100 years of the New Yorker: Even Hemingway was rejected by the paper

There should be a special expression for the guilty conscience that comes with looking at the piles of unread "New Yorker" magazines. Because almost every subscriber, 1.3 million of them worldwide, knows this feeling. A new "New Yorker" in the mailbox is a highlight of the week, but also overwhelming. In our world of breaking news, the magazine acts as if we all have time to devote a few hours to its often offbeat topics.

Gary Shteyngart writes seven pages about capybaras, enormous rodents he encounters while drinking coffee in Tokyo. There are twelve pages about the designer Loewe. Serious reports in the issue are usually expanded upon with a special perspective. There's also a short story every time. And since David Remnick became the fifth and youngest editor-in-chief in 1998, current politics has also found its place. An issue without Donald Trump has become rare these days.

When it was founded a hundred years ago, The New Yorker's primary goal was to be funny, a humor magazine. Remaining from that era are the cartoons, the witty columns like "Talk of the Town," and the iconic cover, which is always illustrated. Many of these illustrations are works of art. The originals fetch high prices at auction.

Even non-subscribers are familiar with the most famous subjects: the Twin Towers after 9/11 in black on a black background, an Orthodox Jew kissing a Black woman – a reaction to the riots in Crown Heights. Or a group portrait of the Supreme Court in which six men wear Trump's face. The cover alone, this concentration of poetry and humor, makes the issue impossible to put down.

The "New Yorker" was conceived in Paris and hatched in New York. Date of birth: February 21, 1925. Length: 36 pages. Price: 15 cents. Its founders, Harold Ross and Jane Grant, fell in love with Paris toward the end of World War I. He was the editor-in-chief of the US military magazine "Stars and Stripes," and she wrote for the "New York Times." The couple married and dreamed of starting their own magazine. Later in New York, they found a wealthy publisher willing to take the risk in Raoul Fleischmann, the heir to a yeast empire.

The first issues were unsuccessful. Editor-in-chief Harold Ross lost $20,000 at poker, and yeast magnate Fleischmann almost abandoned the project. Only over the years did the New Yorker gain profile and readership.

As the very first cover, featuring an arrogant dandy with a monocle, made clear: The "New Yorker" was for the cosmopolitan city dweller. Intellectual, liberal, slightly snobbish, but always self-deprecating. The magazine never sought to ingratiate itself; at times, it was downright anti-reader. In its early years, it dispensed with the orientation aid of a table of contents. And founder Harold Ross famously said that the "New Yorker" was "not for the old lady in Dubuque" – a small town in Iowa. No media outlet would want to exclude certain readers these days.

When author and journalist Lawrence Weschler joined The New Yorker in 1981, the magazine had long since established itself as one of the best in the world. Weschler was given a great deal of leeway. He was interested in what was happening in Poland with the Solidarity movement, so he traveled there and reported.

It was a stroke of luck that the editor-in-chief at the time, William Shawn, was "the most phobic person in the world," Weschler says in an interview: "He was afraid of bridges, airplanes, boats. He was essentially a 'New Yorker.' He lived in Manhattan, only going to the countryside for a few weeks once a year. But at the same time, he was incredibly curious about the world." He also had a budget that allowed him to send people anywhere. "He said, 'Tell me what it's like, make it visible for me!'" Weschler recalls. Shawn actually published the magazine for himself.

It's said that the magazine came of age during World War II. At that time, it could no longer avoid serious topics. In 1936, Janet Flanner wrote a profile of Adolf Hitler; in 1946, an issue consisted solely of a story about the survivors of the atomic bombing of Japan. John Hersey's "Hiroshima" was one of those reports that changed our view of the world forever.

This includes James Baldwin's "Letter from a Region in My Mind," which raised public awareness of racism and sexism in the USA in 1962, and marine biologist Rachel Carson's essay on environmental toxins, "Silent Spring," which led to the ban of the pesticide DDT and gave impetus to the global environmental movement.

Under Shawn, the New Yorker became more global, more literary, more relevant. Shawn worked for the magazine for 53 years, 35 of them as editor-in-chief—only the second after Ross. Lawrence Weschler says that Tom Wolfe, a prominent representative of New Journalism, unjustly called him a mummifier in the land of the undead. Even at almost 80, Shawn was, in spirit, one of the youngest editors-in-chief in America. He discovered and promoted some of the best young authors: J.D. Salinger, Joseph Mitchell, John Updike, among others. New Journalism quickly fell out of fashion. The clear, elegant style cultivated by the New Yorker remains relevant.

The New Yorker has never made life easy for its authors. It is notoriously selective. The New Yorker archive at the New York Public Library contains 2,500 boxes full of rejection letters. Even Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and Sylvia Plath received them.

Roz Chast is one of the paper's most popular cartoonists. She has been submitting about ten drawings a week for almost fifty years. "Sometimes they buy one, sometimes they don't," she says in a video interview. "Every week, The New Yorker has to go through an absurd number of cartoons, maybe a few thousand. Of those, they buy about fifteen. So the odds are stacked against you."

The New Yorker is, depending on your perspective, either fussy or precise. All articles, whether fiction, factual reports, or illustrations, are subjected to rigorous review. Today, in addition to proofreading editors, the paper employs 28 fact checkers, among them veritable language purists.

During Weschler's time as editor, there was a "grammarian" named "Miss Gould" who "could find 50 grammatical errors in a single column, of which the 45 most pesky were not corrected, even though she was right, but two or three of her suggestions were each ingenious." One article she returned corrected was dubbed the "Gould Sample" and included comments such as: "Is that clear? (Not to me)," "NO grammar!" and "Have we completely lost our minds?"

Vladimir Nabokov hated being corrected. Lawrence Weschler, on the other hand, enjoyed being corrected. He says: "About a month before publication, several teams would scour an article like searchlights. It was exciting; the text got better and better."

Longtime "New Yorker" writer Patricia Marx also appreciates the fact-checkers: "They give me a certain sense of security. Sometimes they discovered things about my topic that I hadn't known." She doesn't fight over individual words or against cuts, says Marx, adding, in the tone of her satirical pieces: "If necessary, I shorten my texts to zero characters."

The New Yorker values ​​its moral compass. Its stance against the Vietnam War cost it many advertising clients, but it gained many young readers.

According to its editor-in-chief, David Remnick, the magazine is now financed primarily through subscriptions. This financial independence from advertisers is likely to benefit the paper, especially in this second, even more media-hostile Trump era. The magazine is not shy about criticizing the current administration.

Remnick, too, has been in office for 27 years. The 66-year-old has led the New Yorker into the internet age and focused it more on politics and current affairs. Some readers accuse him of doing too much.

Despite all its modernizations, the New Yorker remains anachronistic in many ways: its meticulousness, its long texts, and its often strange topics. Cartoonist Roz Chast believes this consistency is what makes the New Yorker so successful: "its awareness of who it is and its lack of following the latest fashions." The cover stands out at newsstands, where other magazines compete for attention with diets or scandals on the cover.

Will the "New Yorker" still exist in a hundred years? Editor-in-Chief Remnick takes a combative stance in the anniversary issue, writing: "A century after Ross's great gamble, we want to double the prospects for substance, complexity, argument, humanity, and wit." The magazine is no longer turning away readers in Dubuque, of which there are now several.

A retrospective of 100 years of "The New Yorker" is running at the New York Grand Public Library until February 2026. Netflix has announced a documentary about the magazine for release this year.