The professional and personal lives of the pioneers of an enduring magazine.
From its birth in 1925 to the present day, The New Yorker has been the country’s most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra revisits the early years of that creative cauldron. At the heart of the narrative is the largely forgotten life of Wolcott Gibbs, the magazine’s theater critic and all-around wit, author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine. Around him swirled a legendary roster of names, E. B. and Katharine White, James Thurber, Charles Addams, Peter Arno, and John O’Hara among them. Their stories—along with those of equally colorful but overlooked figures like managing editor St. Clair McKelway, head fact-checker Frederick Packard, and the flamboyant film reviewer John Mosher—are told here. Drawing on extensive interviews, multiple manuscript collections, and myriad secondary sources, Cast of Characters may be the most revealing book yet about the unique personalities who built what founding editor Harold Ross called not a magazine but a “movement.”