MIKE NICHOLS (b. 1931) was born in Berlin, came to America at the age of seven, and attended the University of Chicago. He became famous in the late 1950s as part of an improvisational comic duo with Elaine May. In the 1960s, he turned to directing, first on Broadway and then in films. His seventeen films include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and Primary Colors.
SUSAN ORLEAN (b. 1955) has been writing for The New Yorker since 1987 and became a staff writer in 1992. Her work has also appeared in Outside, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, and her books include Saturday Night, The Orchid Thief, and The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.
DAVID OWEN (b. 1955) is a staff writer and golf enthusiast. His books include High School, The Walls Around Us, My Usual Game, and The Making of the Masters.
DOROTHY PARKER (1893–1967), famed as an Algonquin Round Table regular, wrote for The New Yorker from its second issue, in 1925, until the end of 1957. She contributed poems, stories, and theater reviews and was also known for her book reviews, written under the pseudonym Constant Reader. Her poetry collection Enough Rope was a best-seller in 1926 and was followed by three other volumes. She moved to Hollywood to work with Alan Campbell, her second husband, as a screenwriter. They received an Oscar nomination for A Star Is Born (1937).
S. J. PERELMAN (1904–1979) grew up in Providence and attended Brown University, where he edited the humor magazine. When, in 1929, the publisher of his first book, Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge, sent a copy to Groucho Marx for a blurb, Perelman was taken on as a scriptwriter and worked on two Marx Brothers movies, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. His first New Yorker piece appeared in the 1930s, and he went on to contribute nearly three hundred others, which were collected in such books as Strictly from Hunger and The Road to Miltown, or, Under the Spreading Atrophy. He also collaborated on the stage comedies All Good Americans and One Touch of Venus, and shared an Oscar in 1957 for the script of Around the World in Eighty Days.
LEONARD Q. ROSS was a pseudonym of LEO ROSTEN (1908–1997), who was born in Lodz, Poland, and immigrated to Chicago with his family soon after. Rosten obtained a doctorate in social sciences from the University of Chicago and also studied at the London School of Economics. He claimed that he encountered the original of his famous comic character, Hyman Kaplan, while he was teaching English in night school. The malapropian Kaplan first appeared in The New Yorker in 1936 and in book form a year later. Two further volumes later appeared, and the series was briefly staged as a Broadway musical. Rosten is also well known for The Joys of Yiddish (1968), an informal lexicon liberally sprinkled with anecdote and humor.
PAUL RUDNICK (b. 1957) was born in New Jersey and graduated from Yale. His plays include I Hate Hamlet; The Naked Eye; The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told; Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach; and Jeffrey, which was also made into a movie. His screenplays include Addams Family Values and In & Out. He is the author of two novels, Social Disease and I’ll Take It, and a collection of movie reviews written by his alter ego, Libby Gelman-Waxner.
CATHLEEN SCHINE (b. 1953) is a novelist. The Love Letter, a national best-seller, was translated into fifteen languages. Her other novels include Alice in Bed, Rameau’s Niece, and The Evolution of Jane.
WILLIAM SHAWN (1907–1992), the longest-serving editor of The New Yorker, was born in Chicago and came on staff in 1933 as a Talk of the Town writer. He turned to editing after a couple of years and became managing editor in 1939. He succeeded Harold Ross in 1952, editing the magazine until 1987.
UPTON SINCLAIR (1878–1968) wrote dime novels from the age of fifteen and made his reputation in 1906 with The Jungle, a novel that exposed working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. He stood, unsuccessfully, as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934. His popular Lanny Budd series of novels appeared from 1940 to 1953. “How to Be Obscene” was his only work for The New Yorker.
MARK SINGER (b. 1950) has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1974. He is the author of three books, Funny Money, Mr. Personality, and Citizen K.
SUSAN SONTAG (b. 1933) enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley at the age of fifteen and, after studies at the University of Chicago, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, settled in New York. Her wide-ranging essays on aesthetics, culture, and politics include Against Interpretation, Illness as Metaphor, Styles of Radical Will, and On Photography. She has also written films, plays, and four novels, among them The Volcano Lover and In America.
RUTH SUCKOW (1892–1960) was born in Iowa and lived there for most of her life. She published her first poetry in 1918 and her first short story in 1921. Her first novel, Country People, appeared in 1924. She contributed to The New Yorker from 1927 to 1937. She published eleven books in her lifetime, leaving a novel unfinished when she died.
FRANK SULLIVAN (1892–1976) claimed that his career as a humorist began at the New York World, after he wrote a long obituary of a socialite who turned out not to be dead. He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1926; his cliché expert, Mr. Arbuthnot, testified in the magazine from 1935 to 1952. Sullivan was also known for the annual Christmas poem “Greetings, Friends!,” which he wrote for forty-two years, until 1974.
JAMES THURBER (1894–1961) was born in Columbus, Ohio, and joined The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor and writer; his idiosyncratic cartoons began to appear there four years later. His books include two children’s classics—The 13 Clocks and The Wonderful O—and a memoir of his time at The New Yorker, The Years with Ross. He also co-wrote a successful play, The Male Animal, and appeared in A Thurber Carnival, a miscellany of his works that was adapted for the stage. In 1947, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was made into a film starring Danny Kaye.
CALVIN TRILLIN (b. 1935) has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1963 and has reported from all over America in his long-running U.S. Journal series. His many books include the best-sellers Remembering Denny and Messages from My Father, along with comic novels, short stories, a travel book, and three books on food, collected as The Tummy Trilogy. He has also twice written and performed one-man shows.
GEORGE W. S. TROW (b. 1943) first wrote for The New Yorker in 1966 and co-founded The National Lampoon in 1970. His essay of cultural criticism “Within the Context of No-Context” was published in 1980 and later became an influential book. He is the author of a novel, The City in the Mist, and a collection of satirical short stories, Bullies. He has also written several plays, including The Tennis Game, and has co-written two Merchant-Ivory films, Savages and The Proprietor. He has published a further volume of cultural reflections, My Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studies, 1950–1998.
JOHN UPDIKE (b. 1932) has written for The New Yorker since the mid-1950s, when he was a staff writer for The Talk of the Town. He has contributed more than six hundred short stories, poems, essays, and reviews. He has published more than fifty books, and has won two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and two National Book Critics Circle Awards.
LISA WALKER (b. 1956) has written a novel, Because of You.
ELWYN BROOKS WHITE (1899–1985) worked as a newspaperman, an advertising copywriter, and a mess boy on an Arctic steamer before coming to The New Yorker in 1927. Here his output comprised humor pieces, poems, short stories, newsbreak captions, and even one cover illustration, but he was most associated with the Notes and Comment essays, which he wrote for thirty years. He is famous for three enduring works of children’s literature: Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and a Pulitzer Prize in 1978.
WILLIAM WHITE was a pseudonym of DONALD BARTHELME.
CHET WILLIAMSON (b. 1948) has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Edgar, and Stoker awards for his fantasy, horror, and science-fiction writing. He is also an actor.
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT (1887–1943) joined The New York Times in 1909, and was a feared and famous drama critic there from 1914 to 1922. A central figure at the Algonquin Round Table in the 192
0s, he was one of the very first contributors to The New Yorker. In the early 1930s he wrote Shouts and Murmurs in the magazine almost every week. At the same time, he became a popular and influential radio broadcaster. He also acted in a number of plays, most famously playing the character based on him in The Man Who Came to Dinner, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
DAVID REMNICK is the editor of The New Yorker.
HENRY FINDER is the editorial director of The New Yorker.
Copyright © 2001 by The New Yorker Magazine
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American CopyrightConventions. Published in the United States byRandom House, Inc., New York, and simultaneouslyin Canada by Random House ofCanada Limited, Toronto.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All of the pieces in this collection were originallypublished in The New Yorker. The publication date of each piece is given at the end of the piece.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fierce pajamas: an anthology of humor writing from the New Yorker/edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder.
p.cm.
1. American wit and humor. I. Remnick, David. II. Finder, Henry. III. New Yorker.
PN6165 .F542001
817¢.508—dc212001031775
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-067-0
v3.0_r1
Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Page 57