{"id":6611,"date":"2025-04-06T09:06:25","date_gmt":"2025-04-06T14:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=6611"},"modified":"2025-04-06T09:12:16","modified_gmt":"2025-04-06T14:12:16","slug":"new-yorker-at-100-also-celebrates-editorial-battles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2025\/04\/06\/new-yorker-at-100-also-celebrates-editorial-battles\/","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker at 100 also celebrates editorial battles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>is taking the entire year to celebrate its centennial, and deservedly so. John Updike, whose first major publications were in those\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>pages, turns up quite a bit in the article by Jill Lepore on “The Editorial Battles that Made\u00a0<\/a>The New Yorker.”\u00a0<\/em>John Updike Society’s Dave Lull culled the sections that deal with Updike:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
1\u2014”Early in Adam Gopnik\u2019s stint as a New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0editor, he got a draft of a piece from\u00a0John Updike<\/a>. It was perfect, so he set it aside. Soon, he got a typewritten postcard from Updike:<\/div>\n
\n
\n
Dear Adam,
\nThe piece recently submitted was
\na) deemed unacceptable,
\nb) in need of significant rewriting,
\nc) lost behind a radiator.
\nJohn<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Updike\u2014even Updike!\u2014had been feverishly awaiting a reply, Gopnik realized. ‘Was anything wrong with the Auden review?’ Updike once queried Shawn, scratching at the editorial door like a cat left outside for the night. ‘There has been an ominous gap since I turned it in.’ He wrote constantly, and brilliantly, submitting fiction, poetry, and criticism to the magazine over six decades. He got plenty of rejections, and sometimes, like every other self-loathing writer, he all but asked for them. ‘I enclose a disk,’ Updike once wrote to Finder, ‘but if you and Remnick are too let down, I will certainly understand.’\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
2\u2014”White later wrote to Updike, ‘Nabokov\u2019s the best writer in English but sometimes he\u2019s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.’ Updike once expressed the same kind of exasperation about a Nabokov novel: ‘There seem to be a lot of hostile parentheses.’\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
3\u2014”There\u2019s a reason that Updike fretted so much. Other magazines print most of what their established contributors submit; from the start, The New Yorker<\/em> refused to do that, rejecting submissions even from its star writers\u2014sometimes for years\u2014leaving many of them, especially fiction writers, in precarious financial straits.”<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
4\u2014”In 1973, it was Updike who recommended that the magazine solicit a story from Chinua Achebe. Still, if you\u2019re a piece of well-worn planking, you are keenly aware that your days as part of the ship are numbered. A good editor can put that fear to use, as Angell did with Updike. McGrath puts it this way: ‘Roger had a trick, when John hadn\u2019t submitted anything in a while, of dropping a line to Updike mentioning that the magazine had just discovered a promising young writer, and as often as not, an Updike story would turn up in the mail a week or two later.’\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
5\u2014”Updike never saw that pasture. ‘I wanted to get this down to you before anything more befuddling befell me,’ he wrote to Finder from his sickbed, sending in what would be his last piece. ‘They must begin, surely, with chemo soon.’ He died the next month. He never lost so much as his fastball.”<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker\u00a0is taking the entire year to celebrate its centennial, and deservedly so. John Updike, whose first major publications were in those\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0pages, turns up quite a bit in the article by Jill Lepore on “The Editorial Battles that … 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":[10,35,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications","category-updike-quoted","category-updikes-life-times"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6611","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=6611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6613,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6611\/revisions\/6613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}