Gus Lobrano was officially the fiction editor in 1946 but Katharine White had returned in 1943 to help out during the wartime manpower shortage at The New Yorker. She supposedly was working under him but was exercising equal influence over the selection and editing of stories. On the plus side, she looked to cultivate relationships with a new crop of promising writers, many of whom had been publishing in the small literary magazines, and she had excellent taste. On the other hand, as Ben Yagoda pointed out in About Town: The New Yorker and the World That It Made, she had a narrow definition of what a proper New Yorker story should be, essentially being interested only in stories that focused on the manners and behavior of the upper middle class and their social superiors and were told in a traditional prose style. According to Yagoda, Jane Austen was her idea of the perfect New Yorker writer. New Yorker stories were also expected to be geographically appropriate. In 1943, editor William Maxwell wrote to one prospective contributor, the writer Peter Taylor, advising him that his stories set in Tennessee would not be appropriate because “the editors have in mind an imaginary map of Manhattan which includes, strangely, all of Connecticut and Long Island, Florida, New Jersey, Hollywood, and wherever New Yorkers go."
These restrictions eased in the postwar period. White was willing to pass stories to which she did not relate personally to other editors. But the issue of the magazine’s heavy editing was still a sore point for some writers. Edmund Wilson took up the cause of Vladimir Nabokov, who was a personal friend, when Nabokov objected to some of the editing changes that White had requested. Wilson told White that Nabokov’s work was far superior to the "pointless and inane little anecdotes that are turned out by the New Yorker's editing mill.” For all its restrictions, The New Yorker was the premiere showcase for fiction writers of the time. Most writers would make the requested changes, grumbling only to themselves, but some insisted that future publishers use the original versions for any collections.
“Courtship in the Bronx,” a Bella Gross story from Arthur Kober in the April 20 issue, was not a typical New Yorker story in the Katharine White sense. It had a New York setting but took place in a lower middle class household in, of all places, the Bronx, rather than the magazine’s usual social milieu. Kober’s Bella stories went back to the magazine’s earliest days as a humor magazine and were strictly for laughs, but they offered a glimpse of the sort of New Yorkers unlikely to be New Yorker readers, at least as Kober, a successful Hollywood screenwriter from an immigrant Jewish family, imagined them. In this story, the Gross’s combination radio and “Victrola” is a treasured family possession. They have a cut glass bowl on the mantel in which they kept photos and other keepsakes. Bella serves her gentleman caller cold cuts and chopped liver, while her father complains when he finds lettuce on his sandwich. Morty, the gentleman caller, lives in Manhattan in the West 70s. He takes Bella out to eat and then to a Broadway show. For a special occasion like this, the flowers had to come from the store not a street vendor. Bella and her mother didn’t want the visitor “to get any wrong impressions” so they serve tea in cups rather than their customary glasses. They put out dishes of pickles, gherkins and olives on the sideboard and a candy dish of chocolates still in their wrappers. A souvenir bowl from the World’s Fair is filled with almonds.
While Sloan Wilson’s April 20 story is set at Harvard, which perhaps in some ways could be thought of as an extension of upper class New York, it offers an interesting depiction of newly discharged veterans from the upper strata in the immediate postwar months. In the tale, the wife of one of the narrator’s friend has made their apartment a military shrine with a photo of her husband in his dress whites “staring upwards as if he is about to say something historic or star in a B movie.” She has dozens of other pictures of him in uniform on the wall, as well as a picture of his submarine and a framed case with his campaign ribbons. The narrator is surprised because his friend never wore his campaign ribbons or even the discharge button that was a common accessory in 1946. The friend explains that the shrine is for his wife's sake not his own. The narrator worries that his decision to return to college rather than find a job might have been a selfish choice for a married man like himself; it was hard on his wife. At a party thrown by the Harvard faculty for the veterans, most of the men wear the gilded plastic discharge pins handed out at separation centers, but a few have more ornate gold pins that could be purchased at jewelry stores. Some also have miniature decorations or snippets of their campaign ribbons in their lapels. Because of the clothing shortage, some men wear parts of their uniforms, especially pants or overcoats. A few men who are on terminal leave wear full uniform, mostly of high rank.