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A selection of stories from The New Yorker’s archive

Literary Lives

“All was quiet on the Riviera, and then the Fitzgeralds arrived.” That’s how John Chapin Mosher begins “That Sad Young Man,” his Profile of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, published in The New Yorker in 1926 (just after the appearance of “The Great Gatsby”). Fitzgerald didn’t live “that amorphous affair known as the literary life,” Mosher observes. He was a raconteur, dancer, and drinker, a wellspring of mental and physical energy. That’s often how it is with the best writers. Their books may be read in the library, but they weren’t created there. They were the products of lives so full that they spilled over into novels and stories. This week, we bring you pieces about the dynamic lives behind literary masterworks. In an article published during her famous sojourn in Paris, Janet Flanner chronicles the early writing career of Edith Wharton, and notes that, as a child, the novelist was known as “handsome, disagreeable little Pussy Jones, always scribbling.” W. H. Auden explores the revolutionary nature of Virginia Woolf’s essays and novels, while James Thurber traces the inspiration for Henry James’s “The Wings of the Dove.” Hilton Als considers the evolution of Flannery O’Connor’s literary vision; David Remnick visits with Ralph Ellison at his home in Washington Heights and recounts the novelist’s thoughts on his third book, “Juneteenth”; and Claudia Roth Pierpont examines the work of Zora Neale Hurston, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance who skillfully transformed folk culture into art. Finally, Joan Didion reflects on the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s minimalist prose. Taken together, all of these pieces share a common goal: they reveal literary life as it really is, in all its ardency and struggle. —Erin Overbey and Joshua Rothman, archivists

Profiles | April 17, 1926 That Sad Young Man F. Scott Fitzgerald feels that he is getting on in years, that he is no longer young. It weighs upon him, troubles him. He is almost thirty. Seldom has he allowed a person of such advanced age to enter his books. BY JOHN C. MOSHER

Profiles | March 2, 1929 Dearest Edith Edith Wharton has always suffered the disadvantage of being an outsider—even in the city of her birth, after she became a popular novelist. BY JANET FLANNER

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Books | March 6, 1954 A Consciousness of Reality Sensitive as Virginia Woolf was to attacks, she was never too vain to deny any truth there might be in even the most prejudiced: “The thing to do is to note the pith of what is said—that I don’t think—then to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.” BY W. H. AUDEN

Onward and Upward with the Arts |November 7, 1959 The Wings of Henry James There has probably been no other major novelist whose work has been so often criticized not so much for what it is but for what certain critics think it should have been. One critic, whose name I do not know, becoming impatient of the carpers, once said that they criticized Henry James as they might criticize a cat for not being a dog. BY JAMES THURBER

A Critic at Large | January 29, 2001 This Lonesome Place Race and faith and their attendant hierarchies and delusions are Flannery O’Connor’s great themes. She has been hailed for her artistic and social independence, but readings of this American master often overlook the originality and honesty of her portrayal of Southern whiteness. BY HILTON ALS

Life and Letters | March 14, 1994 Visible Man In a modest apartment overlooking the Hudson, at the weld of northern Harlem and southern Washington Heights, Ralph Ellison confronts his “work in progress.” He has been at this for nearly forty years, and rare is the day that he does not doubt his progress. BY DAVID REMNICK

Life and Letters | November 9, 1998 Last Words Well, there you are. You care about the punctuation or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You care about the “ands” and the “buts” or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t. BY JOAN DIDION

A Critic at Large | February 17, 1997 A Society of One Zora Neale Hurston had never fit happily within any political group. And she still doesn’t. In this respect, she was the unlikeliest possible candidate for canonization by the black- and women’s-studies departments. BY CLAUDIA ROTH PIERPONT

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The New Yorker

A selection of stories from The New Yorker’s archive
The Numbers Game
Tomorrow, believe it or not, is a holiday, albeit an informal one: it’s Pi Day, which falls on March 14th (or 3/14, echoing the first three digits of the mathematical constant). A year ago, to mark the occasion, we asked the mathematician Steven Strogatz to write an essay for our Web site explaining why pi is worth celebrating. Pi, he wrote, “puts infinity within reach.” It’s also crucial to the math not just of circles but of cycles (which are, when you think about it, circles in time). Pi, Strogatz pointed out, “appears in the math that describes the gentle breathing of a baby.” Structural engineers use it to think about earthquakes. Oceanographers use it to think about waves. It’s everywhere.

That’s true, of course, about math more generally—and so, this week, we bring you pieces about mathematics, numbers, and the ways they shape our world. Some selections focus on pure math: in “The Mountains of Pi,” Richard Preston meets two brothers who are determined to explore pi’s outer (or inner) reaches and who, to that end, have constructed a supercomputer in their apartment. Others are about math in ordinary life: in “The Professor of Baseball,” Ben McGrath profiles Bill James, whose use of statistics has revolutionized the game. Finally, for good measure, we’ve included Alva Johnston’s 1933 profile of Albert Einstein—a man, Johnston conceded, whose “definitive biography should be written in mathematical symbols.” For us non-mathematicians, words will have to do.
—David Remnick

Profiles | March 2, 1992

The Mountains of Pi
To the Chudnovsky brothers, numbers are more beautiful, more nearly perfect, possibly more complicated, and arguably more real than anything in the world of physical matter. The brothers have lately been using their supercomputer, m zero, to explore the number pi.
BY RICHARD PRESTON

Profiles | February 2, 2015

The Pursuit of Beauty
The problem that Yitang Zhang chose, in 2010, is from number theory, a branch of pure mathematics. Pure mathematics, as opposed to applied mathematics, is done with no practical purposes in mind. It is as close to art and philosophy as it is to engineering.
BY ALEC WILKINSON