Andrew Marzoni in The Liberties:
Among the many grievances aired by Norman Podhoretz in his insufferable 1967 memoir Making It is an already septic grudge concerning The New Yorker’s publication of James Baldwin’s most famous essay in 1962. Titled, following the magazine’s convention, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” this twenty-thousand word assemblage of memoir, reportage, and philosophical interrogation of the American condition that has become Baldwin’s rhetorical signature was filed by Baldwin as “Down at the Cross,” the name it would retain when reprinted the next year as the second part of The Fire Next Time.
According to Podhoretz, not long after succeeding Eliot Cohen in the wake of the founding editor’s suicide, he commissioned Baldwin to write a piece on the Nation of Islam, whose ascendance in New York alongside the sect’s most prominent minister, Malcolm X, was disconcerting the magazine’s white, liberal, and mostly Jewish readership. Around the same time, The New Yorker asked Baldwin for a dispatch from Africa, then in the midst of postcolonial revolt. In 1958, longtime fiction editor William Maxwell, an admirer of Baldwin’s first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, collected from contributions to Commentary, The New Leader, The Reporter, Partisan Review, and Harper’s, had solicited Baldwin for unpublished work, and in July 1961, then-New Yorker EIC William Shawn signed a series of letters addressed to the authorities in the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea identifying Baldwin as a New Yorker correspondent.
More here.
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