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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

The magazine Shirley Temple killed

February 2, 2018 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” columns I pay tribute to one of the most interesting magazines of the Thirties. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Of all the American general-interest magazines that came and (mostly) went in the 20th century, surely the most enduringly significant is the New Yorker, launched by Harold Ross in 1925 and published to this day in a format that would be easily recognizable to its charter subscribers. Only Reader’s Digest and Time have had longer runs, and both are now well past the peak of their once-formidable influence. Not so the New Yorker, which is as central to the cultural conversation today as it was when Ross and William Shawn, his successor, called its editorial tune.

The New Yorker has been around so long that it is surprising how few imitators it has spawned. Moreover, none of them were commercially successful, and only one is still known, if only to literary connoisseurs: Night and Day, a weekly that sought to transplant the sophisticated style and design of the New Yorker to England between the wars. While it was published for only a short time, putting out its inaugural issue in July of 1937 and shutting down six months later, Night and Day made a impression that has yet to fade. It pops up, for instance, in “Dancing to the Music of Time,” Hilary Spurling’s new biography of the novelist Anthony Powell, a regular contributor to Night and Day, who had previously recalled its “undoubted freshness and style” in “To Keep the Ball Rolling,” his 1983 memoir.

Two years after that, Christopher Hawtree published a lively coffee-table anthology called “Night and Day” whose star-studded index shows why the magazine is so well remembered. (The book is out of print, but used copies are fairly easy to find.) In addition to Powell, the regular contributors included, among others, Evelyn Waugh, who reviewed books; Graham Greene, the co-editor, who doubled as film critic; and John Betjeman, Elizabeth Bowen, Alistair Cooke, Christopher Isherwood, Constant Lambert, Malcolm Muggeridge and Herbert Read. All were mainly out to amuse, though Night and Day was not above publishing more serious fare. For the most part, however, it was, like the New Yorker in the ’20s and ’30s, a chiefly comic magazine. Therein lay its appeal: At a time when England was looking nervously at the totalitarian monsters who were swallowing up Europe, Night and Day gave its subscribers something to smile about….

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Read the whole thing here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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