- Truman Capote and the Swans
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- Here at the New Yorker, Signed by Brendan Gill (Truman Capote, the New Yorker Years)
Here at the New Yorker, Signed by Brendan Gill (Truman Capote, the New Yorker Years)
[Signed Presentation by Brendan Gill] Gill, Brendan. Here at the New Yorker. First Edition. 1975. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is warmly inscribed by Brendan Gill to New Yorker editor and reporter Elizabeth Guyer, “For Betty—comrade in arms—‘the first rule of life is to have a good time.’ Brendan, Feb. 12th 1975.” Her ownership signature is above the inscription on that same page.
What does founding Algonquin Round Table member Harold Ross have in common with the arbiter of late 20th Century zeitgeist Tina Brown? Both were editors-in-chief of the New Yorker, and their reigns, though forty years apart, bookended Brendan Gill’s tenure at the magazine. In this gossipy, personal memoir of his years there, Gill covers the great writers and illustrators whose work appeared in the magazine, the likes of which Charles Addams, Robert Benchley, Robert Frost, Dorothy Parker, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Truman Capote appears in two contexts—first in the 1940s when he worked as the most flamboyant and mollycoddled copyboy ever hired by the magazine, and second, two decades later, when his groundbreaking In Cold Blood was serialized in it.
“Capote anecdotes are hard to check. If he didn’t invent the non-fiction novel, he early became the master of the self-serving anecdote, many of them composed out of the thinnest air possible, but told with zestful self-love that renders them irresistible.”
--Brendan Gill