The Principle of Editing

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Deborah Treisman: Hi, this is Deborah Treisman. I’ve been fiction editor at The New Yorker since 2003, and was the deputy fiction editor for five years before that. So I’ve been involved in the selection and editing and discussion of fiction at the magazine for more than a quarter of the century that The New Yorker has existed. 

For a lot of those years, I had the pleasure of working with Roger Angell, who was an editor and writer for the magazine and was also the son of Katharine White, The New Yorker’s first fiction editor. White is a legend for anyone who works with fiction at the magazine. 

The New Yorker began life as a humor magazine, a 15-cent comic paper, as the cofounder Harold Ross called it. White, who was then Katharine Angell, started at The New Yorker as a part-time manuscript reader a few months after it was launched in 1925, and was very quickly promoted to comanaging editor. She was the first person to actively seek out more serious fiction for the magazine, and she developed close, ongoing relationships with many of the writers she worked with, including Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and John Updike. 

You’re looking at a letter to White from Vladimir Nabokov, who began publishing his work in the magazine in 1942. As you can see, he got off to a bit of a rocky start with the editorial process, which was a deep irritation to him. Later, Nabokov wrote, “Katharine White, who corresponded with the author in regard to all these matters, took endless trouble to check every hyphen and comma and smooth the creases in an author’s ruffled temper, and do everything to keep Nabokov’s prose intact.” 

You can also see here part of the table of contents of a 1949 anthology of fiction from The New Yorker, in which Nabokov has assigned a grade to each story. He gave only two stories A-pluses—J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish,” and his own story, “Colette.”