response to the magazine, he decided to suspend it, but Fleischmann managed to obtain more funds from his rich family, and little by little everything began to change.
Reporters covered key litigation (the so -called Scopes trial) and investigations social
for example, about life in a cabaret. The New Yorker He began to attract writers who would become some of the most famous feathers in the country and the world, such as John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, John Cheever, Mary McCarthy and Dorothy Parker.
That cast of writers would grow in the following years and decades: it could ensure that there is no author who has not collaborated or had any relationship with the magazine. The list includes Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, JD Salinger, Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges, Woody Allen, Ernest Hemingway and Zadie Smith, among many more.
But the magazine was not limited to the literary world, but also to the journalism of research and background, and offered huge spaces to some of the reports with national and world impact. Among the most famous, the extraordinary text of John Hersey, Hiroshima, which was published in full – a whole number was dedicated; Also, the text of the influential environmentalist Rachel Carsons, Silent Spring, which still inspires new environmental writers. Other journalists who are part of the cast of The New Yorker, whose works have had national and world impact on several areas, are Amy Wilentz, Jane Mayer, Jon Lee Anderson and Ronan Farrow, whose research work shook Hollywood. The magazine has published journalistic works or essays, such as Hannah Arendt’s report on Adolf Eichmann’s trial.
The other integral part of the publication is its cartoonists and illustrations. The covers continue to contribute immediate art, causing laughter and tears. Those covers and cartoons remain forced reading for the conscious people of this country. Its artists and cartoonists include Mexicans Miguel Covarrubias and Abel Quezada, as well as Saul Steinberg Jules Feiffer, Ed Koren, George Booth and Charles Addams – of their drawings jumped the Familia Addams To cinema and television. It also has extraordinary film critics – such as Pauline Kael -, theater and art, which have always had great influence.
In a farewell message to the magazine staff, the great editor in Chief William Shawn (who was forced to go under orders of the new business owner of the magazine, in 1987) wrote: “As a reader said at some point, The New Yorker It has been the most gentle of magazines. Maybe it has also been the best of all, but that matters much less. ”
A reactionary environment
In his anniversary essay this week, Remnick points out that 100 years are turned at at a time when a president declared enemy to the press
he insists on subordination, he released hundreds of his followers who assaulted the Capitol in his name, he is saying goodbye to government officials who suspect they are not loyal and has appointed a cast of incompetent to his government, in addition to promoting the Ethnic cleaning
from Gaza to build a new riviera
among other things.
When our centenary arrives, this is where we are
write, and praise the editors and innumerable collaborators who We persist in our responsibility with the joys that Ross contemplated, first, as a comic weekly. But we are particularly committed to the much richer publication that has emerged over time: a record of events and imagination, reports and poetry, words and art, comments on the moment and reflections of our times
.
A century after its foundation, Remnick wrote, and much after we live with digital, audio and video, the bet is substance, complexity, argument, humanity and ingenuity
he concluded.
(To see part of the weekly centenary celebration you can access https://www.newyorker.com/100.)