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Article: Mr. Shawn's New Yorker. (editor William Shawn and The New Yorker)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- August 3, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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AFTER a few years of bimonthly lunching with Carlos, a friend who once worked for The New Yorker, I noticed that he always let me exit the restaurant first.
''Some day,'' I told him, ''I will follow you out a door.''
Carlos doubted it. ''I was trained by Mr. Shawn,'' he boasted. Just as Martin Luther King Jr. was not the only black man in America to earn an advanced degree, but is the only one invariably called ''Dr.,'' so William Shawn, the late editor of The New Yorker, is the only man in America of any hue whose surname never appears without that mild honorific.
''What a powerful system of control,'' I marveled.
''He had many,'' said ...