Editing Without Ego How Katharine S. White Quietly Shaped the New Yorker’s Writers

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Metadata

  • Author: Amy Reading, September 3 Private or Broken Links
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  • Full Title: Editing Without Ego: How Katharine S. White Quietly Shaped the New Yorker’s Writers
  • Category: #articles
  • Summary: Katharine White was a remarkable editor at The New Yorker who preferred to stay in the background, focusing on nurturing writers rather than seeking the spotlight. She built deep, personal relationships with her authors and provided them with unwavering support and encouragement. Despite her significant contributions, her legacy, like many female editors, has often been overlooked in literary history.
  • URL: https://lithub.com/editing-without-ego-how-katharine-s-white-quietly-shaped/

Highlights

  • The editor is the guardian between the two realms. If the writer—that sacred mad genius alone up there in the garret, unloosing a poem from a deep wellspring of inspiration—represents the Romantic conception of art, the editor can only ever be a figure of compromise and debasement, the one who cuts the artist down to size to fit him into the commercial realm, where art can be bolstered by advertising, consumed by the masses, and made to profit the corporation. If, instead, we begin from the premise that all art is collaborative, then we can figure the editor as also an artist and begin to see the practice and methodology of editing in its own right. (View Highlight)
  • As she wrote to one potential contributor from whom she asked for major revisions, “your story is too good not to have it perfect.” (View Highlight)
  • . I think we both took martinis but I’m not sure. (View Highlight)