Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker

by David Remnick Narrated by Amy Irving, Philip Bosco, Alton Fitzgerald White

Overview

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, this collection of New Yorker Profiles presents readers with a portrait gallery of some of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. These Profiles are literary-journalistic investigations into character and accomplishment, motive and madness, beauty and ugliness, and are unrivalled in their range, their variety of style, and their embrace of humanity.

Including these twenty-eight profiles:

"Mr. Hunter's Grave" by Joseph Mitchell
"Secrets of the Magus" by Mark Singer
"Isadora" by Janet Flanner
"The Soloist" by Joan Acocella
"Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce" by Walcott Gibbs
"Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody" by Ian Frazier
"The Mountains of Pi" by Richard Preston
"Covering the Cops" by Calvin Trillin
"Travels in Georgia" by John McPhee
"The Man Who Walks on Air" by Calvin Tomkins
"A House on Gramercy Park" by Geoffrey Hellman
"How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?" by Lillian Ross
"The Education of a Prince" by Alva Johnston
"White Like Me" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"Wunderkind" by A. J. Liebling
"Fifteen Years of The Salto Mortale" by Kenneth Tynan
"The Duke in His Domain" by Truman Capote
"A Pryor Love" by Hilton Als
"Gone for Good" by Roger Angell
"Lady with a Pencil" by Nancy Franklin
"Dealing with Roseanne" by John Lahr
"The Coolhunt" by Malcolm Gladwell
"Man Goes to See a Doctor" by Adam Gopnik
"Show Dog" by Susan Orlean
"Forty-One False Starts" by Janet Malcolm
"The Redemption" by Nicholas Lemann
"Gore Without a Script" by Nicholas Lemann
"Delta Nights" by Bill Buford

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172135064
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/29/2000
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

It used to be said around the New Yorker offices that our founding editor, Harold Ross, invented the Profile. But if a Profile is a biographical piece-a concise rendering of a life through anecdote, incident, interview, and description (or some ineffable combination thereon-well, then, it's a little presumptuous to stick Ross at the Front of' the queue ahead of Plutarch, Defoe, Aubrey, Strachey, or even The Saturday Evening Post. And yet in 192 5. when Ross launched the magazine he liked to call his "comic weekly," he wanted something different something sidelong and ironical, a form that prized intimacy and wit over biographical completeness or, God forbid, unabashed hero worship. Ross told his writers and editors that, above all, he wanted to get away from what he was reading in the other magazines-all the "Horatio Alger" stuff.

James Kevin McGuinness, a staffer in the earliest days of the magazine, suggested the rubric "Profile" to Ross. By the time the magazine got around to copyrighting the term, it had entered the language of American journalism. Most of the initial Profiles in the magazine were fairly cursory and bland (and not worth anthologizing). The first was a sketch of the Metropolitan Opera's impresario Guilio Gatti-Casazza: it ran just over one page and showed scant evidence of even the most rudimentary reporting. It wasn't terrible funny. either. By 192 7, however, the reporting was getting stronger and the writing more irreverent. John K. Winkler's Profile of William Randolph Hearst, a five-part piece, was both uproarious and well researched, and Janet Flanner had begun perfecting a shorter form with a Profile of Edith Wharton.

The most influential of the early Profiles was Alva Johnston's delightful dissection, in 1932, of a phony Russian prince named Mikhail Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff. The prince's real name was Harry F. Gerguson, late of Illinois. (Like Joseph Mitchell's great subject, Joe Gould, Gerguson was an irresistible fake. Obolensky was so irresistible, in fact, that Ross eventually befriended him and sent him off to Los Angeles, where he could freeload off Dave Chasen, the restaurateur; eventually, Obolensky mooched off enough of Chasen's customers to open his own place.) While the mainstays of Ross's New Yorker E. B. White and James Thurber, did the most to develop the magazine's urbane tone and sensibility, Johnston, who had won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter at The New York Times in 1923 and later moved to the Herald Tribune, gave the Profile form real literary and journalistic weight. Johnston was the first to combine a natural wit and sense of storytelling with the legwork of a first-class newspaperman. His Profiles, especially those of Obolensky and the Florida architect Addison Mizner, influenced generations of New Yorker writers and Profile masters, from A. J. Liebling to John McPhee to Mark Singer. His obituary in the magazine read, in part, "When The New Yorker in its earliest days was trying, establish the Profile as a new journalistic form, it was Alva Johnston more than anyone else who set the pace, clarified the idea, and produced the pieces. He gathered and assembled facts in such a way as to give a fresh, candid, gay, and occasionally satirical picture of an individual."

Ross was a man of enormous social energy and mischief, and he was not reluctant to use Profiles in The New Yorker as a means of settling feuds and even starting them. St. Clair McKelway's Profile of Walter Winchell enumerated hundreds of errors and bogus items in Winchell's gossip column; the piece was so thorough a trouncing that it provoked Winchell to report in the Mirror that Ross wore no underwear. Evidently, Winchell had erred again;...

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