The World Through a Monocle: The "New Yorker" at Midcentury

"The New Yorker" is one of a number of general-interest magazines published for a sophisticated audience, but in the post-World War II era it occupied an almost unique niche of cultural authority. A self-selecting community of 250,000 readers, who wanted to know how to look and sound cosmopolitan, found in the magazine's pages information about night spots and polo teams. They became conversant with English films, Italian Communism, French wine, the bombing of Bikini Atoll, pret-a-porter and Caribbean holidays. Mary Corey mines the magazine's editorial voice, journalism, fiction, advertisements, cartoon and poetry to unearth the preoccupations, values, and conflicts of its readers, editors and contributors. She delineates the effort to fuse liberal ideals with aspirations to high social status, finds the magazine's blind spots with regard to women and racial and ethnic stereotyping and explores its abiding concerns with elite consumption coupled with a contempt for mass production and popular advertising. Balancing the consumption of goods with a social conscience which prized goodness, the magazine managed to provide readers with what seemed like a coherent and comprehensive value system in an incoherent world.