Amy Reading's The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker is the kind of assiduously researched benchmark book that will get its share of nominations when awards for biography are being considered. It deserves to win at least some of them, and maybe all of them.
Katharine Sergeant White (1892-1977) was raised comfortably in Massachusetts and attended Bryn Mawr College, where she coedited the college's literary monthly. She was hired by the New Yorker in 1925, when the humor magazine, as it was then characterized, was six months old and fighting for its life. White stayed on for 36 years, during which time she helped hone the magazine's distinctive tone. She also drew many women into her stable of fiction writers and cultivated female talent like Mary McCarthy and Jean Stafford.
It's hard to imagine the book's subject taking her Blackwing pencil to Reading's sentences, which gracefully synthesize the overlapping aspects of White's life: professional, familial, social, marital, medical. Among this woman-in-a-man's-world story's fringe benefits are insights about the subject's second husband, New Yorker contributor turned laureled children's author E.B. White, and pocket-size profiles of the literary giants White worked and sparred with (James Thurber was the spikiest thorn). Reading (The Mark Inside), who waded deep into the New Yorker's archives and White's personal papers for this book, asserts that her subject's "life story was best told through the detailed catalog of her relationships with writers," but The World She Edited may well tell White's story even better. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer