Synopses & Reviews
One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, this collection of New Yorker Profiles presents readers with a portrait gallery of some of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. These Profiles are literary-journalistic investigations into character and accomplishment, motive and madness, beauty and ugliness, and are unrivalled in their range, their variety of style, and their embrace of humanity.
Synopsis
With its unique Profiles, The New Yorker pioneered the modern art of magazine portaiture, and it has continued to set the standard in this genre for seventy-five years. (It's only justice that the magazine owns a copyright to the title "Profiles" as it does to "The Talk of the Town".) No other periodical has brought to this kind of biographical reporting more distinguished and unfoolable writers or more wide-ranging subjects, and none has achieved more incisive and revealing results.
About the Author
David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Lenin's Tomb and is also the author of Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.