Birthday: William Shawn convinced New Yorker writers it hurt him more to suggest edits than it would them to accept them.

William Shawn (1907-1992)

Editor, The New Yorker

Son of eastern European immigrants, Chon- as he was born- dropped out of the University of Michigan in 1927 and became a journalist. He and his wife moved to New YOrk in 1932; she got a job as a fact-checker at the smart-alec magazine, The New Yorker. William tried his hand at composing. It didn’t work out very well, so he swung a gig at The New Yorker and stayed 53 years.

Started as a staff writer, he moved into editing, and by the time World War II rolled up, he was sufficiently well-regarded by founding editor Harold Ross that Shawn became the war’s editor at the magazine. In 1946 he persuaded Ross to devote an entire issue to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, an account of the atomic bomb explosion the year before.

He succeeded Ross as editor in 1951, and, with the backing of the owners- the Fleischmann’s Yeast family- ran the magazine as an ever-so-polite absolute monarch for 35 years. He moved its coverage from the flighty, gossipy Ross template to one willing to give endless space to promising writers, both in terms of magazine pages and production requirements.

“We should have had a policy that after ten years,” he said in a speech to the staff, “if [employees] didn’t rise to something, then they should leave. They’re eccentric, unusual people, and we keep them on.”

That was how, for example, the writer Joseph Mitchell produced maybe an article a year for twenty years, and then produced nothing for another thirty, all the while showing up for work every day retreating into his office, and leaving at 5.

Shawn bought articles and sat on them for years; some he never published. He was notoriously secretive; when, at a shareholder’s meeting, the publisher asked if Shawn had a deputy editor, the dapper little man replied, “I don’t believe so.”

He hated fast cars, central air conditioning, crowds, and self-service elevators; when The New Yorker’s building switched to them, no one had to tell them to leave one operator on duty, for Mr. Shawn. His favorites adored him: J.D. Salinger dedicated Franny and Zooey to him.  Publisher Raoul Fleischmann left him $100,000. He backed controversial writers like Rachel Carson, Hannah Arendt, Truman Capote and James Baldwin, and created opportunities for the likes of John McPhee and his epic series on American geology.

When the 1960s arrived, and with them, The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe savaged Shawn and the magazine in a two-part smackdown called “Tiny Mummies!” He argued all Shawn had done in fifteen years was live off the intellectual capital of the staff Ross left behind, and created “the most successful suburban women’s magazine in America.”  Even Dorothy Parker complained that the early Sixties New Yorker was mostly “about someone’s childhood in Pakistan.”

After a huge fuss in the media Shawn quietly published one of the paramount works of New Journalism, “In Cold Blood,” and Wolfe never included “Tiny Mummies!” in any collections of his work.

When the Fleischmanns cashed out, selling The New Yorker to S.I. Newhouse’s Advance Publications for $142m in 1986, Newhouse announced Shawn would remain editor “until he retired”, and spent the next year assiduously maneuvering him out the door. By now the tiny mummies were all of Shawn’s making; two generations of his staff and writers urged the next editor, Robert Gottlieb, not to take the job. He did, and proved a worthy heir for five years, when Newhouse forced him out and installed the exotic Tina Brown, who tried to return the magazine to its Roaring Twenties style. She exited in 1998.

Shawn took a million-dollar buyout and settled in as a largely honorary editor at a New York Publishing House. He continued shuttling back and forth the ten blocks between his flat and that of New Yorker writer Lillian Ross, with whom he had an affair from 1950 to his death, of a heart attack, in 1992. His children include the composer Allen Shawn and the character actor Wallace Shawn. He left Lillian Ross nothing in his will. She wrote a book about the affair in 1998. Mrs. Ross, who knew about it all along, died in 2005.

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