SHAWN

It's the birthday of the second editor of The New Yorker magazine, William Shawn, born in Chicago, Illinois (1907). He dropped out of college and started working as a reporter for a small newspaper in New Mexico and then began contributing pieces for the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker.
After Harold Ross chose him as managing editor, Shawn began working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. Up until that point, The New Yorker had been known for its humor and its fiction, but Shawn helped turn it into one of the best non-fiction magazines as well. Shawn edited and published the work of Truman Capote, John McPhee, J.D. Salinger, Pauline Kael, and many others. He was known for his attention to detail, and he read every story three times before it was published in the magazine.
He resisted putting a table of contents in the magazine, because he didn't see why there needed to be some special announcement of what was inside. He also didn't think the magazine should include any photographs. He disliked air conditioning, never rode on an airplane, and avoided automated elevators. He was rarely photographed, he didn't give interviews, and even after he became editor of The New Yorker, he once never gave a speech in public.
When a new publisher purchased The New Yorker in 1987, Shawn was asked to retire because the magazine wasn't profitable enough. One hundred and fifty writers signed a letter of protest, but Shawn resigned. On his last day at the office, he made a short speech to the staff about what had motivated him as an editor over the years. He said, "The controlling emotion was love, and love was the essential word."
Four days before he died in 1992, Shawn had lunch with Lillian Ross, and she showed him a book cover blurb she had written and asked if he would check it. She later wrote of that day, "He took out the mechanical pencil he always carried in his inside jacket pocket, and ... made his characteristically neat proofreading marks on a sentence that said 'the book remains as fresh and unique as ever.' He changed it to read, 'remains unique and as fresh as ever.' 'There are no degrees of uniqueness,' Mr. Shawn said politely."