E. J. Kahn, Jr. (1916–1994) became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1937 and remained at the magazine for five decades. He wrote twenty-seven books, including The Separated People (1968), The American People (1974), and About The New Yorker and Me (1979).
Katharine T. Kinkead (1910–2001) contributed to The New Yorker from 1939 until 1964. She is the author of Walk Together, Talk Together: The American Field Service Student Exchange Program (1962).
Hans Koningsberger (1921–2007), who later changed his name to Hans Koning, was a writer and journalist. He is the author of more than forty books of fiction, reportage, and history, including Columbus: His Enterprise—Exploding the Myth (1976).
Jane Kramer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1964, and has written the Letter from Europe since 1981. Since 1970, most of her work has covered aspects of European culture, politics, and social history. Many of these pieces have been collected in books, including Unsettling Europe (1980) and Europeans (1988), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Her piece on multiculturalism and political correctness, “Whose Art Is It?,” won the 1993 National Magazine Award for feature writing and was published as a book in 1994.
Daniel Lang (1913–1981) was a war correspondent at The New Yorker and a contributor from 1941 until his death. His books include Early Tales of the Atomic Age (1948) and Casualties of War (1969).
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed reviews and essays since 2005. Her books include The Name of War (1998), New York Burning (2005), The Story of America (2012), Book of Ages (2013), The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014), and Joe Gould’s Teeth (2016).
Flora Lewis (1922–2002) was an American journalist who covered international politics for over five decades. After beginning her career at the Associated Press, she reported from Europe and Latin America for The Washington Post, Newsday, and the New York Post. From 1980 to 1990, she was a foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times. She is the author of four books, including Europe: A Tapestry of Nations (1987).
A. J. Liebling (1904–1963) joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935 and wrote the magazine’s Wayward Press column for many years. His books include The Sweet Science (1956), The Earl of Louisiana (1961), and Between Meals (1962).
Andy Logan (1920–2000) joined The New Yorker in 1942, and was the first woman to be hired as a Talk of the Town reporter. In over five decades at the magazine, she contributed hundreds of Talk pieces, Profiles, and Letters from Nuremberg. She was most known for her About City Hall column, first published in 1969, which dissected New York City politics and ran for twenty-five years.
Dwight MacDonald (1906–1982) began writing for The New Yorker in 1933, and contributed several Profiles, essays, and book reviews to the magazine. His books include The Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957), Against the American Grain (1962), and Discriminations (1974).
Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1998, and has written Profiles on John Ashbery, Barack Obama, Noam Chomsky, Aaron Swartz, and Hilary Mantel, among others. She has received two Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York, and is the author of Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help (2015).
Donald Malcolm (1932–1975) joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1957, and in 1958 became the magazine’s first Off Broadway drama critic. He later contributed dozens of book reviews and Comments to the magazine.
Terrence Malick is an American film director. Malick went to Harvard, then to Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, before working briefly for The New Yorker and Life. He has directed eight feature films in four decades, including Days of Heaven, which won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life, and The New World, which were all nominated for Academy Awards.
Faith McNulty (1918–2005) joined The New Yorker in 1953, as a Talk of the Town reporter, and contributed to the magazine until 1991. A collection of her stories on the country life, The Wildlife Stories, was published in 1980, and The Burning Bed, her book on a murder trial in Dansville, Michigan, was later made into a film.
John McPhee began contributing to The New Yorker in 1963. He has since written more than a hundred pieces for the magazine, among them a Profile of Bill Bradley, an examination of modern cattle rustling, and several multipart series on subjects like Alaska, the writing process, and a stint with the Swiss Army. He is the author of twenty-eight books, all of them based on his New Yorker writings, including Annals of the Former World, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. He has taught writing at Princeton University since 1975, and in 1982 was awarded Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award for service to the nation.
Thomas Meehan joined The New Yorker in 1958, and went on to contribute comic fiction and several Talk of the Town pieces to the magazine. He has received the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical three times, for his work on Annie, Hairspray, and The Producers.
Ved Mehta was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1961 to 1994. He has written more than twenty books, including an eleven-volume autobiography, Continents of Exile, which documents his loss of sight at age three and his later journey to the U.S., where he attended Pomona College and Harvard University. He won a MacArthur fellowship in 1982.
James Merrill (1926–1995) published his first poem in The New Yorker, included here, in 1957. Among his collections are Divine Comedies (1976), which won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Changing Light at Sandover (1982).
W. S. Merwin’s poetry first appeared in The New Yorker in 1955, and the magazine has since published close to two hundred of his poems and short stories. Merwin is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, for his collections The Carrier of Ladders and The Shadow of Sirius. From 2010 to 2011, he served as the seventeenth poet laureate of the United States.
Jonathan Miller is an English theatre director, actor, author, and physician. He is known for his role in the comedy revue “Beyond the Fringe,” which also featured Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett, and for his prolific direction of operas, including Rigoletto (1982). He has also been the writer and presenter of several BBC documentaries.
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), a social theorist, cultural critic, and historian, wrote The New Yorker’s architecture column, The Sky Line, from 1931 to 1963. He is the author of numerous books, including The City in History (1961), which won a National Book Award.
Howard Nemerov (1920–1991) was the United States poet laureate from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. “The Triumph of Education” was his first contribution to The New Yorker. His Collected Poems (1977) won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
Evan Osnos became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2008, and began reporting from China for the magazine the same year. His book, Age of Ambition (2014), won a National Book Award in nonfiction.
George Packer became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 and covered the Iraq War for the magazine. His books include The Assassins’ Gate, which was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times, and The Unwinding, which won a 2013 National Book Award in nonfiction.
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) graduated from Smith College and later attended Cambridge University on a Fulbright Scholarship. Beginning with “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” in 1958, The New Yorker published twenty-eight of Plath’s poems, as well as excerpts from her journals. In 1982 she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. She is also the author of a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.
David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998. He joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1992, and has since written more than a hundred pieces. He is the author of Lenin’s Tomb (1993), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, The Devil Problem (1996), Resurrection (1997), King of the World (1998), Reporting (2006), and Th
e Bridge (2010).
Robert Rice (1916–1998) was a contributor to The New Yorker between 1947 and 1965. He wrote more than a dozen Profiles for the magazine, on subjects including Mort Sahl, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Dave Brubeck.
Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) was the art critic for The New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, and contributed more than a hundred pieces to the magazine, including a dozen book reviews. He covered the careers of Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, and Saul Steinberg, among others, and in 1952 coined the term “Action painting,” for what soon became known as Abstract Expressionism.
Lillian Ross became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1945, and over the course of her career wrote hundreds of pieces, contributing to nearly every section of the magazine. She is the author of several books, including Picture (1952), Portrait of Hemingway (1961), and Here but Not Here (1998).
Richard H. Rovere (1915–1979) joined The New Yorker in 1944 and wrote the magazine’s Letter from Washington from 1948 until his death. His books include The American Establishment and Other Reports, Opinions, and Speculations (1962) and Waist Deep in the Big Muddy (1968).
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) was an American poet and political activist, whose work frequently grappled with social violence, Judaism, and the Vietnam War. She is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry, as well as a work of criticism, The Life of Poetry (1949).
Xavier Rynne (1914–2002), a pseudonym for Francis X. Murphy, was a writer and Redemptorist priest. He wrote more than twenty books, and is known for his New Yorker stories on the meeting of the Second Vatican Council.
Kelefa Sanneh has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2008. He came to the magazine from the New York Times, where he had been the pop-music critic since 2002, and his writing has appeared in The Source, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and “Da Capo Best Music Writing” in 2002, 2005, 2007, and 2011.
Winthrop Sargeant (1903–1986) was a writer, critic, and violinist. In 1930, after stints playing with the New York Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, he abandoned his musical career to become a writer. From 1949 to 1972, he wrote the Musical Events column for The New Yorker, and he continued to contribute to the magazine until his death.
Jonathan Schell (1943–2014) wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 to 1987. He wrote his first piece for the magazine, “The Village of Ben Suc,” when he was twenty-three years old, and went on to contribute hundreds of Notes and Comment pieces for the magazine. In 1982, The New Yorker serialized his book about the perils of nuclear proliferation, The Fate of the Earth, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) began publishing poems in The New Yorker in 1959. Her books of poetry include To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962), and The Book of Folly (1972).
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, and the 1978 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His first story for The New Yorker, “The Slaughterer,” was published in 1967, and he was a frequent contributor of fiction to the magazine until his death. He is the author of more than a dozen novels, and his short story collection, A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, won the National Book Award in 1974.
L. E. Sissman (1928–1976) was a regular contributor of poetry and book reviews to The New Yorker. An advertising executive by day, Sissman’s collections include Dying: An Introduction (1968) and Scattered Returns (1969).
Muriel Spark (1918–2006) contributed fiction, poetry, and personal histories to The New Yorker from 1960 until 2003. “The Ormolu Clock,” collected here, was her first story in the magazine, and The New Yorker devoted nearly an entire issue to her sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She is the author of twenty-two novels, two of which, The Public Image (1968) and Loitering with Intent (1981), were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
George Steiner, a critic and philosopher, wrote 134 articles for The New Yorker between 1966 and 1997, many of which were collected in George Steiner at The New Yorker (2009). The author of dozens of works of fiction and nonfiction, he has written extensively about the Holocaust, as well as the relationship between language, literature, and society. He has taught at the University of Oxford, Harvard University, and Princeton University, and is currently Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University.
James Stevenson was on the staff of The New Yorker for over three decades, contributing reportage, fiction, and over two thousand cartoons and eighty covers. He is the author and illustrator of over a hundred children’s books.
May Swenson (1913–1989) was an American poet and playwright. The New Yorker published dozens of her poems from 1954 until 1990. She is the author of several poetry collections, including A Cage of Spines (1958), Iconographs (1970), and Collected Poems (2013).
Calvin Trillin has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1963, when he published “An Education in Georgia,” excerpted here. More than three hundred of Trillin’s pieces have appeared in the magazine, spanning comic casuals, reporting, and varied nonfiction. Between 1967 and 1982, he wrote a series of New Yorker pieces from around the U.S., leading to two collections, U.S. Journal (1971) and Killings (1984). He is the author of eighteen books, and his food writing has been collected in American Fried (1974), Alice, Let’s Eat (1978), and Travels with Alice (1989).
George W. S. Trow (1943–2006) joined The New Yorker in 1966 and wrote for the magazine for the next three decades, contributing short fiction, Talk of the Town pieces, and critical essays. In 1980, the magazine devoted an entire issue to his essay “Within the Context of No-Context.” He is the author of a collection of short stories, Bullies (1980), a novel, The City in the Mist (1984), several plays, and two books of criticism.
Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) was born in London and made his name as a theatre critic at the London Observer. He began writing for The New Yorker in 1958, contributing theatre reviews and Profiles on subjects such as Johnny Carson, Tom Stoppard, and Mel Brooks. His books include Curtains (1961), The Sound of Two Hands Clapping (1975), and Show People (1979).
John Updike (1932–2009) contributed fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism to The New Yorker for a half century. He is the author of twenty-two novels, including Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), both of which won a Pulitzer Prize, as well as fifteen books of short stories, seven collections of poetry, five children’s books, a memoir, and a play. His sixth collection of nonfiction, Due Considerations (2007), contains more than seventy book reviews and essays that first appeared in the magazine.
Joseph Wechsberg (1907–1983) began writing for The New Yorker in 1943, and from 1958 to 1973 wrote the magazine’s Letter from Berlin. He is the author of Homecoming (1946), The Best Things in Life (1951), and Trifles Make Perfection (1998), among other books.
E. B. White (1899–1985) produced more than eighteen hundred stories for The New Yorker between 1925 and 1976. Though he contributed light verse, casuals, essays, and cartoon captions, he was most known for his Comments, which helped define the magazine’s light, intellectual style. He is the author of several children’s books, including Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970), and in 1959 he edited and updated William Strunk, Jr.’s The Elements of Style, which has since been published in four editions. He received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and an honorary Pulitzer Prize in 1978.
Thomas Whiteside (1918–1997) wrote for The New Yorker between 1950 and 1991. His 1970 article “Defoliation,” about Agent Orange, led to the curtailment of the herbicide’s use. His books include The Withering Rain (1971), Selling Death (1971), and The Blockbuster Complex (1981).
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) was an American essayist, activist, and cultural critic. In 1968, she became The New Yorker’s first pop music critic, and over the next seven years contributed dozens of reviews to the magazine. She went on to write for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and The Nation, and
in 1997 she founded the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Her writings on music, feminism, and politics were collected in Beginning to See the Light (1981) and The Essential Ellen Willis, which won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
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The 60s Page 84
