{"id":6444,"date":"2024-09-21T10:41:42","date_gmt":"2024-09-21T15:41:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=6444"},"modified":"2024-09-21T10:41:42","modified_gmt":"2024-09-21T15:41:42","slug":"essay-probes-william-maxwells-influence-on-new-yorker-short-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2024\/09\/21\/essay-probes-william-maxwells-influence-on-new-yorker-short-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Essay probes William Maxwell’s influence on New Yorker short stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In “‘The Most Sympathetic Reader You Can Imagine’: William Maxwell’s New Yorker<\/em> and the Midcentury Short Story,”<\/a> Ben Fried described, essentially, how even a light-handed editor can have a tremendous influence on writers and published literature.<\/p>\n

“One editor among several,” Fried wrote, “Maxwell’s selection and revision of texts took place against the backdrop of “the New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0story,” that enduring stereotype which, while considerably oversimplified, nevertheless captures the magazine’s penchant for conventionally realist stories chronicling the domestic lives of a white upper middle class \u2014<\/span> a demographic that, not coincidentally, overlapped with the editors themselves. Maxwell alternately heeded and bucked this aesthetic and social current, although he did little to disturb its racial homogeneity. The archival records of Updike’s stories of Pennsylvania boyhood, of Cheever’s increasingly experimental fiction, and of Gallant’s Linnet Muir series reveal both the scope and the limits of the editor’s sympathetic reading. I argue that Maxwell at once enforced and expanded the company line, reluctantly policing\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>‘s more rigid notions of realism while drawing ever more wide-ranging autobiographical story sequences from a constellation of writers.”<\/p>\n

Read the entire article.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In “‘The Most Sympathetic Reader You Can Imagine’: William Maxwell’s New Yorker and the Midcentury Short Story,” Ben Fried described, essentially, how even a light-handed editor can have a tremendous influence on writers and published literature. “One editor among several,” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scholarship-analysis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6446,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444\/revisions\/6446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}