The April 20 New Yorker
For all the attention lavished on The New Yorker as a chronicle of New York City, it should be remembered that relatively few actual New Yorkers read the magazine in 1946. Circulation had dropped to about 200,000 in the 1930s as Henry Luce's Time and Life came to be seen as more in tune with the zeitgeist than this satiric vestige of the "smart set" of the 1920s. The magazine had turned more serious in the war years and circulation was steadily climbing in the 1940s. But two-thirds of its readership lived outside the metropolitan area and much of its "New York" readership lived in the affluent suburbs, experiencing the city as a place where they worked, shopped and played but did not live. Grand Central station was the hub of their New York City experience. To the average city dweller. The New Yorker was a publication that might be encountered in their dentist's waiting room where it was skimmed for the cartoons. For all its cultivated sneering at the consumerism of the social climber, few publications matched it as a sales catalog of status symbols and tip sheet to the lifestyle of the affluent.
In his 2001 history of the magazine, About Town: The New Yorker and the World That It Made, Ben Yagoda quotes cultural critic Robert Warshow who wrote in the Partisan Review that The New Yorker not only presented events but also the proper attitude that one should have toward these events making “it possible to feel intelligent without thinking.” The prescribed editorial attitude was one of amused detachment. Ross famously did not like his writers to advocate causes or take positions on the issues of the day. One postwar exception was the magazine's crusade against advertising in Grand Central Station, a matter apparently of immense importance to its readers. Much of its fiction was devoted to stories of angst-ridden upper middle class individuals and couples yearning for those years right after college when they had lived in Manhattan. You found few real New Yorkers, other than those who lived in the Silk Stocking precinct, on these pages, except as colorful characters or the butt of snarky column items in "Talk of the Town."
On the other hand, the magazine had run more articles of a serious nature during the war and, Yagoda notes, there was an editorial debate in the immediate postwar period over whether it should continue with this journalistic bent or return to its humorous purpose. Later in 1946 an entire issue was devoted to John Hersey’s landmark “Hiroshima,” which sold out on newsstands the day it was published. In 1943 The highbrow critic Edmund Wilson became the chief book reviewer, replacing middlebrow Clifton Fadiman, a Book of the Month Club judge and amiable quiz show host. That same year the magazine instituted a new compensation scheme that allowed regular contributors to actually make a decent living writing for the magazine. As a result, it cultivated a stable that included the most admired writers of the day, including up-and-comers like John Cheever, Vladimir Nabakov and J.D. Salinger, despite its notoriously heavy-handed editing that tended to make everything read as if it had been written by the same person. Ross also ruled that the magazine's Profiles no longer would be devoted to sneering sendups of city notables but would require the cooperation of its subjects. The magazine. however, was still running fawning profiles of society dowagers in 1946. No other magazine was as compehensive in its coverage of city events and it had more influence than its meager circulation would indicate.
Content and Contributors of the April 20 issue.
Goings On About Town- Entertainment and Arts in the New Yorker