William Shawn

William Shawn (August 31, 1907 â€" December 8, 1992) was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.

"Mr. Shawn," as he was nearly always known, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Benjamin W. and Anna (Bransky) Chon. He dropped out of the University of Michigan after two years (1925-1927) and went to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he worked on the local paper, the Optic. He returned to Chicago and worked as a journalist. Around 1930 he changed the spelling of his last name to "Shawn." In 1932, he and his young wife, Cecille, went to New York City, where he tried to start a career as a composer. Soon after their arrival, Cecille took a fact-checking job on The New Yorker, and her husband began working there in 1933. He would be at the magazine for fifty-three years.

He rose to be an editor and oversaw the magazine's coverage of World War II. In 1946, he persuaded the magazine's founder and editor, Harold Ross, to run John Hersey's story about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as the entire contents of one issue. He left for a few months shortly after that to write on his own, but soon returned. A few weeks after Ross died in December 1951, he was named editor.

Shawn's quiet style was a marked contrast to Ross's noisy manner. Whereas Ross constantly wrote letters to his contributors, Shawn hated to share anything, especially on paper. His shyness was office (and New York) legend, as were his claustrophobia and fear of elevators; many of his colleagues maintain that he carried a hatchet in his briefcase, in case he became trapped. He was secretive, aloof, and cryptic about his plans for the magazine and its contents. Shawn would buy articles and they might not run for years, if ever. Members of the staff were given offices and salaries, even if they produced little for the magazine--Joseph Mitchell, at one time a writer whose work appeared regularly, continued to come to his office from 1965 until his death in 1996 without ever publishing another word. But Shawn did give writers vast amounts of space to cover their subjects, and nearly all of them spoke of him reverently. J.D. Salinger, in particular, adored him, dedicating his book "Franny and Zooey" to Shawn.

When Advance Publications bought the magazine in 1985, the new owners promised that the magazine's editorship would not change hands until Shawn chose to retire. But speculation about Shawn's successor, a longtime topic of publishing-world chatter, grew. Shawn had been editor for a very long time, and the usual criticism of the magazinewas growing more pointed. Advance chairman S.I. Newhouse forced out Shawn in February 1987, andreplaced Shawn with Robert Gottlieb, the editor-in-chief of the well-regarded book publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Shawn soon took an editorship at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a largely honorary post that he held until his death in New York City in 1992.

Shawn married Cecille Lyon in 1928, and the couple had two children. One is the writer and character actor Wallace Shawn. Another son, Allen Shawn, married New Yorker writer Jamaica Kincaid. In 1996, Shawn's longtime New Yorker colleague Lillian Ross revealed in a memoir that she and Shawn had had an affair from 1950 until his death, with Mrs. Shawn's knowledge. Ms. Ross reports that Mr. Shawn was active in the upbringing of Ms. Ross' adopted son, Erik.

He was portrayed in the 2005 film Capote by Bob Balaban.