About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made.
[2000] · New York
by Yagoda, Ben.
New York: Scribner, [2000]. Octavo, blue backed white boards (hardcover), 478 pp. Fine (As New), in like, As New, dust jacket. Illustrated. “About town, written with all the authority and elegance such a subject demands, tells an endlessly fascinating story of how a tiny humor magazine, founded in the Jazz Age on champagne vapors, grew into a literary enterprise of epic proportion. Ben Yagoda is the first author to make extensive use of the New Yorker’s archives...At his disposal are thousands of smoking guns -- three thousand boxes of correspondence, interoffice memos, and edited manuscripts and galleys. Illuminated by interviews with more than fifty people, including the late Jospeh Mitchell, William Steig, Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin, Pauline Kael, John Updike, and Ann Beattie, About Town penetrates the inner workings of the New Yorker as no other book has done...To read this remarkable book...is to read an intimate biography of one of this century’s most enduring, and important, institutions.” (Inventory #: 30389s)