'A whiz' - John Updike.

'Tenacious, indomitable, uncompromising' - Isabel Russell.

'Rock of Gibraltar' – Frank Sullivan.

'Not unattractive' - Harold Ross

Introducing: Katherine White, 'fountain and shrine' (James Thurber) of Ross's New Yorker.

Katherine Sergeant

Born 17 September, 1892, Katherine was the youngest of three sisters in an upper-middle class Brookline, Massachussetts family. She became acquainted with classical literature at a very young age, and at Miss Winsor's school in Boston she was nicknamed Goody Sergeant behind her back because she was well-behaved, solemn and at the top of the class.

At the time, American secondary schools struggled to prepare their students for the two most difficult college entrance exams in the country: those of Harvard and Bryn Mawr. So it is not startling that after graduating Miss Winsor's, Katherine chose to continue her education in Bryn Mawr. Bryn Mawr was established by Martha Carey Thomas, a feminist with a PhD in philosophy. Bryn Mawr graduates left with a thoroughly classical education, fluency in four languages and up-to-date knowledge of economics and politics. They were fiercely independent and ready to make their mark on the world. When Katherine told a Bryn Mawr friend that she was engaged to Ernest Angell, a senior in Harvard Law School and an old friend, the friend's reaction was, 'Oh Katherine, how perfectly awful!'

Katherine was a conscientious but not obsessive student. She was part of the 'Inner Shrine', a group of the top six students, but didn't bother memorising the 300 lines of Hamlet necessary to answer one test question for Shakespeare class. With a friend, she revived and co-edited a bimonthly magazine called Tipyn O' Bob, and edited The Lantern, the colleges literary annual.

Katherine Sergeant Angell

In the spring of 1914, Katherine graduated fourth of a class of 79. On 22 May, 1915, after a year of travel and hospital volunteering, Katherine Sergeant became Katherine Sergeant Angell. She moved to Ernest’s hometown of Cleveland, where she kept house for four months before taking a job to 'earn a maid'. (Katherine’s daughter Nancy, who was born in 1916, said she didn't think her mother could boil an egg.) She and Ernest joined with a few friends to form the Cleveland Play House, a theatrical group. Then, in 1917, Ernest left to France to help devise a life-insurance system for American troops at war. Katherine eventually retreated back to Brookline, where she took a series of small jobs, supposedly to support herself, but actually because she enjoyed being professionally productivity.

Ernest returned from the war a changed man. He moved the family to New York, which better suited his newly-acquired worldliness, and found a mistress, which better suited his newly-acquired French views on love. Katherine took another series of small jobs and gave birth to Roger. Then she heard about a part-time position on a new magazine called The New Yorker. She applied and got it, at $25 a week. Two weeks later, her salary was double and she was working full time. By fall, she was an editor.

At The New Yorker

It would be difficult to overstate Katherine's contribution to the magazine. She established the ground rules by which advertisements were accepted into the magazine, she helped editor Harold Ross make decisions about what artwork to include in each issue and she explained to him why certain pieces of writing had merit (he had never graduated high school). She persuaded Ross to run serious poetry alongside the light verse. She established what would become known as a 'New Yorker' story: one free of 'the burden of plot' that follows the development of a character. She recognised and bought the first works of such literary lights as E B White, James Thurber, Vladimir Nabakov, John O'Hara, Clarence Day, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Jean Stafford, Ogden Nash and John Cheever, among others. Ross recognised her natural superiority in such matters and made her his right hand woman. The two became solid, though platonic, friends. As a token of his appreciation, Ross presented Katherine with a signed picture of himself inscribed, 'To Katherine Angell, God bless her, who brought this on herself.'

Katherine was short but with aristocratic presence. Her hair, which had never been cut, was neatly twisted on the back of her head. Though she seemed cool and unapproachable at first, Katherine knew how to look beyond the coarse exterior of most writers and reach the person beyond.

I noted that she had a lot of back hair and the knack of making a young contributor feel at ease. I sat there peacefully gazing at the classic features of my future wife without—as usual—knowing what I was doing.
~ E B White

Her ability to deal with even the most difficult writers meant that Ross and fellow editor Wolcott Gibbs cheerfully passed her the most obnoxious writers, like John O'Hara or Alexander Woollcott. Katherine used a combination of maternal concern and firmness to give each writer what he needed. She perfected a style of editor's letter that combined personal and business, expressing interest and sometimes regret, always encouragement, often comfort. Her writers soon came to love and trust her. Vladimir Nablokov sent her Lolita to preview before publishing it and John O'Hara went through the trouble of sobering up before every editing session with her. Woollcott considered her a good friend, but enjoyed seeing how far he could push her. He refused to be edited as a rule, but would deign to allow her to plead with him in his own living room, where he would usually be garbed in his pajama pants and dressing gown, his potbelly protruding slightly between the two. Usually—because on one notable occasion he opened the door in the nude. To his chagrin, Katherine didn't blink. 'Go back and put your clothes on, Mr Woollcott,' she ordered.

Her perspicacity extended to Ross himself, a man many dismissed as a dressed-up bum. She recognised his genius and he hers. She admired his attitude to life and thoughtfully provided him with classical reading material for cross-Atlantic trips. He occasionally forgot not to swear in front of her, and once gave her an introductory letter to a friend that began, 'This is to introduce Mrs. Angell, who is not unattractive.' He included Katherine in almost all aspects of producing The New Yorker, and as her life with Ernest became increasingly unbearable, she threw herself into the magazine. One of her greater contributions may have been the day she convinced a shy young man who signed his articles E B W to join the staff as a part-time newsbreak editor.

Katherine Sergeant Angell White

Ernest's professional career was prestigious enough, but Katherine soon outstripped him. However, even their double income couldn't keep up with their expensive lifestyle. Ernest was also a shameless philanderer, and once suggested that Katherine herself have an affair to balance things. Katherine was naturally shocked, and didn't intend to. But as she became increasingly unhappy at home her happiest hours became those she spent at the magazine office, working with E B 'Andy' White.

In an effort to save their marriage, Katherine and Ernest took a trip to Europe. Andy was taking a similar trip with Gus Lobrano¹, and arranged to meet Katherine in Paris. The two went on a canoeing trip on the Seine together while Ernest was off elsewhere. After this minor debauchery, the two decided to limit their relationship strictly to business. Andy was notoriously afraid of commitment and had been fickle in love before – and Katherine knew that.

But her marriage only deteriorated. After one argument late in February 1929 when Ernest slapped her across the face and knocked her down, Katherine walked out, determined to get a divorce². She moved to Nevada where divorce was easier to acquire and settled at the Circle S Ranch in Reno. She learned to ride, swam in the nude and wrote long letters back to New York. She received long responses from Ross about the magazine and from her in-laws begging her to reconsider, but only non-committal ones from Andy, who was going through one of his 'artistic' periods. When she returned to the office, though, Andy picked up where he'd left off, and the two married.

Woman Editor

The Whites maintained their individual independence within their marriage; Katherine spent long hours at the office and brought home manuscripts that she'd read between spurts of sleep while chain smoking. Meanwhile, Andy was liable to be vacationing in Florida or Maine with their mutual son Joel. Katherine said the letters she received were a fair exchange for his distance, but in 1937, when Andy decided to 'take a year off', Katherine was less than happy. She threw herself into her work as associate editor. She was receiving invitations to speak, sit on committees and have her biography written. She refused unless she thought there was constructive purpose in acquiescing.

Because of their different lifestyles, Andy nearly missed Joel's birth, 31 December, 1930. Following the birth, Katherine bled uncontrollably and became increasingly weak. Then, Andy proudly relates, a nurse whispered to his wife, 'Do you want to say a little prayer, dearie?'

'Certainly not!' Katherine replied in her clear Boston voice, and promptly recovered.

Andy decided he worked best from Maine, and Katherine agreed to move. Andy's old friend Gus Lobrano would take over Katherine's position full-time; she would work part-time from Maine and visit throughout the year. Numerous New Yorker writers were horrified on Katherine's behalf – she was abandoning a prestigious position, particularly for a woman – but she insisted she didn't mind. Whether she did or not, they certainly minded. 'You have been a friend and a guide, a counselor and a prop and a Rock of Gibraltar to me for so long that I don’t know just how I am going to manage without you,' Frank Sullivan wrote.

Katherine didn't disappear, though. She continued to edit, criticise, propose ideas and correspond with writers and editors while tending a garden in Maine. Ross described one of her letters as 'One of the most satisfying, eloquent and amusing documents of the year.' She also, with the help of her first son, Roger Angell, reviewed children's books, often running contrary to popular sentiment. She panned The Little Prince as a book about adult ideas written in a childish way.

In soft tweeds and a pale sweater, [she] sits at her cherrywood desk, one leg tucked under her, with a lighted Benson and Hedges in one hand and a soft brown pencil in another as she works her way down a page of Caslon-type galleys, with her tortoiseshell glasses down her nose. Her desk is littered with papers and ashes and eraser rubbings.
Across the hall Andy sits up at his pine desk, facing her....there are messages to himself taped up on the bookcase behind....Andy reads a passage aloud from today's letter from Frank Sullivan or his brother Stanley or a grain merchant in Ellsworth, and my mother laughs, scarcely lifting her eyes from the page. Soon the noises of her typing out another letter to Harold Ross or Gus Lobrano are joined by the slow clatter of his Underwood: a New England light industry is again in full gear, pouring out its high-market daily product.
~ Roger Angell, in Let Me Finish

Though fiction had been a mainstay of The New Yorker for years, New Yorker stories received almost no recognition from critics. To remedy that, Katherine began compiling an annual anthology entitled Short Stories from The New Yorker in 1940. Reviewers noted with surprise that the stories were quite impressive, and New Yorker literature received more attention thereafter.

Aging but Active

While Andy invented illnesses to excuse himself from public appearances, Katherine suffered from real, debilitating and rare diseases. She rapidly became a hypochondriac in the second sense of the word: someone obsessed with her ill health. Her letters dwelt on that subject in great and detailed length. In conversation, either of the Whites was likely to skip from a friendly inquiry about one's latest doings to an unabridged description of their latest symptoms in a blink. Their children named the phenomenon the 'White Shift', after the Red Shift of the Doppler Effect. The Whites were energetic valetudenarians; though falling apart and feeling terrible, they were never depressed. For them, shared illness was a form of companionship.

It was always wonderful to behold the intuitive adjustments by which one of them got well in time for the other to get sick. What a mountain of good work they have accumulated in that see-saw fashion! Certainly they have been the strongest and most productive unhealthy couple that I have ever encountered.
~ Brendan Gill

One of Katherine's more peculiar (and humiliating) conditions was called subcorneal pustular dermatosis, a rash of pus-filled bumps that made contact with almost any cloth pure agony. She was forced to swap the tweeds and sweaters that were her signature for loose dresses. She also underwent a battery of hospital tests and examinations. At one hospital check-in the nurse asked, 'Occupation—housewife?' Though suffering, Katherine rose and corrected with dignity, 'Semi-retired fiction editor.'

Her laundry list of health problems, compounded with the side effects of her medications, made it difficult for Katherine to work, but it was impossible for the powerhouse of a woman to slow down and remain content. Instead, she edited Andy’s writing, answered his fan mail, shielded him from the prying public, wrote a gardening column for The New Yorker, composed her 'Victorian will' and kept up a web of correspondence with a phalanx of old friends. She also kept a house full of nurses and domestic help hopping.

The two still respected each other's independence, and for much of the day they worked separately, typing notes to each other across the hall. At late afternoon, they'd meet for martinis and then dinner. As her medication muddled Katherine’s thinking, Andy occasionally felt compelled to gently rein her in, particularly when she was defending his honour as a writer, a matter she took very much to heart. But he never took any of her late peccadilloes seriously; he seemed to look at the frail and demanding old woman and see only his younger, poised wife. Utterly romantic, Andy was often caught picking flowers for her. The two were a study in contrasts: Andy preferred simplicity; Katherine was a born bureaucrat. He could pass an evening watching the geese march across the lawn; she was ordering Christmas gifts before Thanksgiving.

Katherine died 20 July, 1977, and Andy was crushed. 'She seemed beautiful to me the first time I saw her, and she seemed beautiful to me when I gave her the small kiss that was goodbye.' He didn’t attend her small funeral, but composed the service, including a poem he’d written about her years earlier that she particularly loved.

Lady Before Breakfast
....By eight o’clock she has rewritten noon

For faults in style, in taste, in fact, in spelling;

Suspicious of the sleazy phrase so soon,

She’s edited the tale before its telling....