The 40s: The Story of a Decade
*Starred Review* This is on its face an anthology of writings from one ­magazine—the New Yorker—over the course of a single decade. In fact, it is the record of an exceptional magazine fully coming into its own under the editorship of Harold Ross during a crucial decade, constituting a history of a pivotal, war-torn period told through its (artfully selected) pages, an absolutely breathtaking assemblage of some of America’s finest and most lasting writing. It includes (for starters) war reportage by A. J. Liebling, Janet Flanner, and, in its powerful entirety, John Hersey’s Hiroshima; postwar Europe as seen by Edmund Wilson and Lillian Ross; commentary on the American scene by E. B. White and Joseph Mitchell; portraits of some of the era’s most extraordinary individuals by journalists of commensurate stature; criticism, including David Lardner on Casablanca, Wolcott Gibbs on Death of a Salesman, and Lionel Trilling, brilliantly, on Orwell’s 1984; poetry by Auden, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes; fiction by Cheever, Nabokov, McCullers, Irwin Shaw, and Shirley Jackson; plus fashion, music, art, and architecture (Lewis Mumford spectacularly wrong about Rockefeller Center). Each section is introduced by one of today’s contributors (Zadie Smith on Fiction is particularly good), with the whole introduced by New Yorker editor David Remnick. Time, one supposes, will determine how these new names measure up to their predecessors, but the bar is set impossibly high. This is magnificent stuff, a cornucopia of truly distinguished literature, a near-perfect gift to give and an entirely ideal one to receive. --Mark Levine