America's most influential fiction journal
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
John Cheever
15 min read
The article centers on Cheever as the archetypal New Yorker fiction writer who published 120 stories there. Readers would benefit from understanding his biography, his complicated personal life, and his place in American literary history beyond just his association with the magazine.
-
The New Yorker
14 min read
The article argues this magazine has defined the American short story since the 1940s. Understanding its founding, editorial philosophy under various editors, and its broader cultural influence would provide essential context for why it achieved such literary dominance.
-
John O'Hara
11 min read
O'Hara published 220 stories in The New Yorker—more than Cheever—yet has faded from literary prominence. His story offers an interesting counterpoint about literary reputation and what makes certain writers endure while others are forgotten despite prolific output.
I have written about many fiction journals over the last few months. I’ve written about Esquire, where Gordon Lish began his process of reshaping Raymond Carver’s voice. I’ve written about Weird Tales and The Saturday Evening Post and the Western pulps and the Sunday edition of The New York World. But there’s one journal I haven’t really mentioned.
There is one journal that, almost from its inception, has defined the American short story. For most of its existence, this journal wasn’t the highest-circulation fiction journal in America (that honor usually belonged to The Saturday Evening Post or McCall’s or Playboy). And it certainly was not the highest-paying fiction journal—its contributors frequently complained about its stingy rates. Nor was this journal particularly easy to work with: their editors were quite hard on their writers, often rejecting stories by past contributors and by famous writers.
Roger Angell rejected a story by Shirley Jackson, after her death, explaining to her agent, “The writing is admirable, of course, and the setting unusually interesting, but the conclusion, for some reason, lacks the surprise and chilly sense of semi-reality that is so necessary to this kind of story.”
Angell was also happy to reject Hemingway:
And here’s Angell’s reaction—in a memo circulated within the fiction department—to a late story from Hemingway: “Then you have the great leftover fish the redolent ancient dead fish who are always with us trailing their scaly manuscripts and spoiling our midwinters and our childlike trust of them with their expectations that whatever is left of them will find its way surely into the pages of the good magazine no matter how stinky and tired their trail . . . the same old tiresome later Papa stuff to me . . . please, please, please let’s not put this in the magazine.”
But despite this journal’s extremely annoying habits, writers continue to send their best work there, because sometime in the 1940s this journal became the most prestigious fiction journal in America, and it has not since relinquished that title.
As The Cambridge Companion To The American Short Story puts it:
Of the 1,700 stories selected for the Best American Short Stories (BASS) since 1942, 269 were originally published in the New Yorker, far exceeding the number in any other journal or magazine. And this dominance is sustained and consistent, with The New Yorker publishing the most
...
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.