When The New Yorker began publication in 1925, founding editor Harold Ross intended it to be a smart magazine of metropolitan life. Many of the writers who created the magazine's distinctive style—including E.B. White, James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, and St. Clair McKelway—are still read today. Yet one of its best writers is often overlooked—Wolcott Gibbs, who joined the New Yorker in 1927 and remained on staff as a writer and editor until his death in 1958. Gibbs was the longtime theater critic but also wrote short stories, Talk of the Town pieces, and parodies. As E.B. White said, "All of his stuff was good, much of it superb—smart, memorable, funny. His style had a brilliance which was never flashy, he was self-critical as well as critical, and he had absolute pitch, which enabled him to be a parodist of the first rank."
Readers will be introduced to this great forgotten writer in a panel discussion of Gibbs' life and work. The panelists include Thomas Vinciguerra, editor of the new anthology Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker (Bloomsbury); Kurt Andersen, a founding editor of Spy magazine, the host of Studio 360, and the author of Heyday and Turn of the Century; Mark Singer, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of Somewhere in America, Character Studies, and Mr. Personality.
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Sponsored by the School of Writing and Bloomsbury Publishing.
Bio
Kurt Andersen
Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Heyday and Turn of the Century. Heyday was a New York Times bestseller that the Los Angeles Times called "a major work." The New York Times Book Review said there is "something moving, a stirring spirit, in the energy of its amazement." And the Chicago Sun-Times (and nine other papers) said it "deserves instant acceptance into the ranks [of] Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, [and] Gore Vidal's Lincoln." It was included on several best-books-of-the-year lists, including the New York Public Library's, and won the Langum Prize as the best American historical novel of 2007. The New York Times called Turn of the Century "wickedly satirical" and "outrageously funny" and one of its Notable Books of the year, while The Wall Street Journal called it a "smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age." It was a national bestseller.
Andersen began his career in journalism at NBC's Today program and at Time, where he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice and for eight years the magazine's architecture and design critic. Returning to Time in 1993 as editor-at-large, he wrote a weekly column on culture. From 1996 through 1999 he was a staff writer and columnist "The Culture Industry") for The New Yorker, and from 2004 through 2009 wrote a column ("The Imperial City") for New York.
He was also a co-founder of Inside.com, editorial director of Colors magazine, and editor-in-chief of bothNew York and Spy magazines, the latter of which he co-founded.
He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, and is a member of the boards of trustees of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Pratt Institute.
Mark Singer
Mark Singer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1974. He has contributed hundreds of Talk of the Town stories and scores of Profiles and reporting pieces. In the fall of 2000, he revived the U.S. Journal column in the magazine, a monthly feature that was written by Calvin Trillin from 1967 to 1982.
Singer’s account of the collapse of the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City appeared in The New Yorker in 1985 and was published as a book, “Funny Money,” that same year. In 1989, he published “Mr. Personality,” a collection of his reporting from The New Yorker. In 1996, Singer published “Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin,” which originated as an article in the magazine. His most recent books, “Somewhere in America,” (2004) and “Character Studies,” (2005), are collections of articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Thomas Vinciguerra
Thomas Vinciguerra revived the Philolexian Society in 1985 and has thereafter been known to members as its "Avatar". He was also an editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator, participated in the 1982 revival of the Varsity Show, and, in 1991, introduced the annual reading of "Is There A Santa Claus?" by Francis Pharcellus Church CC1859 to the College's annual Yule Log ceremony.
An editor at Columbia College Today magazine for more than a decade, he is now deputy editor of the newsmagazine The Week and contributes frequently to The New York Times.