Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from the New Yorker - Softcover

Vinciguerra, Thomas; Gibbs, Wolcott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1608195503 ISBN 13: 9781608195503

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2011

Synopsis

"Maybe he doesn't like anything, but he can do everything," New Yorker editor Harold Ross once said of the magazine's brilliantly sardonic theater critic Wolcott Gibbs. And, for over thirty years at the magazine, Gibbs did do just about everything. He turned out fiction and nonfiction, profiles and parodies, filled columns in "The Talk of the Town" and "Notes and Comment," covered books, movies, nightlife, and, of course, the theater. A friend of the Algonquin Round Table, Gibbs was renowned for his humor. (Perhaps his most enduring line is from a profile of Henry Luce, parodying Time magazine's house style: "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.")

In his day, Gibbs was equal in stature to E. B. White and James Thurber, but he is little read today. In Backward Ran Sentences, journalist Thomas Vinciguerra provides a biographical sketch of Gibbs and gathers a generous sampling of his finest work across an impressive range of genres, bringing a brilliant, multitalented writer of incomparable wit to a new age of readers.

Praise for Wolcott Gibbs:

"His style had brilliance that was never flashy, he was self-critical as well as critical, and he had absolute pitch, which enabled him to become a parodist of the first rank."-E. B. White, New Yorker, 1958

About this title

About the Author

Wolcott Gibbs, born in 1902, began working at the New Yorker in 1927. A supremely gifted writer and editor, he had, by his mid-thirties, published more than a million words in the magazine, covering every section, although he was best known, in his later years, as a sharp theater critic. Gibbs died at the age of 56 on Fire Island.
Thomas Vinciguerra is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and former deputy editor of The Week.

Review

"[A] marvelous tour of another era of magazine writing, before Mailer, Didion, Capote and Wolfe transformed the medium with literary ambition and electric Kool-Aid. . . . do yourself a favor, and buy the book." - Time.com

"In his time there was scarcely anyone more skilled than Gibbs. . . . Exceptional prose is far more of a rarity in journalism than most of us in the trade like to believe, so when it occurs it should be treasured and preserved. This is what has been done in Backward Ran Sentences." - The Washington Post

"A real contribution to the history of journalism." - The Palm Beach Post

"Gibbs might have slid into oblivion but for the fact that an editor and journalist named Thomas Vinciguerra, much taken with Gibbs's writing, has gone to the work of assembling an impressive, and substantial, collection of his prose." - The Weekly Standard

"With most of his writing still buried in the files of the magazine, it was left for the enterprising Thomas Vinciguerra to compile this ample--perhaps more than ample--selection from Gibbs's work. The collection shows that the best of Gibbs remains pointedly entertaining." - Columbia Journalism Review  

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1608195503
• ISBN 13: 9781608195503
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 688