THE NEW YORKER PUBLISHES ITS FIRST ISSUE IN 1925

The New Yorker, February 21, 1925

The Grandma is relaxing at home after her travel to Brussels. She has been unpacking her suitcase and she has sit on her sofa to read a little about world news. She has chosen one of her favourite English newspapers, The New Yorker, a publication that published its first issue on a day like today in 1925.

The New Yorker is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry.

Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.

Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric Americana, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous fact checking and copy editing, its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue.

The New Yorker was founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter, and debuted on February 21, 1925. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine that would be different from perceivably corny" humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked, or the old Life.

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Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann, who founded the General Baking Company, to establish the F-R Publishing Company. The magazine's first offices were at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan. Ross edited the magazine until his death in 1951.

During the early, occasionally precarious years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. Ross famously declared in a 1925 prospectus for the magazine: It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.

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Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon established itself as a pre-eminent forum for serious fiction, essays and journalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue.

In subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Ann Beattie, Sally Benson, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Mavis Gallant, Geoffrey Hellman, Ruth McKenney, John McNulty, Joseph Mitchell, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Stephen King, and E. B. White. Publication of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery drew more mail than any other story in the magazine's history.

The New Yorker, September 12, 1994

In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has remained steady at one story per issue.

While some styles and themes recur more often than others in its fiction, the stories are marked less by uniformity than by variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic narratives to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, and from parochial accounts of the lives of neurotic New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras and translated from many languages.

Kurt Vonnegut said that The New Yorker has been an effective instrument for getting a large audience to appreciate modern literature.

The magazine is notable for its editorial traditions. Under the rubric Profiles, it publishes articles about notable people such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry R. Luce and Marlon Brando, Hollywood restaurateur Michael Romanoff, magician Ricky Jay and mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky.

Other enduring features have been Goings on About Town, a listing of cultural and entertainment events in New York, and The Talk of the Town, a miscellany of brief pieces -frequently humorous, whimsical or eccentric vignettes of life in New York- written in a breezily light style, or feuilleton, although in recent years the section often begins with a serious commentary.

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For many years, newspaper snippets containing amusing errors, unintended meanings or badly mixed metaphors (Block That Metaphor) have been used as filler items, accompanied by a witty retort. There is no masthead listing the editors and staff. Despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its traditional appearance over the decades in typography, layout, covers and artwork. The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr, in 1985, for $200 million when it was earning less than $6 million a year.

As far back as the 1940s, the magazine's commitment to fact-checking was already well-known. However, the magazine played a role in a literary scandal and defamation lawsuit over two articles written by Janet Malcolm in the 1990s, who wrote about Sigmund Freud's legacy. Questions were raised about the magazine's fact-checking process.

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As of 2010, The New Yorker employs sixteen fact checkers. In July 2011, the magazine was sued for defamation in United States district court for an article written by David Grann on July 12, 2010, but the case was summarily dismissed. Today, the magazine is often identified as the leading publication for rigorous fact checking.

Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has used the Internet to publish current and archived material, and maintains a website with some content from the current issue, plus exclusive web-only content. Subscribers have access to the full current issue online, as well as a complete archive of back issues viewable as they were originally printed. 

The New Yorker, April 17, 2017

In addition, The New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase online. A digital archive of back issues from 1925 to April 2008, representing more than 4,000 issues and half a million pages, has also been issued on DVD-ROMs and on a small portable hard drive. More recently, an iPad version of the current issue of the magazine has been released.

The New Yorker has featured cartoons, usually gag cartoons, since it began publication in 1925.

The cartoon editor of The New Yorker for years was Lee Lorenz, who first began cartooning in 1956 and became a New Yorker contract contributor in 1958.

After serving as the magazine's art editor from 1973 to 1993, when he was replaced by Françoise Mouly, he continued in the position of cartoon editor until 1998. His book The Art of the New Yorker: 1925–1995 (Knopf, 1995) was the first comprehensive survey of all aspects of the magazine's graphics.

In 1998, Robert Mankoff took over as cartoon editor and edited at least 14 collections of New Yorker cartoons. In addition, Mankoff usually contributed a short article to each book, describing some aspect of the cartooning process or the methods used to select cartoons for the magazine. Mankoff left the magazine in 2017.

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The New Yorker's stable of cartoonists has included many important talents in American humor, including Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Charles Barsotti, George Booth, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Sam Cobean, Leo Cullum, Richard Decker, Pia Guerra, J. B. Handelsman, Helen E. Hokinson, Ed Koren, Reginald Marsh, Mary Petty, George Price, Charles Saxon, David Snell, Otto Soglow, Saul Steinberg, William Steig, James Stevenson, Richard Taylor, James Thurber, Pete Holmes, Barney Tobey, and Gahan Wilson.

Many early New Yorker cartoonists did not caption their own cartoons. In his book The Years with Ross, Thurber describes the newspaper's weekly art meeting, where cartoons submitted over the previous week would be brought up from the mail room to be gone over by Ross, the editorial department, and a number of staff writers.

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Cartoons often would be rejected or sent back to artists with requested amendments, while others would be accepted and captions written for them. Some artists hired their own writers; Helen Hokinson hired James Reid Parker in 1931.

Brendan Gill relates in his book Here at The New Yorker that at one point in the early 1940s, the quality of the artwork submitted to the magazine seemed to improve. It later was found out that the office boy, a teen-aged Truman Capote had been acting as a volunteer art editor, dropping pieces he didn't like down the far edge of his desk.

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One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is

they let you write stories

that sometimes end up almost half a book.

David Grann