Month: August 2010

But will she listen?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Politics, The Media

I’m still working on my essay on political scandal, and that work is still producing wacky asides. This one comes from Richard Strout, who reviewed Time columnist Hugh Sidey’s book on Lyndon Johnson, A Very Personal Presidency, for the New York Times Book Review in 1968:

Superficial, uniformly interesting, it is written in the slick, lucid Time-Life style and is crammed with quotable paragraphs that you want to read aloud to your wife.

Well, then. At least Time put Phyllis McGinley on its cover in 1965. She was the only woman writer to get that honor in the 1960s.

Time’s literary coverboys and -girls

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

[The Millions]

Over at The Millions — and in honor of Time’s Jonathan Franzen cover — I’ve compiled a full list of the magazine’s previous literary covers. You’ll find links to each cover and cover story (83, by my count), along with a short essay on the subject. The take-home point:

Just about every interaction between Time and a literary type has been characterized by a waffling between reaching out and selling out that, today, we’d describe as Franzean.

If you’re interested in more on this, I’d recommend Joe Moran’s fascinating (if also a little predictable) “The Author as a Brand Name: American Literary Figures and the Time Cover Story” and the third chapter of Evan Brier’s A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. (Brier’s whole book is pretty good.)

I managed to read most of the cover stories linked to in the article. My favorite is the one on Carl Sandburg and his massive Lincoln biography.

In which I finally find a reason to post about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Politics, The Media

One of the most influential legal articles ever written — and an article I keep running into since I’m working on an essay about political scandal — is Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s “The Right of Privacy” (1890). “The Right of Privacy” still surfaces in even non-academic settings, as in this recent New York Times Magazine story on privacy in the Internet age:

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet.

You can make a strong case that the shameless coverage of political weddings — Warren to Mabel Bayard (daughter of Senator Thomas F. Bayard); Grover Cleveland to Frances Folsom (a friend of Mabel’s); and several others within Warren’s family — led to the writing of “The Right of Privacy.” In fact, Amy Gajda makes precisely this case in “What if Samuel D. Warren Hadn’t Married A Senator’s Daughter?” [pdf]. Gajda’s essay makes for a fascinating and accessible read — especially in the context of all this saturation-point publicity surrounding Chelsea’s wedding.