Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker

by Ved Mehta

For more than three decades, a quiet man - some would say almost an invisible man - dwelt at the center of American journalistic and literary life. He was William Shawn, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. In Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, Mr. Mehta, who started writing for The New Yorker at the age of twenty-five, and over some thirty-three years contributed such historic pieces as his brilliant study of philosophers at Oxford, and who was a friend of Shawn and his family, gives us the closest, most careful, and most refined description that has yet been written of Shawn's editorship of the magazine. As Mr. Mehta pulls back the curtain, we see the workings of The New Yorker behind the scenes. The book will give intense pleasure to all who love reading and writing, for it is at once a tribute to William Shawn, a close look at the relationship between writer and editor, and a joyful homage to the inextricably linked arts of editing, writing, and reading.