Amy Reading: On the History of Good Editors

Amy Reading is the author of The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker and The Mark Inside: The Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the New York Public Library. She lives in Ithaca, NY, where she has served on the executive board of Buffalo Street Books since 2018. Follow her on Instagram.

Amy Reading

In this interview, Amy discusses the evolution that took place with how to go about writing her new biography, The World She Edited, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Amy Reading
Literary agent: Susan Golomb at Writers House
Book title: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White Edits The New Yorker
Publisher: Mariner Books
Release date: September 3, 2024
Genre/category: Biography
Previous titles: The Mark Inside: The Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con
Elevator pitch: The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker is a biography of the woman behind the making of the magazine and a large swath of 20th century literary culture. White edited an impressive list of women writers like Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop, in addition to men like John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, and her husband, E.B. White.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I found Katharine White when I sorely needed a mentor in my writing life. I read an essay about her decades-long editing friendship with Jean Stafford, and I just ached with how moving it was. Katharine helped pull Stafford out of a collapse after her brutal marriage to the poet Robert Lowell and was a steady and responsive reader for Stafford’s work, calling stories out of her and working to shape them, suggesting story ideas, even introducing Stafford to another New Yorker writer, the reporter A. J. Liebling, who became her third husband. I was enchanted to see how much Katharine directly influenced Stafford, and I realized the author-editor relationship, which is rarely studied, can be quite crucial to literary culture. It also gives us an understanding of how canons are made and a realistic, non-mythologized description of what the writing life truly entails. But basically, I just wished I could be mentored by Katharine!

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It has taken almost eight years. I learned about Katharine in 2017 and spent a year researching her and drafting a book proposal. Initially, I wanted to write solely about White and Stafford as a crystal-clear story about the effects of gifted editing, but my then-agent, Geri Thoma, said that I couldn’t possibly leave out all the other authors whose careers White influenced. So next I proposed a book in which each of six chapters would focus on her relationship with a different writer. Geri said the same thing: No, we need more. She thought that book would leave the readers wanting the full life. So, the third pitch was a cradle-to-grave biography. One thing I didn’t anticipate was that women editors would so enthusiastically respond to a proposal about a woman editor—but of course they did! They were the first and arguably most vested readers.

Once I settled on the genre of biography, the idea did not change much. I did not write the book in the three years that I initially promised, and only part of that broken promise was because the pandemic forced research libraries to close for a time. I didn’t end up writing exactly the table of contents I proposed—for instance, the book was originally going to have fewer, longer chapters, and instead has 44 shorter, shapelier ones—but the themes stayed the same. I knew that I wanted to treat Katharine’s editorial memos to her authors as a serious body of work to be read and analyzed, worthy of literary critical study (and fascinating for her voice and the New Yorker gossip!). I wanted to look at how her life—college, marriage, two children, divorce, remarriage, another child, health trouble—influenced what she published, what stories attracted her, how she understood readers like herself who were college-educated and ambitious and engaged with the issues of the day. And I wanted to trace change over time. How did The New Yorker evolve from a scrappy little humor magazine to a literary powerhouse? How did Katharine’s feminism shift as she lived through the first 77 years of the 20th century? How did she and E.B. White maintain their long and successful marriage between a world-class editor and a beloved writer?

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I was surprised at how much editing I received on this book about editing! I’ve had thorough, sensitive reads from two rock star editors at Mariner (formerly Houghton Mifflin). Deanne Urmy, who acquired the book, said all the right things. She read the first few chapters “without a pencil in my hand,” as she put it. I love that phrase and totally understood it after seeing so many of Katharine’s pencil-marks. She meant that she read it first for pleasure as a reader would, not an editor, and her response was, “This is great. Just keep doing what you are doing, and we’ll take a scalpel to it later.” I didn’t know that’s exactly what I needed to hear, that affirmation of my process. Then I had several substantial rounds of editing with Jessica Vestuto, who was so sympathetic to the material and so interested in Katharine as a person. Lots of writers say that publishing has no room for editing these days, but that has not been my experience.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

As someone who loves research and archives and crumbling letters in acid-free folders, I was surprised to discover the pleasure of meeting and interviewing actual people. I was so fortunate to get to know many of Katharine’s descendants. The best surprise was befriending her son, Roger Angell, and his wife Peggy. Roger was 99 years old when I first met him, and his memory was long and impeccable. He was so generous with me, but even more than that, he was curious about and open to things I was learning about his mother that he never knew. His mother had hired him at the fiction department at The New Yorker, so he was both a writer and an editor, and therefore he knew exactly how to foster me as a writer—the perfect reader. I wasn’t expecting that my heart would be as involved in the writing as my mind.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

An understanding of editing as an art; an appreciation for the unheralded work of a woman in publishing who invented her job as the only woman in the room and made the writing life possible for dozens of women authors; a sense of how some of the best writing was made in the twentieth century; a behind-the-scenes look at a powerful and magnetic literary institution

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Write the book that will bring about the world in which you want to live. This can be grand, if your book seeks to change our social, cultural, political world, but I also mean it in a smaller sense. Write the book that will reel in the people, the ideas, and the other books that you need in your life. I did end up feeling a bit as if Katharine had mentored me, or at least had drawn women and men into my life who have enormously influenced me. What a gift.

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