A woman retrieves a copy of The New Yorker magazine from her mailbox. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Two survivors of American print journalism are celebrating big milestones this year — Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker, both of them Manhattan-based monuments to an increasingly anachronistic formula: Literary flair, plus the stubborn endurance of ink on paper.
Harper’s, founded in 1850 and once home to writers like Herman Melville and Mark Twain, is celebrating its 175th anniversary with a black tie gala tonight that will honor two luminaries of journalism and literature — New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, and Gilead author Marilynne Robinson. The New Yorker, meanwhile, is closing out its 100th anniversary year having already published special centenary issues, as well as having given the magazine’s annual festival in October a special anniversary focus.
Still to come is a Netflix documentary, The New Yorker at 100, that arrives on the streaming giant on Dec. 5.
At one point in that documentary from director Marshall Curry, which I had the opportunity to screen early, editor David Remnick marvels: “The New Yorker is a miracle, ok?” That’s because it, like Harper’s, has somehow managed to survive the unrelenting carnage of the digital era, while also remaining as meticulous as ever in its fact-checking, as droll in its cartoons, and stylishly metropolitan for everyone but the “old lady in Dubuque” (more on that in a moment).
Here’s a brief look at the stories behind both magazines:
Founded in 1850, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine as it was first known quickly became a kind of literary clearinghouse for the giants of the age. Melville appeared in its pages with an excerpt from Moby-Dick. Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray followed, and later Twain.
Over the decades, Harper’s at times waded into controversy. The magazine published Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the My Lai Massacre in the 1970s. There was also, at one time, a separate, standalone Harper’s Weekly that covered the U.S. Civil War extensively (it ended that format in the early 20th century).
In its original 1925 mission statement, meanwhile, The New Yorker co-founder Harold Ross famously declared that the magazine “is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” The statement wasn’t intended as an insult — rather, a kind of shorthand describing the magazine’s posture toward sophistication and an appreciation of life in New York.
The magazine’s identity also encompassed more than just its voice. Its visual style was just as essential to what the magazine became, with the first cover introducing the character that would become a mascot for the publication: Eustace Tilley, the well-dressed dandy in a top hat observing a butterfly through his monocle.
Curry, in a promotional interview with Netflix, summed up his thoughts about The New Yorker this way: “It’s been thrilling to get to peek behind the curtain and witness the precision, thought, and almost fanatical obsession that goes into crafting their stories, cartoons, and covers.”
Those qualities, as much as the mastheads themselves, probably explain why both magazines endure when so many others have vanished. Together, Harper’s and The New Yorker arguably form a kind of double-portrait of American print journalism, at a time when the media industry feels like it’s striving to leave the idea of words on a page behind. A miracle, indeed.