SOURCE: "The Urban New Yorker," in The New Republic, Vol. 107, No. 3, July 20, 1942, pp. 90-2.

As a longtime literary critic for the New Yorker, Hyman rose to a prominent position in American literature during the middle decades of the twentieth century. He is noted for his belief that much of modern literary criticism should depend on knowledge received from disciplines outside the field of literature, and many of his critical essays rely on theories gleaned from such disciplines as cultural anthropology, psychology, and comparative religion. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of the writers and editorial features that characterized the New Yorker in 1942.

There is no other magazine quite like The New Yorker, which is perhaps just as well. There is a Rural New Yorker, but it is an unabashed farm paper, and will not be mentioned in this review again. Its urban cousin, The New Yorker...