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Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from the New Yorker | 
 enlarge | Author: St. Clair McKelway
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
Buy New: $10.09
You Save: $7.91 (44%)
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Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 115570
Media: Paperback
Pages: 640
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.8
ISBN: 160819034X
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.52
EAN: 9781608190348
ASIN: 160819034X
Publication Date: February 16, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The best of St. Clair McKelway, a longtime New Yorker writer, whose astonishing career and work have been overlooked for too long. Named for his great-uncle, a prominent newspaperman, St. Clair McKelway was born with journalism in his blood. And in thirty-six years at the New Yorker, he made “fact-writing” his career. His prolific output for the magazine was defined by its incomparable wit and a love of New York’s rough edges. He had a deep affection for the city’s “rascals”: the junkmen, con men, counterfeiters, priests, beat cops, and fire marshals who colored life in old New York. And he wrote with levity and insight about his own life as well, a life marked by a strict Presbyterian childhood, a limited formal education, five marriages and divorces, and sometimes debilitating mental illness. Like Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, McKelway combined the unflagging curiosity of a great reporter with the narrative flair of a master storyteller, and he helped establish the New Yorker’s unique brand of journalism in its most storied years. William Shawn, who began as McKelway’s assistant and became the magazine’s revered editor, described McKelway as a writer with the “lightest of light touches,” his striking style “too odd to be imitated.” Reporting at Wit’s End collects McKelway’s most memorable work from the 1930s through the 1960s, creating a portrait of a long-forgotten New York and of one of its consummate chroniclers.
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| Customer Reviews:
Fascinating in-depth articles, no strings attached May 10, 2010
Amy E. Henry (Nipomo, CA United States)
I really love it when a reporter is able to do an in-depth article that includes volumes of research and subtle details that make you really know the subject, and that is what the New Yorker is famous for. For example, last month they had a very detailed and fascinating article about some Serbian diamond thiefs, the "Pink Panthers". It didn't just cover their crimes, but went on to their upbringing, their techniques, the methods of searching for them, and on and on. Most magazines are not willing to give up the space for such depth.
That's why Reporting at Wit's End "Tales from the New Yorker" by St. Clair McKelway, is such a treat for me. It's a collection of the best articles New Yorker has offered, but in a totally inventive way. It selects feature articles from different decades, the 1930s, 40s, 50s and concludes with two from the 1960s. These aren't famous people biographies or even well-known articles, just well-written articles about subjects fascinating at the time.
One is "Average Cop", a very long study of one of New York's finest, as he goes about his day, from a 1930s issue. Big details and little details are combined to make a complete character study, and it's done uniquely: there's no mockery or subtle elevation of his character. It's just about him. As he is. There's no effort made to push a political agenda or disclose social ills. It's a simple story about a man, and it's fascinating.
From the 1950s, an article called "The Rich Recluse of Herald Square" about the death of an elderly hoarder, and her mysterious life. Little details make it painful and tragic, and yet there's this strange sense of power that this woman and her sister had, in order to put the world in its place (and out of theirs). Little pictures of human kindness abound.
This is a great collection, and one that I personally enjoyed very much. I thought it was interesting to see the changes in writing and social details between the decades discussed. What was considered improper in the 1930s is handled without note in the 1960s. A great supplement to American history for the 20th century.
Classic New Yorker Writing March 19, 2010
Waldo Lydecker (Malibu, CA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The master of the classic New Yorker character driven long profile, McKelway largely ignored the Park Avenue bluebloods and the silk stocking crowd, and instead plumbed the depths of the great city's underclass, focussing on its unique and singular "rascals" with near affection and an amazing forensic attention to detail.
Believable stories about unbelievable characters March 19, 2010
wogan (Indiana&Maryland- U.S.A.)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
How good are these essays? Well, I remember reading them in old copies of `The New Yorker' many years ago, that my grandmother had. They increased my fascination of the city and people in it where I spent most of my summers. Here is the real New York. There are stories from the 30's, but they could still be of today, as are the works done in the 40's, 50's and 60's.
Most are stories of New York and the interesting people McKelway profiled, such as; a counterfeiter of $1 bills, and a man who posses as a naval officer among others and is able to meet the president in the White House.
There are a few exceptions to the stories of New York characters; when he was a runaway from home and those done mostly when he was a public relations officer and with them you will see perhaps a different side of Curtis LeMay The quality of the writing allows you to glimpse these people and places even if you have never been near his subjects or New York. McKelway's thoughts and words are extraordinary.
It's a delight to find an author, that as you finish reading their work, you not only regret it ending, but you immediately go to find other creations by them. St. Clair McKelway is one of those authors and this collection of his essays is worth the time to sit and read and absorb his descriptions of life and most of all the characters he depicted.
Treasures from one of "The New Yorker's" best February 28, 2010
Robert C. Ross (New Jersey)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Roger Angell wrote a short description of McKelway's 37 year tenure at "The New Yorker":
"McKelway, a brilliant and prolific writer, had been a staff member of The New Yorker since 1933, and in that time also became its first managing editor for factual stuff. He hired numbers of young reporters who went on to celebrated careers with the magazine, including E. J. Kahn, Philip Hamburger, and Brendan Gill.... His best-known piece was six-part Profile of Walter Winchell, but his favorite subject was oddball criminals, like a master embezzler he called "the wily Wilby," or an inveterate forger of one-dollar bills known as Mister 880. He had a lovely touch."
One of his best series covered was a four-part article from 1945 about American bomber squadrons in the Marianas Islands:
"The rain fell on the just hardened concrete of the runway, on the black-topped asphalt of the taxiways and hard-stands, splashed into the faces of the ground crews crouching in pup tents alongside the places where the homecoming B-29s would park, if they ever did park. It fell on the surrounding white-capped sea. It washed away some of the unfinished roads leading from the airstrip to the air crews' quarters; it flooded already muddy roads and walks in wing and group and squadron establishments on the bluff over the sea; it ruined the previous day's work of the Army Engineers, who were building three-lane asphalt highways to the unimpressive headquarters of the island commander on Saipan's highest hilltop; and it made a mess of the carefully graded terraces between the closely packed Quonset huts where the administrative business of the island would be carried out weeks later when a fresh invasion force took off from Saipan to invade Iwo Jima. It fell on the cemeteries of the Marine and Army men who had been killed in the battles that won the Marianas from the Japanese."
All of McKelway pieces are long and consist of countless small facts that bring his subjects, and particularly the scoundrels he loved to write about, to vivid and believeable life. Many of the essays in this wonderful collection came from his regular column, "The Annals of Crime." True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality is an earlier collection of some of his contributions to the Annals.
He does just as well with the good guys: Harry Grossman swam across the bay to a beach in East Quogue, where he served papers: "This is an outrage" she said when Grossman put the damp subpoena on her lap. "An outrage is it?" he replied. "Suppose I get cramps? Suppose I get drowned? Would that be an outrage or wouldn't it?" He swam back across the inlet, full of righteous indignation.
My first serious magazine subscription was to "The New Yorker". In a sense, I grew up with the magazine, and McKelway was one of my best tutors. This wonderful collection seems as alive to me today as it was back in the 1950s when I first starting reading them.
Robert C. Ross 2010
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