Notes
179 notes Preface: Haute Literacy 1. If William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker for over thirty-five years, were the bragging type—he was instead famously modest—he might have boasted that by 1970, he “had already had 50 books dedicated to him” (Stingone v). See also this short selection of titles: Kunkel, Genius in Disguise; Kramer; Thurber; Mehta; and Berg. 2. Bok’s memoir is treated at length in chapter one. For more on Bok, see Steinberg; and Krabbendam. For more on Ladies’ Home Journal, see Damon-Moore; and Scanlon. 3. The story of Harold Ross and the New Yorker, as Trysh Travis explains , “satisfies at many levels: it is rich in vivid and funny details, it neatly encapsulates cultural change, and the irony at its heart (how could a man who has to ask, ‘Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?’ be the editor of the New Yorker?’) is unresolvable without recourse to the tantalizing mysteries of ‘genius’” (258). For Jane Grant’s role in the founding of the magazine, see Henry, “Gambling on a Magazine and a Marriage.” See also William Shipman’s introduction to an exhibit of Jane Grant’s papers at the University of Oregon Libaries. 4. So successful was Blackwell in this mission that she was eventually honored as a director of the Columbia University School of General Studies. Unlike some other editors of the period, Blackwell did not write a memoir and has not been the subject of a biography. She was, however, profiled in Rayner’s Wise Women (38–47) (Francine du Plessix Gray wrote the foreword) and appears in glimpses in editorials. Blackwell’s father was a writer and her mother a “fashion stylist” at Lord & Taylor. Blackwell ’s son became an executive at Newsweek (Sanders and Hersam Acorn Newspapers). 5. “Smart” used in this sense evolved from its eighteenth-century roots as “one who affects smartness in dress, manners, or talk” (OED). For more on “smart magazines,” see Douglas. 6. Sponsors “lend their resources or credibility to the sponsored but also stand to gain benefits from their success, whether by direct re- 180 Notes to Pages ix–x payment or, indirectly, by credit of association.” Brandt chose the term “sponsors” because of “all the commercial references that appeared in these twentieth-century accounts—the magazines, peddled encyclopedias , essay contests, radio and television programs, toys, fans clubs, writing tools, and so on, from which so much experience with literacy was derived” (Literacy in American Lives 19–20). Brandt studies the effect of these sponsors on the sponsored, while I am trying to get behind the scenes of sponsorship. 7. These magazines formed a belletristic “extracurriculum” that was both liberating and restrictive. I borrow the term “extracurriculum” from Anne Ruggles Gere’s Intimate Practices (and she in turn borrowed it from Frederick Rudolph) to highlight the “literary clubs” and other activities that supported collegiate life or learning generally. See also Gere, “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms”; and Hobbs. 8. For an analysis of how illiteracy gets sponsored, see Mortensen. 9. In Literacy in American Lives, Brandt refers to how literacy can be viewed as a “raw material.” As she argues, it makes sense that literacy came to be something highly desirable in the mid-twentieth-century: “Turbulent economic and technological changes force changes in the nature of work, rearrangements in systems of communication and social relations, and fluctuation in the value of human skills. With the unique kinds of economic and technological changes of the twentieth century, those fluctuations came especially to affect the value of literacy .... Rapid-process production, technological innovation, modern weaponry, corporate consolidation, the growth of consumerism, the rise in knowledge industries, and the spread of computer technology all made controlling and communicating words and other symbols vital to the production of profit” (187–88). 10. This value they shared with belletristic critics in the academy who viewed literature in the manner of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin “as a moral and spiritual force and a repository of ‘general ideas’ which could be applied directly to the conduct of life and improvement of national culture” (Graff and Warner 6). 11. This view still has currency and market capability, as illustrated by work like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. 12. Katharine employed several signatures over her long career, including Katharine Sergeant, Katharine S. Angell, K. S. Angell, Katharine S. White, K. S. White, and, on strategic occasions, Mrs. E. B...
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