ABOUT TOWN: THE NEW YORKER AND THE WORLD IT MADE.

ABOUT TOWN: THE NEW YORKER AND THE WORLD IT MADE

BY BEN YAGODA SCRIBNER. 480 PP. $30

Aged seventy-five and still recovering from a tempestuous relationship with a much younger editor, The New Yorker today looks rather exhausted; but in dandified youth and dignified prime it

was probably the best magazine in the world. It won plaudits from the start, notably for its brilliant artwork, which so eclipsed the text that in 1925 The New Yorker was hailed as "the best magazine in the world for a person who can not read." This annoyed the first editor, Harold Ross, who was addicted to words. But within a few years critics acknowledged that his so-called "comic weekly was publishing some of the greatest American writing. Its quality is well displayed in the superb collections of short stories (Wonderful Town) and profiles (Life Stories) compiled by the current editor, David Remnick, two of a clutch of books celebrating The New Yorker's seventy-fifth birthday. Remnick's volumes also convey the magazine's tone -- witty, sophisticated, civilized, and authoritative. For much of the twentieth century The New Yorker was no mere organ of the fourth estate; it was the glossy gospel of urbanity, the New York Testament.

Appropriately, therefore, Ben Yagoda's splendid anniversary history of The New Yorker, About Town (the main focus of this review), not only scrutinizes the magazine's contents but also assesses its cultural impact. It does so with the kind of verve, insight, and elegance that would have had Ross dancing a jig of delight. It is, furthermore, the most comprehensive and authoritative history of The New Yorker yet to appear. For it is soundly based on the magazine's rich archive, which was deposited at the New York Public Library in 1994. That consists of 2,500 boxes of manuscripts, memorandums, and correspondence, though the files of the elusive second editor, William Shawn, are conspicuous by their absence. Taken together, Yagoda shows, these documents tell the story of how a little magazine became "a paragon of English prose, critical acumen, and political judgment."

However, Yagoda is not so star-struck by The New Yorker that he fails to recognize its shortcomings. It was, he says, intellectually snobbish and aesthetically conservative. It fought shy of raw emotion, preferring sentimentality and "urbanality" (James Thurber's term). And it often provided a home for "writing that was precious, smug, tiresomely literal, too long, or just plain dull." Nor is Yagoda under any illusions about Ross himself, a journalistic roughneck who never had the slightest "appreciation of music, fine art, or literature," How then did The New Yorker form the taste, inform the mind, and transform the wit of upper-middle-class America?