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

An oft-overlooked woman shaped the New Yorker’s literary style, according to this penetrating biography from Reading (The Mark Inside). Katharine White (1892–1977) joined the New Yorker soon after its founding in 1925 and helped craft the magazine’s tone—sophisticated, witty, not too erudite or obscure—as fiction editor. Much of the book analyzes White’s artful handling of writers including Mary McCarthy, Adrienne Rich, and John Updike, highlighting White’s one-on-one editing sessions, generous advances (based solely on the testimonial of Edmund White, she gave Vladimir Nabokov $500 for his first short story), and tact (even her rejection letters could run to several pages of praise). Among the writers she influenced was her second husband, E.B. White, who wrote Charlotte’s Web under her nurturing influence and credits her with editing his and William Strunk’s The Elements of Style. Reading convincingly portrays White as a feminist pioneer who built a career in which she embodied the urbane, ambitious women who read the New Yorker and populated its fiction. The prose is lucid and elegant, evoking the style White infused into the magazine (she loved to read “an intense moment distinctively told, a small, well-rounded exercise of a writer’s personality and wit”). The result is a fine portrait of one of the New Yorker’s leading lights that nails the magazine’s hothouse sensibility. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Sept.)