Amy Reading The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Amy Reading chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker, the biography of Katharine Sergeant White, the first fiction editor of The New Yorker, an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry.

Capturing the Essence of Katharine S. White

Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
‘This is a first-rate biography’: Washington Post
‘A literary landmark’: Booklist (starred)

The World She Edited

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker’s midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, Katharine White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse.

Katharine S. White

The World She Edited is a lively and intimate portrayal of Katharine S. White, who helped build The New Yorker’s prestigious legacy and transform the twentieth-century literary landscape for women.

This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent 17 rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure, confusing words.

Katharine S. White

Katharine White’s most remarkable contribution was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle and many more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now classic stories and essays. Katharine propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer’s work but also their life.

Tackling Katharine S. White’s Gargantuan Archive

A cornerstone of The World She Edited is its feminist perspective, offering readers a lens through which to appreciate Katharine’s extraordinary contributions. Amy Reading’s emphasis on Katharine’s relationships with literary giants also provides a deep contextual background to The World She Edited. It showcases Katharine’s keen eye for talent, her unwavering commitment to excellence, and doing everything in her power to support her authors.

Katharine and her husband E.B. White in the early 1950s

Amy explores the motivations behind Katharine’s decades of devotion to her authors and the elusive art of editing. In detailing Katharine’s immense talent, fastidiousness, rigour and ability to nurture deep professional relationships, Amy reveals Katharine’s tremendous savvy. In so doing, Amy reminds us to pull back the curtain and look carefully at who, and what, is behind the stories that shape us and our literary culture.

The Role of a Biographer

Praise For The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker

Amy Reading has recreated a lost, gilded literary world in her smart and evocative biography of Katharine White, the longtime editor at The New Yorker who helped shape postwar American literature. One finishes this book with enormous gratitude for Katharine White’s quiet but fierce commitment to reading, writing, and women, and for Amy Reading’s determination to recognize White’s achievement. Gratitude, too, for all the drama, humor, and literary gossip that make The World She Edited the next best thing to cocktails at the Algonquin.

Heather Clark
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

The World She Edited, Amy Reading’s stunning new biography of the New Yorker’s least lauded but arguably most consequential editor, Katharine S. White, is both revealing and revelatory....With delicacy and insight, Reading opens a closely guarded personal life to empathic scrutiny, while proving definitively that White’s was nothing short of a brilliant career.

Megan Marshall
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

Reading harnesses years of deep research, granular attention, and a refreshingly critical eye to examine the life of Katharine S. White, renowned editor of The New Yorker. In detailing White’s immense talent, fastidiousness, rigor, and, perhaps most groundbreakingly and movingly of all, her deep relational acuity, Reading reveals White’s tremendous savvy—and, equally, her sacrifice—in choosing to exercise her power from the wings rather than center stage. Reading reminds us to pull back the curtain and look carefully at who, and what, is behind the stories that shape us all. A thorough, nuanced, and deeply human excavation of an extraordinary life.

Sara B. Franklin,
The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America

Harold Ross, James Thurber, and E. B. White usually get all the credit for the creation and shaping of The New Yorker magazine. Amy Reading’s book, carefully researched and lucidly written, makes a powerful case that Katharine White was every bit as important. They gave the magazine a tone and a style. She gave it a brain.

Chip McGrath
Former Deputy Editor of The New Yorker

An important, overdue corrective to the persistently male-dominated histories of American literature as it developed over the twentieth century and, particularly, of the magazine that most fostered its growth: The New Yorker. You will be astonished to learn of the extensive networks of women supporting each other and playing important roles in the literary world from the 1920s-1950s. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, The World She Edited is an enlightening, enthralling read, revealing White’s powerful influence and development of generations of writers, many of them women who are very little known today—but deserve to be, as does White herself.

Anne Boyd Rioux
Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist and Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters

About Amy Reading

Amy Reading grew up in Pennsylvania and Washington State and went to college in Portland, Oregon. She worked for three years in scholarly book publishing then studied at graduate school. In 2007, she received a PhD in American studies. Amy Reading is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library.

Amy’s first book, The Mark Inside, began when she discovered Frank Norfleet’s too-good-to-be-true story of going undercover into the Big Con. It struck her as the perfect tale on which to hang a history of American economic development as driven by fraud and speculation. She started the book as soon as she left academia, at the exact moment that the con game of subprime housing threatened to crash the economy. The Mark Inside was published by Knopf in March 2012 and the Vintage paperback in 2013.

Amy’s overriding interest is using story and creative narrative form to convey argument and analysis. She is interested in stories from nineteenth and twentieth century American history that revise our conventional understanding of literature, markets and women’s participation in both.

‘That’s not true’, Amy said. ‘My overriding interest is reading, and I write because I read.’

And that’s why she wrote a biography of Katharine Sergeant White, the first fiction editor of The New Yorker, because what is an editor but someone who puts her reading into action? Katharine White was happiest when she was reading with a pencil in her hand, and her singular gift was her immense receptivity to her authors. Amy savoured spending six years reading Katharine’s letters and wishes Katharine could have been her editor. ‘I wish I could have had her job’, Amy said.

Amy lives in upstate New York in a 175-year-old farmhouse with her family and a beautiful, deranged dog named Lyra. She also proudly serves on the Executive Board of her local indie cooperative bookstore, Buffalo Street Books. She says: ‘my name is an aptonym’.