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

*The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker* by Amy Reading (2024). Published by Mariner Books.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

Because my income during this time was so limited, I had to be careful about where and how I spent my money. I’ve always been such a huge fan and advocate for public libraries, as when I was a child, my mother took us every week. People always get confused as to how I read over a hundred books a year, but it began when I was a child and I’ve largely done the same thing every single year for most of my life.

As I was unemployed, I went to the library every single week. I used their Kanopy subscription and access to The New York Times, checked out DVDs, picked up all the new and wonderful releases I wanted to read throughout the weeks. That’s how I kept myself busy as I was job hunting, which took forever because of the declining economy.

I found this book in the middle of the new nonfiction section. I was not aware of Katharine White, but I could see from the title alone she was a female writer or editor (she was an editor—I was right) at The New Yorker. When I read the synopsis, I knew I wanted to read this.

And man, this was a book I found myself consumed by. I couldn’t stop reading it!

Let’s get into the review before I start putting too many spoilers about my thoughts.

The story of Katharine S. White, the formidable fiction editor at the beginning of The New Yorker.

This book is a biography is Katharine S. White, so buckle up, we’re going from her childhood all the way up until she passes away at the age of 84. As we see in the book, she was one of the most impactful editors working at The New York during this time, and she got the job because she was determined and willing to make a change at a brand new publication trying to change the landscape of American media publishing.

But before 1925, when she lands the job at The New Yorker, she was born Katharine Sargeant in Massachusetts. Her family is relatively well-off, and her one older sister, Elizabeth, would become a well-known writer and artist in her own right. Katharine would refuse her work in The New Yorker though.

I say the family is relatively well-off because Katharine was able to get a good education, and was sent to Bryn Mawr College for her education. It was at Bryn Mawr she had her coming-of-age, and not long after graduating she married a lawyer, Ernest, in her home state. He would become someone notable, too, as he would be a future president of the ACLU.

However, their marriage wasn’t the best. They moved to New York City, and that’s when Katharine would become involved with The New Yorker almost ten years after getting married. That’s the core of this book: what Katharine did at The New Yorker would forever change American literature, and it would help build the publication up to the reputation it has today.

Some of the writers she had championed were John Updike and Nabokov, but, most importantly, Katharine opened up avenues for women to publish and work with The New Yorker. While women were somewhat publishing during this time, they weren’t really taking up positions on editorial boards in the 1920s and 1930s.

Somewhere along the way she would meet E.B. White (I gasped when I made this connection—the beginning of my writing career as a high schooler I was forced to read The Elements of Style by Strunk and White), and they would get married after she separates from Ernest.

Clocking it at 600 pages (it’s more like a little under 500 if we’re taking into account that the bibliography for nonfiction books usually is a novella in itself, which is a good thing), you might either be taking your time with this over the course of weeks or speeding through it like I did. It’s rare I get so invested in a biography, but I was devouring this story.

Overall Thoughts

I knew nothing about Katharine White before going into this biography, but I came out of it admiring her so much. Like everyone else in the world, she’s a flawed person and probably shouldn’t be completely idolized, but I think the work that she did was critical and important not only for the sake of the magazine’s development, but also the literary world and pushing the boundaries of literature.

All of this is to say that I really enjoyed the book. I mentioned how rare it is for me to read through a biography like this, but this was really well-written. Really good nonfiction has made me cry in the past, like when I picked up a copy of The Warmth of Other Suns and found myself sobbing by the end.

Go pick this up if you’re interested in Katharine White or the story of her life and work. I think this’ll be worth the read if you’re interested!

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