The New York Public Library's new major exhibition A Century of The New Yorker draws on NYPL's collections, including the magazine's voluminous archives and the papers of many of its contributors, to bring to life the people, stories, and ideas that made The New Yorker.
Over the past 100 years, The New Yorker has created a world of its own. Guided by the founding vision of Harold Ross and Jane Grant, and built upon by generations of staff, the magazine has set the bar for effortless style, thought-provoking prose, journalistic rigor, and playful art—delivered with a dash of snootiness, and a wink.
In ways we see and don’t see, The New Yorker has informed our understanding of almost every aspect of society: war and violence, race and gender, the environmental movement, the distinctiveness of American fiction writing, and more. In its contributors and its content, the magazine has reflected both the lofty ideals and the profound inequalities that have defined the American experience in ways that continue to shape our social and political landscape today.
The story of The New Yorker—and the brilliant, funny, obsessive, imperfect people who made it—is told, in part, in the pages of the 5,057 issues that have gone to print in the magazine’s first 100 years. But a deeper history can be found in the magazine’s archives, in the collections of The New York Public Library. Through correspondence, manuscripts, memos, artifacts—and yes, cartoons—A Century of The New Yorker uncovers the unsung stories of prickly editorial relationships, diligent typists, fastidious fact checkers, and talented artists.
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This exhibition is organized by The New York Public Library and curated by Julie Golia, Associate Director, Rayner Wing, and the Charles J. Liebman Senior Curator of Manuscripts, and Julie Carlsen, Assistant Curator, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.
