SOURCE: "The New Yorker, Old and New," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 4, Fall, 1975, pp. 676-85.

Donaldson is an American critic and educator who has written several studies of twentieth-century American literary figures, including Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever. In the following excerpt from a review of several books about the New Yorker, Donaldson examines changes in the magazine's content and editorial policies over the years.

The dust jacket of Here at The New Yorker, with its cartoon gallery of thirty-six of the magazine's present and past luminaries, promises much the sort of anecdotal reminiscence that Brendan Gill delivers within. But there is only one cartoon of Gill himself, which hardly suggests how ponderously he bulks in his own version of the New Yorker's history. To some extent this is inevitable, for Gill is after all a survivor, having labored among the cubicles on West 43rd Street...