Magazines For Writers Are Finally Acknowledging Writers Of Color

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, when I subscribed to Writer's Digest magazine, the only black writer I can remember seeing on the cover was Alex Haley of Roots fame. In all that time I never saw any articles about black writers or other writers of color in its pages. It was as if  other writers of color like John A. Williams, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ernest Gaines didn't exist.

I recently resumed my subscription to Writer's Digest (no longer a monthly; it is now published every two months). I was delighted to see writers of color like Zadie Smith and Viet Thanh Nguyen featured as well as an article about Patrice Caldwell, a young black literary agent.

Finally, Writer's Digest and other writing magazines have ceased ignoring writers, editors, and literary agents of color in their pages.

Rupert Murdoch's New York Compost

People today know the New York Post as a conservative tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul.

But in the 1940s, '50s, '60s, and '70s, the Post, under the ownership of Dorothy Schiff, was very liberal and published liberal names such as Pete Hamill, Harriet Van Horne, Max Lerner, Murray Kempton, and James A. Wechsler, the editorial page editor. (Ms. Schiff sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch sometime in the mid-1970s.)

According to Winchell (Doubleday), Bob Thomas's 1971 biography of Walter Winchell, the once powerful and controversial columnist and broadcaster (as well as the narrator for the TV crime drama The Untouchables), referred to the Post as "the New York Compost."

Today that label might be considered by the paper's left-wing detractors as a more suitable description of its current content and political views.

Proofreading Cloris Leachman's Autobiography

Among the last books I proofread at Kensington Books was actress Cloris Leachman's autobiography called Cloris, which was actually ghostwritten by her husband, George Englund, who predeceased her. (Ms. Leachman recently died at age 94.) It was the first and only celebrity autobiography I ever proofread.

She was in her 80s at the time (this would be around late 2008 or early 2009) and I guess because of her age, she misremembered certain things. Whenever there was a factual error, I pointed it out on the galley proof. The one error I remember correcting was the one where she said she replaced June Lockhart as the mother on the television series Lassie. Actually, it was the other way around, it was Lockhart who replaced her.

While visiting the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem, about two or three years later, I found a copy of Cloris on the shelf in the Biography section. Skimming through the book, I couldn't find that particular error. Maybe they deleted it from the finished book. Or maybe the correction was there and I couldn't find it among the thousands of words because I couldn't remember the page it appeared on. Unfortunately, I neglected to photocopy those pages for future reference. Anyway, I might try to track the book down and do a careful page by page search for that correction.

Mislabeling Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas

Here is how Claudia Roth Pierpont described Richard Wright's Native Son protagonist, the ill-fated Bigger Thomas, in an essay on James Baldwin--"A Negro rapist and murderer" who "raped and murdered a white woman." (The essay appears in her book, American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016.)

Anyone who has ever read Native Son knows that Bigger Thomas murdered but did not rape the daughter of his white employer. (He also killed his girlfriend.) In fact, the murder of the daughter was unintentional, caused by fear rather than malice. (He later incinerates the body to cover up the killing.)

I would advise Ms. Pierpont to re-read the book.