This coming week, The New Yorker will be celebrating its ninety-fourth anniversary. To mark the occasion, we’re bringing you twelve profiles—some classic, others lesser-known, all delightful. Joan Didion writes on Martha Stewart and recounts how Stewart built her empire; Ariel Levy gets to know Nora Ephron, the writer and director who perfected the rom-com with films such as “Sleepless in Seattle.” Hilton Als tells the story of the pathbreaking comedian Richard Pryor, and Mark Singer goes behind the scenes with Ricky Jay, the magician who took sleight-of-hand to new heights. Lillian Ross introduces us to the real Ernest Hemingway, while Calvin Tomkins meets the glamorous couple who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.” David Remnick and Calvin Trillin profile two extraordinary journalists—the New York City columnist Murray Kempton and the Florida crime reporter Edna Buchanan, respectively. Nat Hentoff enters the world of Maurice Sendak, the author of “Where the Wild Things Are.” Susan Orlean hangs out with Fab Five Freddy, the coolest man in nineteen-nineties New York, and Kelefa Sanneh goes into the studio with Erykah Badu, the godmother of soul. Finally, in a piece from 1952, Joseph Mitchell profiles Louis Morino, the proprietor of Mitchell’s favorite restaurant, the seafood mecca Sloppy Louie’s. The word “profile” is telling: it suggests catching sight of someone from an unusual angle. These pieces help us see people, even familiar ones, in new ways.
“Martha Stewart presents herself not as an authority but as the friend who has ‘figured it out,’ the enterprising if occasionally manic neighbor who will waste no opportunity to share an educational footnote.”
“Maurice Sendak does not subscribe to the credo that childhood is a time of innocence—a point of view that results in tales and pictures soothing to parents but unreal to the children.”
“Richard Pryor’s art defies the very definition of the word ‘order.’ He based his style on digressions and riffs—the monologue as jam session.”
“Because of her ladylike bearing and her extraordinary comic timing, people tend to experience Nora Ephron as jaunty and fresh. That does not mean that they are not often slightly afraid of her, too.”
“The coolest person in New York at the moment is a man named Fred Brathwaite, who is known most of the time to most of his friends as Fab Five Freddy, Fab, Five, or just Freddy.”
“Ernest Hemingway said that of all the people he did not wish to see in New York, the people he wished least to see were the critics.”
“Sloppy Louie’s is an old restaurant with old furnishings that has had a succession of proprietors and a succession of names.”
“Erykah Badu has become a touchstone for a generation of younger musicians—the cool big sister they always wanted, as well as a self-empowered sex symbol.”
“In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel Castro. Another is Edna Buchanan.”
“The real trouble with ‘Tender Is the Night’ is that F. Scott Fitzgerald started out by using a friend of his named Gerald Murphy as the model for Dick Diver, and then allowed Diver to change, midway through the narrative, into Fitzgerald.”
“Generations of journalists in New York have known a sense of awe when, after years of seeing the tiny photograph of Murray Kempton over his columns in the paper, they have finally run into him.”
“Though Ricky Jay first performed in public at the age of four, he rejects the notion that magic—or, in any case, his mature style of magic—is suitable entertainment for children.”
