When editors were gods

The late Roger Angell remembers the late William Shawn

"The only piece of advice I ever got from William Shawn was something he said to me in 1956, in my very first week as an editor at the magazine. 'It's no great trick,' he said, 'to edit a piece of fiction and turn it into the greatest story ever written. Anyone can do that. It's much harder to take a story and help that writer turn it into the best thing he is capable of this week or this month.' I've tried to keep that in mind. What you hope for is that the writer will sense how this process works, and will learn to trust it." — Roger Angell, longtime editor at The New Yorker, in his 2006 memoir, "Let Me Finish."

Ever the editor, he offers a somewhat different version of Shawn's quote in his 2015 memoir, "This Old Man."

Angell died yesterday at age 101.

The sensitive editor

"…the editor must have a more sensitive and impulsive reaction to each and every little thing than anyone else. If you feel, he feels 10 times as much. If you hurt, he hurts 100 times as much. If your eyes moisten, he is bathed in tears. This is figurative, of course, but it is the editor’s acute awareness that makes him struggle to make each word, and each paragraph and each spot on a page a fraction better than it otherwise would be." — Aron M. Mathieu, writing in Writer's Digest magazine, 1957.

Mathieu was at that time the business manager of Writer's Digest. His 1996 Cincinnati Enquirer obituary says he was a former editor of Modern Photography magazine, previously known as Minicam Photography. He also seems to have been a very astute photograph collector, judging by this 2021 auction description.

When magazines were shut out of the Pulitzers

Sixty years ago today (May 7, 1962), the Pulitzer Prize advisory board announced that the organization would not add a new awards category for magazines, according to a United Press International account. The group said it believed that "the magazine field is adequately represented by its own prizes."  The decision came in response to a request from the Society of Magazine Writers, now known as the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

Undeterred by rejection, a useful trait for magazine writers then and now, the society made another plea in December of that year, with a petition signed by 40 editors and 18 Pulitzer Prize winners. Again, it seems to have been rebuffed.

The Pulitzer board has since rethought the matter, opening two of its journalism categories to magazines in 2015 and the rest of them the following year. This year's finalists and winners will be announced on May 9.