Q&A with Amy Reading

 

Photo by Jamie Love

 

 

 

Amy Reading is the author of The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker. She also has written the book The Mark Inside. She lives in Upstate New York.

 

Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of editor Katharine S. White (1892-1977)?

 

A: I’ve long read biographies of women writers to find out how they built their artistic practices in a world which did not accommodate them.

 

Then I read about Katharine White’s relationship with Jean Stafford. Katharine helped bring Stafford back to her writing desk after the end of her violent marriage to the poet Robert Lowell. She published Stafford’s stories in The New Yorker and advanced her money against future stories and worked with her on drafts and gave her ideas and sent her Blackwing pencils and even introduced Stafford to her third husband, New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling—which is above and beyond her job description!

 

I found this incredibly moving. Stafford had a smart, sympathetic woman right down in the trenches with her as she wrote, someone who was responsive and encouraging, and that affected what Stafford was able to write. Her work was called out from her by Katharine. She ended up dedicating her collected stories to Katharine White, a book which won the Pulitzer Prize.

 

So then I learned that Katharine had this kind of intimate relationship with so many of her writers. For her, the art of editing was to create personal relationships that went far beyond the page.

 

This electrified me and showed me that the arc of 20th century literature could be told quite differently, as a story about women who worked behind the scenes to read each other’s writing and to write for each other. If Katharine White is the invisible hand behind so much of The New Yorker and its authors, I wanted to make her work visible.

 

Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book says, “Reading convincingly portrays White as a feminist pioneer who built a career in which she embodied the urbane, ambitious women who read The New Yorker and populated its fiction.” What do you think of that description, and how would you characterize White's impact on The New Yorker?

 

A: I argue that Katharine was not a pioneer, that women have edited magazines since the founding of the American republic, that literary taste is a value that women have been allowed to contribute to public life even when they weren’t allowed to be doctors or scientists or voters.

 

In the 1920s, Katharine relied on a healthy network of women literary agents representing women authors, many of whom she knew from Bryn Mawr or from social circles in Boston and New York. Only later did these networks contract as women were eased out of the workforce.

 

Katharine began her career in a unique window of American history when she was actively encouraged to have it all: an education, a substantial career, a companionate marriage, a family.

 

But the larger point is true: Katharine was always the only woman in the room at The New Yorker, and she curated her parts of the magazine—both fiction and nonfiction—with women like herself and her cohort in mind, women who were educated, who worked outside the home, who had disposable income, who considered themselves equal to their husbands, who were engaged in the issues of the day.

 

This, as literary scholars have noted, was a huge part of the magazine’s success, that they were able to attract women readers in greater numbers than other general interest magazines by addressing them not in the gendered, reductive terms of women’s magazines but as lively participants in the city’s culture.

Q: How would you describe the relationship between White and her husband E.B. White?

 

A: This question is hard to answer succinctly—it needs an entire book! E.B. White (known all his adult life as Andy) was Katharine’s second husband. Her first husband was a lawyer named Ernest Angell who was never comfortable with Katharine’s job at The New Yorker.

 

Katharine hired Andy White as a staff writer at the magazine; he was seven years her junior and not an obvious match. But they shared a sense of humor that was, I think, the foundation of their marriage, and they shared a commitment to writing that paid dividends to both of them.

 

Katharine’s marriage to Andy White meant that her job at The New Yorker was secure, that she did not need to justify her career. And his marriage to her meant that he had a built-in editor and champion for his work.

 

In their farmhouse in Maine they each had an office on either side of the entryway, and they’d sit at their desks to read and write with their doors open, occasionally calling out to each other when they read something funny.

 

Work and marriage were deeply intertwined for the two of them, and one symbol of that was the book they edited together in 1941, The Subtreasury of American Humor.

 

Q: What do you see as Katharine White’s legacy today?

 

A: The New Yorker is celebrating its 100th anniversary this very month, February of 2025, and I wonder if the magazine would have lasted this long without Katharine White’s vision for it.

 

The founder, Harold Ross, conceived of it as an irreverent humor magazine that was quite specific to the city and to its time in the fizzy Jazz Age. Katharine consistently challenged him to expand his offerings to more substantial fare—most famously campaigning to supplement the magazine’s light verse with poems from W.H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Theodore Roethke, and eventually many, many others.

 

We can also trace her legacy in the careers of the writers she fostered, many of whom she discovered or who hit their stride at The New Yorker. She edited men and women in roughly equal numbers, but no one else was working so hard to nurture women writers and develop their careers over time, including Kay Boyle, Nancy Hale, Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Christine Weston, and Nadine Gordimer.

 

I believe E.B. White would not have had the writing career he did if he had not married Katharine. She acted as his literary agent. She suggested ideas to him and read many of his drafts. It was her idea that he should write down a story he’d told his niece about a mouse, and her connections in publishing that led to his children’s books.

 

She worked incredibly hard to keep the noisy, demanding world at bay so that he could write. He was lucky to have her, and we too are lucky because we have his superlative writing.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I appreciate this generous question but I’m not working on anything that is solid enough to discuss just yet.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: If my book piques your curiosity about how literary culture gets made, you might also like my friend Sara Franklin’s book, which is also a biography of a female editor and which was published just a few months before mine.

 

The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America tells the story of Jones’ career at Doubleday and Knopf, where she rescued Anne Frank’s diary from the slush pile and shepherded Julia Child into print. Jones had twin legacies as the book editor for literary authors like John Updike and Anne Tyler and cookbook authors like Edna Lewis and Madhur Jaffrey.

 

Sara writes very perceptively about Jones’ status within the male-dominated publishing industry and how her life experiences informed her conception of cooking—and writing about food—as female-coded labor with a history and culture worth reading about. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb