The Salem Orientalist Society

Monday, June 26, 2006

Part 1 of a multipart series on the Modern Condition

A young man who'd got his first story in the New Yorker in the late 1940s proved one of the magazine's most popular contributors, especially after he found tremendous success with a novel a couple years later, and William Shawn, the editor, did everything he could to keep him submitting stories. It got harder, though, as the stories got longer, stranger, and less frequent. A sort of a cult readership was developing, however, and Shawn would do anything to keep his writer from going to another magazine, even if it meant upsetting practically everyone else at the New Yorker by going over the editors' heads and accepting works that the magazine would never normally even consider, then publishing them without the usual editing and paring. Other contribuors were insensed, as well, by what they saw as the maganize's promotion of faddish, arcane stuff that had little real merit. The last story, which came out in the mid-sixties, is an absurdly unbelievable and scramblingly discursive eighty page letter written by a seven year old boy at summer camp to his parents.

Here's what Salem looked like around the turn of the last century in Early March on Kodachrome 64: