The world through a monocle

by Mary F. Corey

At midcentury, The New Yorker magazine occupied an unsurpassed niche of cultural authority, wielding a power without precedent in the magazine market. In this period a small but influential community of readers relied on The New Yorker as a guide to the emerging postwar world, turning to it for information about Broadway theater, Parisian pret-a-porter, Italian Communism, the bombing of Bikini Atoll, English movies, and French wines. A well-known critic lamented that "certain groups have come to communicate almost exclusively in references to the [magazine's] sacred writings." The World through a Monocle is a study of these "sacred writings.". Mary Corey mines the magazine's mix of journalism, fiction, advertisements, cartoons, and poetry to unearth a kind of New Yorker Village - a locale of contradiction and delight, of self-importance and social justice. She exposes a magazine with blind spots in regard to women and to racial and ethnic stereotyping, but which nevertheless strove tow