But Shawn, who took over the magazine in January 1952, was a distinctly different personality. Shawn assumed for himself far more authority than Ross, who was prepared to delegate a greater amount to his various deputies, or “Jesuses.” Shawn was also quiet, subtle, secretive, elliptical, and, to some, quite strange. He was a variety of genius who enjoyed funny writing as well as serious fiction, supported completely the individual artists and writers on a profoundly variegated staff, and expressed his myriad curiosities about the world by sending writers out to explore its many corners. J.D. Salinger called him “the most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors.” Beneath the modesty, however, was a steely tactical will. Harold Brodkey suggested that Shawn combined the qualities of Napoléon Bonaparte and Saint Francis of Assisi.

Shawn was also working in radically different circumstances than Ross. In the early years of the magazine, Ross was often at odds with ownership and battling over questions of principle and money. As with most fledgling editorial enterprises, the central concern was existence itself. Would the thing survive? The New Yorker almost closed its doors more than once. I have on my wall a rueful letter from Fleischmann informing a business-side colleague that he was shutting the magazine down. It is dated May 1925—three months after the debut issue. There were many such moments of despair and rescue. But the magazine found its financial footing, and, by the early 1950s, it was in happy synch with the postwar consumer boom. Educated middle- and upper-middle-class readers seemed to want what The New Yorker was providing, and advertisers identified the magazine as uniquely suited to reaching those freespending readers.

With that kind of security, and with so many editorial columns to fill, Shawn could think expansively about the magazine. He could build on the deepening ambitions of the 40s with the plump resources of the 50s. If he wanted reporting from the newly independent country of Ghana, the big East-West summit in Geneva, or the Bandung Conference, in Indonesia, he did not consult the ledger books; he sent a writer. In fact, the sheer proliferation of advertising demanded that Shawn scramble in search of more and more editorial matter. This, he found, had an inevitable drag on quality. There is, in this world, after all, only so much talent at a given time—only so much good writing. At a certain point, he found it necessary to limit the pages in a weekly issue to 248—as fat as a phone book in some towns. In his tenure as editor, Shawn made innumerable hires, tried out countless freelancers, and ran long, multipart series—some forgettable, some central to the literary and journalistic history of mid-century America. His relationship to advertising was distinguished mainly by the ads he found too distasteful to accept. A manufacturer of bathroom fixtures once told me that his ads for bathtubs and sinks had been rejected, because, as Shawn told him, “They are in the bathroom, which means they are next to the, well, you know . . .”