William Shawn
William Shawn (August 31, 1907-December 8, 1992) was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.
"Mr. Shawn," as he was universally known, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Benjamin W. and Anna (Bransky) Chon. He dropped out of the University of Michigan after two years (1925-1927) and went to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he worked on the local paper, the Optic. He returned to Chicago and worked as a journalist. Around 1930 he changed his last name to Shawn. In 1932, he went to New York City to try to make a career as a composer. He was not successful, but became a fact checker for The New Yorker in 1933. He would work there for forty-three years.
He rose to be an editor and during World War II oversaw the magazine's coverage of the conflict. He was responsible for John Hersey's story on Hiroshima being given an entire issue of the magazine in 1946. He left for a few months in 1946 to write on his own, but soon returned. When founder Harold Ross died in 1952, he was named editor.
Ross's collegial style was a marked contrast to Shawn. Whereas Ross would constantly be writing his correspondents letters, Shawn hated to share anything. He was secretive, aloof, and cryptic; the staff never knew what was going on. Shawn would buy articles and they might not run for years, if ever. Members of the staff were given offices and salaries, even if they never produced anything for the magazine--Joseph Mitchell had an office for thirty years and produced nothing. But he did give writers vast amounts of space to cover their subjects.
When Advance Publications bought the magazine in 1985, the new owners promised no changes. But speculation as to who would succeed Shawn, a popular topic of conversation for decades, grew. Shawn had been editor for three decades and the magazine was regarded as stale and boring. Advance forced out Shawn in February 1987, replacing him with book editor Robert Gottlieb. Shawn took a editorship at publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, working there until his death in New York City in 1992.
Ross married Cecille Lyon in 1928 and had three children with her. One is the writer and character actor Wallace Shawn. Another son, Allen Shawn, married New Yorker writer Jamaica Kincaid. William Shawn carried on an affair with New Yorker writer Lillian Ross from 1950 until his death; she later wrote a book about it.
