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Summary
Summary
"In New York Days, the long-awaited sequel to the prize-winning North Toward Home, Willie Morris recalls his triumphant, exciting, and ultimately devastating years as the youngest ever editor-in-chief of Harper's, America's oldest magazine, when he was at the center of the nation's stunning cosmos of writing, publishing, politics, and the arts." "It was the 1960s, when New York City was a place "throbbing with possibility" and "in which everyone seemed to know everyone else and where everything of importance seemed to happen first." These were Willie Morris's New York days - with William Styron, David Halberstam, Woody Allen, Bobby Kennedy, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, George Plimpton, Leonard Bernstein, and the other leading figures of the time. For he knew them all: the writers, the poets, the intellectuals, the editors, the actresses, the tycoons, the detectives, the athletes, and not a few fakirs and charlatans. He wined with Sinatra at the Players Club and eavesdropped in the trattorias on the Mob; sat next to DiMaggio in the Garden ringside seats and spent evenings at Elaine's." "And during the day, Morris worked to transform Harper's from an uninspired literary magazine to its apex as the groundbreaking political and cultural voice of the '60s, until the editorial rift and the mass resignations of 1971 - possibly the most notable dispute in American publishing history." "New York Days is a portrait of an era, but it is also a poignant, deeply personal yet universal story of a man's life: a man who attains everything he has ever hoped for only to realize that what he has sacrificed is even greater. For in the process of reaching the pinnacle of his career, Morris also experienced profound loss: the dissolution of his marriage and the breakdown of the magazine as he helped create it. Now, from a vantage point of more than twenty years and a thousand miles, Morris asks his younger self: "Where on earth, fast-moving boy, are you going now?" And what, if anything, did it all mean?" "Beautifully written with bittersweet lyricism and exuberant humor, New York Days captures the spirit of the '60s: the dazzling parties, the fervent intellectualism, and the sense of slowly decaying idealism as the country plunged deeper into a tragic war and intensifying social chaos. And in the midst of this scene is Willie Morris, exalted, exhilarated, and eventually almost consumed by his brilliant, electric, enervating New York days."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Willie Morris is the author of "North Toward Home", "New York Days", "My Dog Skip", "My Cat Spit McGee", and numerous other works of fiction & nonfiction. As the imaginative and creative editor of "Harper's Magazine" in the 1960s, he published such writers as William Styron, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, and Norman Mailer. He was a major influence in changing our postwar literary & journalistic history. He died in August 1999 at the age of sixty-four.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nearly 25 years after his bestselling memoir North Toward Home, the Mississippi-born writer and editor here revisits some of the same material--Southern boy in the big city--but with a closer focus on his controversial editorship of Harper's magazine. Morris writes, sometimes eloquently, sometimes with a little too much rhetorical rodomontade, about the magic of New York City and the distinguished writers with whom he worked during those influential years (1967-1971) when the magazine was the ``hot book'': Norman Mailer, David Halberstam, Marshall Frady, Larry L. King and Bill Moyers, among many others. Morris recaptures splendidly the heady sense that he and his magazine were helping to shape the culture of the times by focusing opposition to the Vietnam war and by taking the complicated beat of the contemporary American pulse. Eventually the magazine fell victim to the bottom-line mentality of its Minnesota owners, the Cowles family, and Morris quit. There are fine anecdotes galore (the early days of Elaine's celebrated restaurant are delightfully chronicled) and striking quotes; the whole is drenched in nostalgia and regret. Morris, now having been back home in Mississippi for many years, leaves readers with the feeling that he lived during the kind of time, personal and professional, that can never come again; and in a period when '60s attitudes are so readily scorned, it is salutary to be reminded of the sense of excitement and possibility those times aroused in so many writers. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Morris (The Courting of Marcus Dupree, 1983, etc.), Mississippi-born, was barely 30 when, in 1963, he took the helm of Harper's magazine and changed it from a genteel and respectable cultural warhorse into a writer-driven journalistic whiz-bang, publishing Mailer and Halberstam and everyone else who was pushing journalism into more plastic realms. Morris became the toast of the intellectual town--until he was forced out in 1971 by the Cowles family ownership. What he's written here is more a continuation of his first autobiographical book (North Toward Home, 1967) than a portrait of the 60's city the title describes--of being in the thick of literary politics, the political edges that flashed around like knives, the camaraderie at Elaine's and Bobby Van's: the whirl, in other words. An orotund and now-and-again infelicitous stylist (``The first time I met James Jones was in the city at the party the evening he told Ted Kennedy I was not the bartender''), Morris falls back too much on nearly year-by-year recapitulations of what his magazine published (something that adds an odd poignancy, in a way: that Morris had become subsumed in his identity as Harper's editor to the point that his works were his days). Portraiture here is at a minimum; mostly there are names and more names. That all of these are names culturally significant to the era gives the book its interest--but finally even they can't quite help it see much beyond its own bumped and bruised nose. Morris's pride, hurt and otherwise, is on every page--but disappointingly little of the cautionary tale of literary power that shades his whole story breaks free and takes over, or is allowed to be fascinating. (First printing of 25,000)
Booklist Review
This distinguished Mississippi writer proffers a delectable sequel to his delicious memoir North toward Home (1968). The previous book looked with an honest eye and lovely style back over the author's upbringing and schooling; now he casts a backward glance over a pivotal point in his not-so-ordinary life: his tenure as editor-in-chief of Harper's during the 1960s. He was only 32 when he assumed the editorship--the youngest editor in the magazine's 117-year history. "I came to the city"--New York, of course--"and it changed my life," he begins; what follows is an extended essay on time and place, an especially beautiful piece of writing in which Morris attempts to answer the question we all shy away from with regard to roads we've taken: "What did it all mean?" His anecdotes about Harper's staff members and author-contributors are lengthy, telling, and entertaining; his ideas about the tumult of the 1960s are fresh and provocative. And his explanations of what he tried to do at Harper's and couldn't get accomplished--to the point where he had to resign--are remembered with evenness. Journalistic memoirs abound, but few are as full of heart and as gracefully expressed as this one. (Reviewed July 1993)0316584215Brad Hooper
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xi |
| 1. I Came to the City | p. 3 |
| 2. Early Days | p. 15 |
| 3. The Sixties Unfold | p. 38 |
| 4. The Nation: 1967 | p. 62 |
| 5. Declarations of Independence | p. 81 |
| 6. The Proprietors | p. 121 |
| 7. The Place | p. 133 |
| 8. City Lights | p. 152 |
| 9. 1968: Annus Mirabilis | p. 181 |
| 10. Mailer, LBJ, RFK, the U.S. from Afar | p. 210 |
| 11. Fame, Family, Failure | p. 241 |
| 12. Elaine's and Other American Peregrinations | p. 254 |
| 13. Loves and the Island | p. 281 |
| 14. Apex | p. 301 |
| 15. Farewell | p. 341 |
| 16. South Toward Home | p. 368 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 386 |
| Index | p. 387 |
