The New Yorker: The Quintessential Literary Mag
A Smart, Witty and Relevant Publication
Ask any writer what they would consider the pinnacle of their career and they are sure to answer with some variation of the following: "getting published in The New Yorker". So what makes The New Yorker such a prestigious literary magazine and how did it get to where it is today?
A Brief History of The New Yorker Magazine
The New Yorker first debuted on newsstands on February 17, 1925. The creative offspring of founder Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, the magazine was intended to provide readers with sophisticated, humorous and cosmopolitan reading material. While the magazine kept its undertone of intelligent humor, it quickly became a noted arena for world-renowned journalism and literature. It is published on a weekly basis throughout the year, with the exception of five special issues, which are published every two weeks.
An Overview of a Typical Issue of The New Yorker
A smart magazine most widely recognized for its comics, each issue follows a similar style and contains the following components:
- An artistic cover, usually drawn or painted, that represents a visual commentary of the artist's choosing.
- The front sections, which include letters to the editor, a listing of events happening in the New York vicinity and the Talk of the Town section comprised of commentary, editorials, and humorous takes on modern life in and out of the city.
- The middle section, which houses all of the cartoons, features, fiction and poetry. The New Yorker also includes the majority of its ads in this portion of the magazine.
- The back section includes the criticisms.
Famous Contributors That Have Written for The New Yorker
Looking at the list of names of those who have contributed to the magazine reads like a who's who list of the most prominent writers of the 20th and 21st century: J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Anne Sexton, David Sedaris, Milan Kundera, Stephen King, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Vladimir Nabokov, just to name a few. E.B. White got his first big break writing for The New Yorker in 1926, and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood made its first appearance in the magazine as well.
Interesting Facts About The New Yorker Magazine
- Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery, was published in the June 28, 1948 issue and stands as the most popular short story published, in terms of reader mail received.
- The New Yorker utilizes some of the most unusual editorial house styles seen in literary magazines: the insertion of diaeresis marks in the occurrences of repeating vowels, the use of quotation marks to set off the titles of books as opposed to italics and its favor of rarely used spellings over more common ones.
- The most popular and most often reprinted New Yorker cartoon is that of two dogs sitting in front of a computer with one saying to the other, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog", which was drawn by Peter Steiner and first appeared in the July 5, 1993 edition.
- The magazine rarely publishes profanities unless absolutely necessary.
A magazine that combines consistently well-written content with world-class cartoons has proven to be a winning formula for The New Yorker.
