When Te 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.
New York City, NY; NYC